Pros & Cons

- Plenty of editing tools for precise control
- Includes motion graphics and audio editing
- Deep color-grading tools
- AI features to automate processes
- Fast render performance
- Requires a lot of system resources
- Takes some time to learn

DaVinci Resolve Specs

Exports to H.265 (HEVC)
Keyword Tag Media
Motion Tracking
Multicam Editing
Number of Video Tracks	Unlimited
Supports 360° VR Content
Supports 4K XAVC-S Format

All Specs

Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve is professional-grade video editing software used in many current blockbusters, Oscar-winning films, TV shows, and commercials. It's also popular with ambitious enthusiasts thanks to its powerful free version. The program excels at integrating video editing, motion graphics, color grading, and audio production into a single platform, along with several innovative tools. However, mastering DaVinci Resolve can be challenging due to its extensive feature set and somewhat unconventional interface. Our Editors' Choice remains Adobe Premiere Pro, which offers a similarly robust set of features but is generally easier for both professionals and beginners to learn and use.

Pricing: Free or a One-Time Fee

The free version of DaVinci Resolve is popular among YouTubers and gamers because it provides a substantial subset of the program's editing features at no cost. The free version is surprisingly robust, offering standard editing and cutting, effects, motion graphics, color correction, and audio editing.

However, the free version lacks some more advanced capabilities, such as the DaVinci Neural Engine, stereoscopic 3D tools, dozens of extra Resolve FX filters, Fairlight FX audio plug-ins, and advanced HDR grading and HDR scopes. During testing, I occasionally received a message stating that I would need to pay to use a tool I was trying to access. That’s perfectly understandable—you still get a lot for free.

To access all premium features, you must pay a one-time fee of $295. Blackmagic also sells optional custom keyboards and panels that work with the software—those range from the $475 Speed Editor keyboard to the $31,089 Advanced Panel. The company makes professional cinema and studio cameras, ranging from the $1,185 Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to the $7,025 URSA Mini Pro 12K.

The $295 price slightly undercuts the $299 Apple Final Cut Pro. The latter app requires you to buy the $49.99 Motion and the $49.99 Compressor ancillary apps to get parity in functionality, however. Premiere Pro is a subscription-only service that costs $22.99 per month with an annual commitment. If you do the math, that means after a year and one month, you will have paid more for Premiere Pro than for DaVinci Resolve.

What's New in DaVinci Resolve 20?

Blackmagic Design claims Resolve 20 has over 100 new features. Chief among those are AI tools, which require the paid Studio version. Here are some highlights, though there are plenty more:

AI IntelliScript. Use this tool to create timelines based on a text script.

AI Animated Subtitles. Automatically animate words as someone speaks them.

AI Audio Assistant. This adjusts the audio output level when you have multiple audio tracks, making speech understandable over background and effect tracks.

AI Beat Detection. The AI can automatically time clips with beats in the background soundtrack.

AI Multicam SmartSwitch. You can rely on AI to assemble a timeline with camera angles based on speaker detection.

ChromaColor Warp. The new color grading feature lets you precisely adjust the hue and saturation of any color in your image by dragging points on a chromaticity diagram.

Collaboration Features. Version 20 adds several collaboration features, such as auto-syncing, remote editing and streaming URLs for review via Blackmagic Cloud, Smart Proxies to improve editing performance, shared Cloud Folders, and team management capabilities.

Dedicated Keyframe Editor. The new editor appears on the Cut and Edit pages. You can use the keyframe curves and parameter modes to edit keyframes and customize animation shapes.

Smart Auto Grade. You can use this tool to automatically match the look of clips in your project; it targets skin tones.
Vertical Video. When you load a vertical video for smartphone display, DaVinci Resolve now reformats the editing layout for it in the Cut, Edit, and Color pages.

Voiceover Palette. Another new tool for the Cut and Edit pages, this lets you use a prompter script and a countdown while you're playing the timeline.

Version 19 was perhaps an even bigger update for DaVinci Resolve, with not only some impressive new AI tools but native support for Arm-based Copilot+ PCs, which include NPU chips to accelerate AI work. Other notable features from that update include:

AI-Powered UltraNR. DaVinci Resolve's noise reduction tool can perform spatial frame denoising (as opposed to temporal denoising across frames).

