DaVinci Resolve 9.0 Color Correction Software

The Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 9.0 Color Correction Software, in addition to featuring many new functions, tools, and performance upgrades, also has a very much re-designed interface. Many software makers have not long ago begun redeveloping their applications to be more user-friendly and more efficient, and Blackmagic has done the same with Resolve. Where you previously likely had to go to school to learn Resolve, now you can learn a lot of its workflow on your own. 

Resolve can natively be operated by keyboard and mouse, or you can instead use one of many compatible control surfaces, including Blackmagic's award-winning DaVinci Resolve Control Surface, a Tangent Devices Wave or Element Panel, JL Cooper's Eclipse CX, and Avid's Artist Color, or, simply in addition to your keyboard and mouse, a tablet and pen, like Wacom's Bamboo Tablet. 

Resolve comes to you in a package including an installation disc and a user key dongle. The disc is ready use with a Mac, and for use with Windows would only require the installation of a free driver from Blackmagic's website. 

Please note that owners of Resolve 8 or 7 can download the new version free of charge on Blackmagic's website.

What's New in DaVinci Resolve 9

New Fast-to-Use Interface Design

• Larger full color palettes with direct user access to more tools for faster grading
• One click selection for fast switching between timelines
• Three timeline appearance selections to show re-sizable timeline tracks and thumbnails, with optional audio waveform, flags and markers
• Expandable timeline view for long edit sessions
• Bigger and clearer text to ease eye strain
• Drag and drop effects from the Effects Pool
• Add flags to clips for quick and easy sorting and filtering
• Resizable gallery stills stored and displayed in user-named albums
• Includes 44 'Looks' for fast grade selection
• Streamlined project import, export and selection workflow with just five screens that step you through each project
• Selection of timeline available on Conform and Color page

New Login, Project and Clip Management Tools

• Scroll thumbnails to select user login or just type the user name
• Browse and select projects with scrubbable thumbnail or list view
• Double-click thumbnails for fast project loading
• Search projects by name or format
• Sort projects by name, creation, modification date or frame rate
• Project count displayed per user in thumbnail and list view
• Browse and select clips in the Media Library with resizable and scrubbable thumbnail or list view
• Sort and search folders and clips
• Hover over clip to reveal metadata
• Embedded audio icon indicates which clips have audio
• Media Pool now easily managed by dragging and dropping clips and bins
• Media Pool now has consolidated clip attributes controls permitting concurrent modification of multiple clip elements for multiple clips
• Media Pool list view now also displays input LUT, PAR, video/data level, frame rate and audio channels
• Capture-from-tape includes Log and Capture, Batch Clips, and Capture-Now options
• Projects can now be saved in a project-based file database with optional database server

New Dailies, Audio, Conform and Editing Tools

• Mixed source clip frame rate support option for simplifying XML and AAF workflows
• Insert, Overwrite and Edit Ripple support
• Blade tool for applying multiple cuts
• Support for amending timeline start timecode
• Templates for user-selectable keyboard shortcuts matching popular editing functions
• Support for speed warps from FCP XML and Avid AAF with handles
• Ability to auto-import AMA linked Red R3D clips with AAF
• Trim RED R3D clips to new extents with handles
• 100+ production metadata fields for entering on set shot notes

New Color Correction Tools

• New Log, Camera Raw, Stereoscopic 3D, Tracker, Sizing and Data Burn-in palettes for faster access and grading
• Log grading includes Lowlight, Midtone, Highlight and Offset in every corrector node concurrent with traditional DaVinci 3-way grading
• Log palette also includes Contrast and Pivot with low and high range controls
• One click generation of LUTs from the clip grade
• Nodes can now be named; linking nodes is much faster
• Primary Control palettes now includes Master Gain
• Camera Raw palette offers real time direct control with Image Debayer and Decode settings optionally saved as a part of the grade version
• Window and Key palettes display the selected windows, key shape and position
• Tracker palette displays editable keyframe timeline
• Stereoscopic 3D palette offers Floating Windows and also separate Viewer, Monitor and Waveform Mesh selections
• Additional and faster automatic stereo 3D image alignment tool
• Data Burn-ins palette for source clip and traditional track burn-ins now includes multiple custom text and logos and user selectable fade up and down times
• Sort and filter thumbnail timeline shots by flags, markers shots modified recently
• Clips in the RGBA format can now use the Alpha channel for matte
• Alpha clip type is selectable for each source clip
• Input LUTs are selectable for each source clip
• Easy application of Gallery memory/still grade to multiple clips
• Version name presets to improve selection speed and accuracy
• Double click timeline thumbnail version name to see clip codec
• Clip details window now includes EDL comments, clip description and notes
• Improved tracker accuracy with non-square PAR images
• ACES v0.1.1 support
• ADX10 IDT support

