The big news lately from the Adobe camp is Content-aware Fill for video in Adobe After Effects. But Adobe isn’t the only company who has been working on such a feature. Blackmagic’s latest DaVinci Resolve 16 Beta update also includes a similar feature, along with a slew of other major updates. We spoke with Blackmagic at NAB 2019 to find out more about the new features that have come to DaVinci Resolve 16 Beta.
It wasn’t too many years ago that DaVinci Resolve was primarily just a colour grading tool with very limited editing features. In the last few versions, though, Resolve has evolved into an editing powerhouse containing just about all the popular features of its competitors and a few that are unique to only Resolve. And it’s grown beyond simply colour correcting and editing your footage, too, incorporating both Fusion for effects and motion graphics as well as Fairlight audio.
It’s been kind of buried in the list of the new features, but Resolve’s Fusion page now supports object removal from video footage. This is essentially the same sort of idea as Content-aware Fill for video, recently announced for Adobe After Effects. Essentially, you draw a power window around what you want to remove, track it in your sequence, and it’ll remove that object using the surrounding frames to help fill in the gaps. One of the other big new features in DaVinci Resolve 16 is the “Cut” page. This allows editors to easily edit footage together in a very short amount of time. It’s separate from the regular Edit page, cutting things down to the bare minimum you need to see for fast editing. The regular Edit page is still there, offering all that we’re used to from previous versions, but the goal with the Cut page is to maximise efficiency, especially when you’re on a deadline. Amongst a multitude of other updates (around 150 in total) another major feature is facial recognition. Not only can the software recognise faces amongst a scene, but it can also distinguish individual people. You can then get it to show you all of the clips containing a specific person. Other new tools include a “source tape”, which allows you to quickly scrub through all of your clips on a single timeline. You can work with it just like regular clips setting your in and out points to add segments onto the main editing timeline. There’s also a dual timeline feature, allowing you to see a zoomed in section of the sequence timeline on one part of the screen while looking at the entire timeline in another.
Along with the DaVinci Resolve 16 Beta update, Blackmagic has also announced a new editors keyboard designed specifically for use with Resolve. It’s available to pre-order now for $1,025 and is expected to ship around August. There are so many new features in the latest DaVinci Resolve Beta that you should check out the complete list. You can also download the latest Beta at that link, too, and the final release should be coming sometime around July. I’m really looking forward to having more of a play with the features in Resolve 16 over the coming weeks. We would love to send a shoutout to our sponsors who helped bring you this NAB 2019 coverage: Artlist, StoryBlocks Video, SYRP, B&H, Spiffy Gear. Don’t forget to check out our NAB Giveaway, where we’re offering over $8,500 worth of cinema goodies.