Defocus Background. Use this tool to isolate the foreground with a realistic blur in the background.

Film Look Creator. With this capability, you can create custom effects.

IntelliTrack AI. This point tracker improves motion tracking and stabilization.

Text-Based Editing. Similar to what has been possible in Adobe Premiere Pro, you can edit timelines using automatically generated captions.

Getting Started With DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve runs not only on macOS (version 14.3 or later) and Windows 10 or 11, but also on Linux. Just note that you need at least CentOS 7.3 or Rocky Linux 8.6. The program requires at least 16GB of RAM, and you need at least 32GB for Linux or if you want to use the Fusion motion graphics. It supports Apple Silicon CPUs and now Windows on Arm PCs powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon natively for improved performance. The installer is a 3GB download, which is smaller than Premiere Pro’s 3.3GB, without the motion graphics and Media Encoder software. Both of these take up more than 5GB on my hard drive, compared with less than 1GB for CyberLink PowerDirector. I tested on a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K CPU, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

You can choose to install just the DaVinci Resolve program or the Control Panels, Raw Player, and Fairlight Audio program along with it. If you're installing the Studio version, you also get an optional step to optimize the software's 50-plus neural engine components for your computer. The installation requires a system reboot, which isn’t common these days. For its size, DaVinci Resolve starts up reasonably quickly.

Before you get into the editing interface, you see the Project Manager window, which has hover-scrubbable thumbnails for each project you’re working on. Here, you can open, import, or export an existing project, whether it's on your local machine, a network, or in the Blackmagic Cloud. Cloud features include Blackmagic Cloud Presentations to share timelines for review. You can now restore a backup of a deleted timeline.

When you start a project, you see a bare-bones window with a single Untitled Project entry. There’s not much of the kind of assistance Adobe gives you in Premiere Pro, nor the amount of hand-holding you get in consumer-focused apps such as CyberLink PowerDirector. You can take advantage of the program's exhaustive help documentation, however.

Interface and Ease of Use: It Takes Time to Master

In place of what other software would call modes, DaVinci has seven pages: Color, Cut, Deliver, Edit, Fairlight (sound), Fusion, and Media. Buttons along the bottom of the program window let you navigate between these pages (most programs have mode-switching buttons along the top). The full-screen view works well, which is important because, with this complex interface, you're going to need all the screen real estate you can get. You can choose Auto, 100%, 150%, and 200% UI scaling—helpful if you're using a high-DPI display. I don't like that you can't adjust the relative sizes of some panels, and that adjustment sliders don't reset to the default position when you double-click them, as happens in Adobe's software.

The Media page is where you find and organize media using bins, color coding, and metadata. You can also pre-trim source clips here using the I and O keyboard shortcuts. An interesting context-menu option here is Analyze for People, which, similar to many photo-editing apps, does face recognition to help you organize media.

Once you're on the Cut or Edit page, you get the familiar three-panel working interface, with the source panel at the top left, video preview at the top right, and timeline across the whole length of the bottom. Like Final Cut and Premiere Pro, DaVinci lets you create compound clips, nested timelines, and take selectors. All of this means timelines can be very flexible (and complex).

There are two timelines on the Cut page. The main one at the bottom shows image frame previews and audio waveforms, while the solid blue one at the top is useful for navigation. You can view source material in thumbnail, metadata, strip, or list views, but you can’t adjust the thumbnail size. The Cut page includes a Boring Detector option, but all this does is show you which clips are too long and which are too short; you can set the maximum and minimum number of frames for these designations. A menu lets you turn ripple and snap editing on and off, as well as other display options. Another offers the Create Subtitles from Audio, scene detection, markers, and other track options.

The Source panel buttons let you easily control what appears in the Source section: Media Pool, Sync Bin, Transitions, Titles, and Effects. A search box helps you find what you are looking for, and the useful Power Bins persist from project to project.

DaVinci lets you choose between a locked or free playhead. With the former, you drag the clip across, and the playhead remains centered. The latter is more like what you see in other editors. With a free playhead, you move the playhead rather than the media. It's disappointing that you can't zoom the timeline with the mouse wheel on the Cut page. In my testing, it did, however, work on the Edit page, and you get buttons for Full Extent Zoom and Detail Zoom, as well as a custom zoom slider.