New Viewer Modes

• Automatic switchable viewer to SDI video output with synced audio
• Full screen viewer mode for accurate review of Windows and Qualifiers
• New cinema mode offers a clean full screen so you can sit back and enjoy a preview of graded material
• Dedicated screen for creating rendered deliverables includes large viewer and timeline
• Video scopes now available in 1, 2 and 4 up display, including optimized trace display
• Video scopes include pan and tilt control using the mouse scroll function and Option/ Alt + scroll for zoom
• Video scopes include a 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio option
• 4K monitoring with DeckLink Quad SDI

New Deliver Screen for Rendering and Edit-to-Tape

• User-configurable easy setups can now be saved and recalled
• Concurrent renders can be generated for multiple format dailies deliverables
• Simple text name burn-in for dailies deliverables
• Force Highest Quality Debayer and Resizing setting when rendering clips
• When in Source render mode, clips can be rendered with a specific starting frame number
• Batch Render Queue shows job status
• Edit-to-Tape mode for fast transfer of jobs to tape
• Support for Anaglyph stereoscopic 3D rendering
• Support for timeline filters to select clips for render

New and Improved Codec Support

• Encoding and decoding DNxHD in a QuickTime wrapper
• Improved decoder performance for uncompressed MXF on Linux
• Improved CinemaDNG, ARRI Alexa and Sony F65 debayer performance
• Canon C500 camera codec support
• Improved Phantom Cine decoder

New Performance Optimization

• Resolve for Mac is now a 64-bit app for faster operation with more clips
• Improved performance for single GPU systems
• Optimized display mode during playback improves speed for reduced performance systems
• Dramatically increased render speeds for a number of codecs
• Hot plug and play for external USB drives on Mac OS X
• GateKeeper signature for Mountain Lion security support
• General performance and stability improvements

Features Elaborated On

Unlimited Grades

DaVinci Resolve uses node based processing where each node can have color correction, power windows and effects. You can join unlimited nodes sequentially, or in parallel to combine grades, effects, mixers, keys and custom curves.

Powerful Primaries

Get perfect looking images with the world's most powerful primary color corrector for setting lift, gamma and gain with the control of YRGB colorspace. Primary control includes shadows, midtones and highlight log controls with offset.

Precision Secondaries

Target specific colors or areas of the image with secondary color correctors. DaVinci Resolve includes precise color qualification that lets you target colors with clean edges so no matter how complex your grade, it always blends seamlessly.

Optical Reframing

When you need to reframe a shot, it's vital that you don't loose quality. DaVinci Resolve includes optical quality sub pixel processing so when you reframe, or even zoom into a shot, quality is retained. This lets you fix shots with full quality.

Image Stabilizer and Tracker

Includes the world's most powerful 3D tracker for locking Power Windows to on screen objects. No more time wasting on keyframe generation! You can also image stabilize to clean up shots that would otherwise be unusable!

High Dynamic Range

DaVinci Resolve supports HDR source images with real time display, blending and grading for incredible control over your shot. DaVinci Resolve also supports the 16-bit floating point ACES colorspace so you get full quality and dynamic range.

RGB Mixing

For extreme looks and innovative creative styles, DaVinci Resolve supports RGB mixer grading to control individual red, green and blue gain for each color channel, blend and mix channels. You can even swap inputs for extreme effects.

Custom Curves

When you're after subtle control, custom curves let you define a custom gamma curve that's applied for your corrections. This can be ganged for all channels or set per channel. Custom curves also support YSFX luminance and saturation effects.

HSL Curve Grading

Curve grading is a very popular grading method and lets you adjust colors on a curve graph with a workflow that's similar to grading with popular editing software. You can control high and low clip per node, and set high and low clip softness.

Power Windows

Invented by DaVinci, Power Windows revolutionized grading. DaVinci Resolve features unlimited windows with circle, linear, polygon and PowerCurve shapes. Windows have mask control with inside and outside grading and full multi point tracking!

