I'm no expert, but I never found Resolve materially more difficult to learn or use than Final Cut Pro or Premiere. And if you're doing anything moderately complex, it's potentially easier to learn because things that require external tools in FCPX and Premiere are built in to Resolve Studio.
I suspect the agent integration is primarily workflow/UI related, but regardless, I don't see it as any more anti-creative than incorporating precanned effects and presets into a project, and potentially a very useful learning tool since the Resolve UI is quite good at letting you see how the sausage is made.
I don't have a single reason to do any form of video editing, let alone professional video editing, but that kind of pricing model makes me want to buy a license just to make sure that companies like this stick around.
Black magic also make a program that support/ties into the camera hardware on smartphones and they support both Android and iOS.
I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve Studio for 12 years now with frequent updates, with the license I got with the original Pocket Cinema Camera for £800 (still a fantastic pocket size cinema camera, shoots raw cinemadng and ProRes with a beautiful sensor).
One of the best founders and companies around.
I've been using Resolve since version 14, still getting upgrades to it! My license does only work on one "computer" at a time though, so when I switch between Linux and Windows, I need to re-enter and activate the license, as when I do that it deactivates the previous (other OS) one. You have seemingly unlimited amount of times to switch though, as I've probably done it on a bi-weekly basis for quite some time.
This is commoditizing Adobe for them.
And great for beginners, now they get to pay some chatbot company to cover the gaps left by detereorating software design. Lucky they're already using agents... are they?
I don't mean to be harsh, only passionate.
I have a hard time seeing your way. I build software. Tools for humans to do stuff. Whatever they want. Then it gets complex. There are methods to make it more accessible to more people including so called agents. I want to go to there I want to enable the humans.
I feel you bro that you see human getting squeezed out. I do not see it that way. The human is still the nexus.
CEOs and tech bros and hype are all a distraction and a fog that will dissipate with time. We need to focus on the functionality and utility. We are engineers
You are a valuable person in the conversation and we all need you to participate with eyes wide open. I assume you are young. That's not discounting it is welcoming.
[edit: cleaned stuff up to hopefully make it more direct and non-confrontational]
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
This I agree with, though.
Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.
There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.
Ultimately, and this applies to so much of life, "to each, their own," right?
What is lost when losing the (understandably annoying) process of the grind? By letting LLMs do the busy work, do you lose the opportunity to stumble into randomness? Do you lose the understanding of what is possible/interesting with the medium?
And do you end up in this derivative future where decisions are made by a system that was trained on all the previous uses of it?
Obviously that's fairly hyperbolic, but I have absolutely felt the pull of it all. When it decides to take a couple extra steps I didn't ask for creatively and I think "eh, that's fine."
*EDIT: I wrote this and looked back and this SOUNDS like an LLM wrote it. See what I mean??????
Thank. God.
I never want to rotoscope again.
And frankly I'm not fond of editing either.
Although... BMD has actually made it harder, by adding bloat like the Cut page. I have attempted to find value in it a couple of times, and didn't. Now I disable it.
BMD needs to stop throwing crap into Resolve and buckle down and do two things:
1. Fix bugs, including UI defects. The Deliver page is a mess. The clip selection between the Edit timeline and the Fusion page makes no sense. And lots more.
2. Unify the node views. Resolve is a bunch of stuff BMD bought and threw together on different pages. The "integration" is janky and can, especially for the beginner, seriously degrade your work. Once example is how Fusion compositions inexplicably downgrade everything to timeline resolution. So you can bring 4K footage into a Fusion comp, but if your output timeline of the moment happens to be merely HD, the entire composition (including keys) will be degraded to work at that resolution. I mean... really? And beyond that, the relationship between Fusion comps and the timeline events they wind up in is extremely fragile and breaks arbitrarily and unrecoverably all the time.
A single nodeview for all operations would be a long-overdue game-changer for editing software.
As pro software, the UI has a learning curve. Many YouTube videos are out of date, or unnecessarily drawn out.
Additionally, as a hobbyist, project settings, color spaces, clipping, etc can be tricky to miss.
I’ve already been using Claude to (1) help me with UI, (2) QA my delivery, and (3) occasional fixes for audio repair; waveform sync (can’t afford time codes).
I make all creative decisions - including most menial ones - myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way; I enjoy the act of creating. I welcome this integration.
I’m sure some users are gonna agentically grade or whatnot. I don’t like it, but I’m also don’t believe in telling other people what they should do with their own work and creative process.
Maybe not entirely handed by AI but when AI starts doing it better than most and in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, why do you think it wont be at least partly delegated to AI?
the "never" is what gets me here.
1) software doesn't commit suicide like some pilots did.
2) software has superhuman reflexes, processing power and are not affected by emotion.