All the standard keyboard shortcuts are available: J for reverse, K for stop, L for forward, and Spacebar to stop and start playback. The Keyboard Customization panel lets you go to town with your own shortcuts, and you can even set the program to use Final Cut or Premiere Pro shortcuts. One very handy option on the Fusion page is pressing Shift-Spacebar to call up a searchable list of all the tools you can use in your project.

Like Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve offers multiuser collaboration workflows so that editors, colorists, and sound people can all work on the same timeline—even simultaneously. The use of proxy media makes this more efficient, and the software integrates with Frame.io, an online collaborative video editing platform that can sync projects. Davinci's Blackmagic Cloud has added more first-party collaborative editing features, including Blackmagic Cloud Storage, Cloud Project Libraries, organizational support, and the previously mentioned Cloud Presentation, which allows you to share uploaded clips with a URL and features a Comments sidebar.

Help and Documentation: Complex and Extensive

Blackmagic doesn't skimp on its help documentation for DaVinci Resolve—a PDF of over 4,000 pages! I appreciate the detailed instructions and information, but that size alone indicates the complexity of the application. If that’s not enough, a web search can find a wealth of online video tutorials from enthusiastic users. Still, if you want to learn DaVinci Resolve inside and out, you need to dig.

Basic Editing Tools: Plenty of Options

When you add clips to the timeline in Cut mode, buttons let you choose among Smart Insert, Append, Ripple Overwrite, Close Up, Place on Top, and Source Overwrite (requires synced time codes in the clips). As with most pro video editors, you can trim the source clips before adding them to the timeline. While you’re doing that on the Cut page, the preview window splits into two, showing your start and end frames, along with the frame number in a mini timeline. You can set in and out markers on the timeline to tell the program where to insert a clip from the source. The program lets you do three- and four-point editing, in which you mark the in and out points on both the source and on the timeline to control the clip position.

For trimming, DaVinci selects the appropriate edit tool automatically depending on where the cursor is—roll edit, transition duration, or slip and slide—though you can also manually select the mode you want. The Edit page's Dynamic Trim view shows adjacent clips with frame numbers when you drag on a boundary between clips, and four panes when you're moving a clip around its surroundings with a slip or slide edit—the top left is the in point of the clip your sliding, the top right is the out point, the bottom left is the preceding clip, and the bottom right is the clilp after the one you're moving.

Transitions and Effects: Striking

Pro video editors usually don’t use canned transitions in consumer products. They either simply jump-cut or use a custom transition. Some consumer products do include custom transition tools such as Pinnacle Studio’s seamless transitions, which let you identify areas of the before and after clips to zoom, pan, and swoop to. In Resolve, you get to the transitions on either the Cut page, where there's a clear button, or on the Edit page, where you find them in the Effects section's Toolbox.

Resolve has one of the coolest transition interfaces I’ve seen. Simple monochrome shapes appear in the list. But if you hover over an entry, your clips in the timeline show how the transition will look in the viewer when applied. There are some striking transitions at your disposal in the Fusion Transitions section, including Camera Shake, Drop Warp, and Tunnel of Light.

Many transitions simply work when you drag them to the timeline. For others who need more clip content, the program can automatically overlap the clips if you choose Add to Selected Edit Points and Clips from the context menu. Controls for effects that you apply show up in the Inspector panel, which you can open from the top-right button.

You can control any effects for which they make sense with keyframes, which smoothly animate the effect’s position or intensity from the start to end keyframes in your timeline. The new Keyframe Editor shows editable points and curves for all your keyframes. A new Keyframe tray in the timeline header shows your keyframes in relation to the timeline.

DaVinci Resolve’s unique Fusion Studio editor uses a node-based editing workflow beyond the ken of the average enthusiast-level video editor. It’s basically an input/output system in which you add effects and media along the flowchart and connect one node's output to another node to its right. You can reuse effect groups or restrict them to selected parts of the image.