Real Time Noise Reduction

When running powerful CUDA based hardware with DaVinci Resolve, you can take advantage of digital noise reduction. DNR is perfect for removing noise in digital cameras, and you can even apply noise reduction within Power Windows!

Keyframe Timeline

The built-in keyframe timeline lets you see color corrections, shot framing and transitions in a separate timeline per clip. You can adjust every grading parameter with auto key-framing and adjustable dynamics.

Color Decision Lists

DaVinci Resolve supports ASC color decision lists including full slope, offset, power and saturation metadata. All CDL events are synchronized with EDL events including additional support for stereoscopic 3D size data.

Gallery Stills and Grades

When you're grading, it's important to keep stills from earlier in the job so you can compare shots to keep your grades consistent. DaVinci Resolve's Gallery lets you quickly save and share stills and also copy color grades from your work.

Dailies and Metadata

For on set editing and grading, DaVinci Resolve includes dailies tools for syncing audio and to manage and edit metadata. The one click sync links full quality camera images with system audio for quick on set grading, preview and render.

3D and 1D LUT Support

Work with 1D and 3D LUTs simply and easily. DaVinci Resolve supports open standard .cube files and you can add LUTs for input, output and display, or even a LUT for every node! You can even create a 3D LUT from any grade with a single click.

Copy and Paste Grades

When you're working with media shot on the same location, with the same camera, then the copy and paste grade feature dramatically speeds up your work. Copy grades to any clip, or even a range of clips, and even copy camera raw metadata.

Real Time Proxies

Sometimes when you use lots of nodes on a high resolution source clip you might run out of GPU processing to play real time. No problem with DaVinci. Simply turn on real time proxies and then play, even when adding even more grades.

Video Formats

DaVinci Resolve is resolution and frame rate independent so it supports all video formats. You can work in SD, HD, 2K, 4K and even higher resolutions. Video I/O formats support 4:2:2 color space as well as RGB color space. When combined with Blackmagic Design DeckLink or UltraStudio capture and playback, you can work in RGB via 3 Gb/s SDI or dual link HD-SDI directly from within DaVinci Resolve! DaVinci Resolve also supports real time monitoring while grading.

Support More File Formats

No other system handles more types of file formats so you can grade virtually anything a client brings through the door! DaVinci Resolve allows full unlimited grading of raw RED, ARRI and Sony files in real time so you're not limited by rendering before grading. Choose from a huge range of file formats including CinemaDNG, DPX, CIN, QuickTime, DNxHD and native RAW files with full de-bayer all in real time. You can even work with TIFF, JPEG, TGA and BMP and multi channel audio.

Multi Track XML Support

Move your projects between your favorite NLE software and DaVinci Resolve and add professional color correction to your edit! DaVinci can be used on set, to grade shots before the edit, or after to grade and re-render the final master in a deeper bit depth. DaVinci supports XML import and export from Final Cut Pro X and any color grades in Final Cut Pro become DaVinci grades once imported. DaVinci Resolve also supports Final Cut Pro 7, Adobe Premiere Pro and also Avid AAF.

Built-In Editing

When you need to make adjustments to your job, it's easy to use the built-in DaVinci editing feature in the conform page. Conforming in DaVinci lets you grade from the original high bit depth and full resolution camera files, and keep all this quality all the way through to the final rendered master. DaVinci editing features full multi track support, preview of all tracks in real time, plus supports full drag and drop editing in the timeline. You can mark edit points, insert into tracks, delete clips and more.

Superior 3D Tools

DaVinci Resolve has a powerful 3D toolset for advanced jobs. DaVinci Resolve allows real time concurrent grading and display of stereoscopic 3D timelines, as well as side by side, line by line, checkerboard and anaglyph comparison between eyes. DaVinci Resolve also includes the most advanced automatic 3D alignment tools to remove slight errors between cameras on 3D rigs at the push of a button. DaVinci Resolve features a massive 3D toolset that makes stereoscopic 3D grading easy.

4K Grading and Monitoring

DaVinci Resolve for Mac, Windows and Linux offer 4K monitoring when combined with the DeckLink 4K video card. With DeckLink 4K and a 4K projector or monitor, your DaVinci Resolve grading suite offers the highest quality grading and display in the industry, so you can see every subtle detail of your grade on any screen size.