Motion Tracking, Now With IntelliTrack

DaVinci Resolve is excellent at motion tracking, even allowing multiple tracks. To do this, you need to create nodes in Fusion. Suffice it to say it’s a much more complicated process than it is in Corel VideoStudio or other similar consumer software. In addition to the IntelliTrack tool, the program actually has Camera, Planar, and Point trackers. The last two take 3D space into account, moving with your tracked object on three axes. You can even track a surface as it warps.

The tool works in the Color and Fairlight pages as well. In Color, it lets you follow an object around while changing its color, and in Fairlight, you can follow a sound source to change its spatial output.

Other Cool Effects

Smart Reframe is similar to tools in Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut. It can take a landscape scene and reframe it as a vertical smartphone-shaped canvas, automatically keeping the point of interest, say a person, in the frame. This tool is available only in the paid Studio version of DaVinci Resolve.

It took me a while to figure out how to apply a chroma key effect: You have to switch to Edit mode (even though you can see and apply the Effects in Cut mode and in the Inspector in that mode) and then switch the viewer window mode to Open FX Overlay view. You draw a box inside the color you want to key out, and eureka! This gets you a reasonable key to fine-tune, but in testing, just checking the Despill box did an amazing job of cleaning up frizzy hair, which can be difficult for chroma-keying tools.

Picture-in-picture effects are easy to produce. Simply turn on the Transform or Crop tool below the preview player and resize and position as you like.

You can apply stabilization from a handy option in the Inspector. You get three mode choices: Perspective, Similarity, and Translation. Perspective is the standard version that takes into account motion on any axis. Similarity does the same, except it can avoid image artifacts that the first may introduce. Translation only stabilizes based on the X and Y axis (two-dimensional) motion. As with everything in Resolve, you get plenty of adjustments for stabilization, such as zoom, cropping ratio, and strength. The tool works quickly, and with enough tweaking, you can achieve optimal stabilization.

Multicam editing is another strength of DaVinci Resolve. You can sync by timecode or sound, and use as many angles as you want, though a four-by-four grid is the max the interface can show, which is a standard number for pro video editing software.

Defocus Background lets you easily create a background after selecting the subject with the Magic Mask tool and refining the selection. You can choose between camera and Gaussian blur styles. It creates a more realistic, camera-like background blur than standard blurring tools.

Color Editing: Everything You Expect and More

DaVinci Resolve sports all the color wheels and spectrometers you’d expect in a professional video editor. You can copy grades, use LUTs, and control edits with keyframes and Fusion nodes. New for version 20 is the Chroma Warp control. With this, you can either adjust the entire frame's colors or pinpoint a specific spot on your frame and modify that particular color and its saturation with a stroke. It's a sophisticated tool that offers a lot of power and control.

Resolve uses AI for color matching, supports camera raw modes, and offers temporal and spatial noise reduction.

UltraNR does a remarkable job of removing image sensor noise. It's available in the Motion panel on the Color page (Studio version only). I tried it on a still image, and it did as well as some photo software. You have several options for removing noise in DaVinci, but UltraNR is trained on real-world images to deliver better results than purely mathematical noise tools.

Another cool feature is automatic object selection. Just scribble on an object or person (there are separate modes for them) to create a Magic Mask. This is a paid license feature you can then use for tracking color edits so they'll just apply to the selected area as it moves.

With the Film Look Creator on the Color page, you can select Clean Slate (unless you want a nostalgic look to start with) and tune the sliders to taste. You have a load of effect sliders to choose from, including split tone, vignette, halation, grain, and flicker.

The new Auto Color tool did an excellent job of enhancing the colors and contrast in some drab test footage. The left side below shows the original, which had a green color cast in the sky, likely due to the grass. The right side shows the result after applying Autocolor.

Titles and Text: Customizable Effects and Automatic Captions

In DaVinci Resolve’s Effects Library, the Titles section includes basic lower third, scroll, and static text options. You can make them any size, position, rotation, color, and font you can think of, as well as apply drop shadow, stroke, and background color. Below those basics are the Fusion Titles, which include many more choices, many with animations (even 3D animations).

AI Automated Captions

A cool feature in Davinci is the ability to generate captions by analyzing your clip or timeline with AI (Studio version only), now with Speaker Detection. You simply press the speech bubble icon (third button from the top left), and a caption panel pops up after a brief progress bar.

It did an accurate job on an indoor clip I tested it with, but fares less well if there's a lot of background noise. The Speaker Detection worked to some extent, but it sometimes failed to separate the correct speaker even when an adult male voice was in the clip alongside a female voice.

What's cool is that when you click on a word in the transcription, it takes you to the place in the video where the word was spoken. There's also an option to remove silent portions, and you can add keyframe markers based on words in the transcript. It can't, however, automatically remove filler words (like "um" and "ah") from the caption or video.

AI IntelliScript: Auto Editing

This new AI feature lets you create a rough-cut timeline by matching video clips containing speech with a script you upload. I tried this with a tax software video I recorded a while back. Although this tool is indeed impressive, the cuts tended to be abrupt. And, at one point, it didn't catch when I repeated some text and sighed. Fortunately, you can use the standard trimming tools on the timeline that IntelliScript creates. Otherwise, it was able to match the text to the spoken words, and Blackmagic claims that it can match semantically even when a video subject doesn't speak the exact same words.

Animated Subtitles

In addition to automatically generating captions, DaVinci Resolve now offers animated text styles that light up as the video subject speaks each word. It's a popular effect for social media videos. You simply open the effects panel, scroll down to Subtitles > Animated, and drag one of the styles onto the subtitle track head.

Sound and Audio Editing: Full-Featured Controls and Effects

Resolve’s Fairlight audio editor supports up to 2,000 audio tracks. Without even opening Fairlight, you can easily lower the volume using the line in the audio waveforms (in the timeline) or use a simple mixer control to the right of the timeline. All of today’s advanced acoustic effects are at your disposal—chorus, de-esser, de-hummer, echo, compressor, noise reduction—many even from the standard Edit page as well as on the Fairlight page. You can download a library of royalty-free stock audio from Blackmagic’s website for use in DaVinci.

Features include AI-based audio classification, an automatic dialog leveler, Fairlight automation vector keyframing, and a timeline grid to help you sync audio and video. Fairlight also has 3D audio panning capabilities.

DaVinci's Deliver Page: Tons of Output Options

As you might imagine, DaVinci offers robust output options. In addition to all of the video file formats you can think of with detailed settings, it lets you customize your export for YouTube, TikTok, and even for sending to Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Avid Media Composer. You can also queue multiple render jobs and run them simultaneously.

Performance: Top-Tier

For all of its complexity, DaVinci Resolve is fast and stable. When I tried the free version, however, I did run into a message telling me, “Your GPU memory is full,” something I have never seen while testing video editing software. I found the proxy resolution was set to full resolution by default. Halving the resolution corrected the problem, though processing the proxies wasn’t immediate, with the preview pausing for a while. The program automatically detects and uses the GPU to accelerate processing, and this now works in the free as well as the paid Studio version.

For render speed testing, I set each video editing program to join seven clips of various resolutions, ranging from 720p all the way up to 8K. Then, I apply cross-dissolve transitions between them all. I note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 and 192Kbps audio. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I run tests on a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. Note that I tested the paid version of the software.

As you can see in the chart, DaVinci's performance is just a second behind the lead. In previous tests, the Native software encoder delivered much slower results. But with my current setup, it took about the same time with that setting on Auto, which uses your graphics hardware (in my case, Nvidia). In any case, I suggest using the Auto setting.

Final Thoughts

(Credit: Blackmagic Design)

DaVinci Resolve

4.0 Excellent

DaVinci Resolve 20 is a professional-grade, all-in-one video editing workhorse with a robust free version that's best for ambitious creators willing to invest time mastering its vast toolset.

Get It Now

DaVinci Resolve

The Bottom Line

Buy It Now

Pros & Cons

DaVinci Resolve Specs

Buy It Now

Pricing: Free or a One-Time Fee

What's New in DaVinci Resolve 20?

Getting Started With DaVinci Resolve

Interface and Ease of Use: It Takes Time to Master

Help and Documentation: Complex and Extensive

Basic Editing Tools: Plenty of Options

Transitions and Effects: Striking

Buy It Now

Buy It Now

Buy It Now

Buy It Now