3) software also will eliminate a whole class of failure modes that caused many crashes in the past like: "I won't seek nearest and safer airport because that will be expensive in fuel costs"
4) software is already landing planes and saving lives in the process: https://youtu.be/XawXSLRCM3o
5) Most part of a comercial flight is already controlled by software anyway. Pilots mostly take off/land and input coordinates and altitudes.
6) push for fully automous aircraft during modern war is going to speed up development and test of the tech.
I think it's a matter of time here too.
If, and that's a big if, a pilot did choose a less safe airport because of monetary cost to his airline, it would be because those are the guidelines of the airline. And those guidelines would obviously be in the software too.
I have no idea what legislation is in place regarding this topic and protecting pilots. But even with really good protections, there's no way that it won't affect your social standing with the higher ups if you divert and cost the company exorbitantly.
So pilots do have to make judgment calls about how much they're willing to risk their lives and the lives of their passengers versus a perceived risk, and worse, this judgment call exists in a weird fuzzy area where they're "allowed" to make the safe bet, but in practice, they will be punished for it.
Software doesn't (generally) have this luxury. It decides whether to land or continue flying based on some defined set of conditions.
It can still decide to risk the lives of the passengers. But that decision has to be approved by the airline, and can't live as an informal "you will lose brownie points with management" sword over the necks of the flight crew.
Unless we start to incorporate LLMs and probabilistic models into autopilots... but no-one would ever do that, right? ....
The process is the point for any passionate creative. And yes, for every passionate creative you have a burned out creative who's trying to make ends meet who will use more AI centric tools because both that creative and the people paying them likely do not care how things look when they're completed, only that they're completed, on-time, and under budget.
However, again, an actual creative wouldn't. Imagine you and I are climbing a mountain: I'm climbing the mountain because I love climbing mountains. Climbing mountains is what I live for. I work full time and hard as hell so I can afford trips to climb mountains. You, on the other hand, have a terminal illness and you know that at the top of this mountain is a plant you can eat that will cure you with no side effects. So we're both doing this thing, but for WILDLY different reasons.
If as we're climbing a helicopter flies up and hovers behind us and the pilot says "hey I'll take you to the top of the mountain if you want!" we're going to have very different responses: you don't care about climbing mountains, and even if you do, you're not on this particular climb to enjoy it; you're here because you need this plant to cure your illness. You'd be crazy to not jump in that helicopter and get what you need to live. However, I'd be equally crazy to do the exact same thing, because climbing the mountain is why I'm here, I live for climbing mountains, and I want to climb this one.
This is what AI people do not get about creatives and why we talk past each other. AI people think creative people make things to have finished works, and that's certainly a part of it, and basically a requirement if you'd like to monetize your creativity. But like, I work in software as my day job and I'm bloody good at it, but I use AI to generate code sometimes because the process of developing software doesn't do nearly the same thing for me as creating art. I love making art, and I'd do it even if it made me no money. And I know that, because I've been doing it my whole life and it's never made me money. I feel depressed if I go too long between making works of art. I get ideas building up inside me and they itch and scratch at my being until I sit down and spend several hours turning said idea into something I can see, but like, if I just put a prompt into an AI image generator, I feel absolutely nothing doing that.
All of that to say: I genuinely do not believe AI will completely replace all of this, for no other reason than only a fraction (sizable though it may be) of creatives will ever want it, let alone use it. The quality of it and arguing about if it can "match" a human creative isn't the point, the humanity is the point. I don't want to look at AI generated art, and so I won't, and I especially do not want to replace my creative output with that of Midjourney. Ever. I don't care how good or cheap it is which is why those arguments just bounce off of me. I'm here to climb a mountain and you're offering me a staircase.
For me, the point of creativity is play, exploration, and experimentation. I've always jumped on new technology and new media because they're the best place to find those.
From what I've seen, a lot of the "it's a process" people are more interested in craft than art.
They're not creating anything unique, novel, or personal. They 'create' like an engineering problem - master this skill, copy this style, reproduce some acceptable and recognisable version of this popular imagery/content/genre.
There's a huge gap between competent craft and work that has a voice and is surprising - no matter how it's made.
People with that original voice are rare, and many aren't afraid of AI.
That's not to say that AI doesn't it make even easier to make uninteresting, unoriginal content. But the 'process' can also be fighting the default output quality to transcend that.
Why not? Personally (although I'm not saying others have to see it this way too), I'd wait until I can see what AI can replace, before believing so, rather than the opposite.
So far, AI isn't able to "set direction" at all in any sensible way, especially for a creative project like TV or movies, the results are just too bad (today). Although it's excellent at "following directions", which is why these new APIs are great and exciting, it lets people who are good at setting direction to leverage these tools to have the direction concretely followed by something, without having to create a group of collaborators.
Until we've seen proven that AI can indeed "set directions" ("have taste"), I think it's fair to assume they're unable to do so in a way that it produces something that humans generally enjoy. And very far from the kind of masterpieces a human can create.
It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.
Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.
I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.
But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.
I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.
Watching this next generation closely, because there are just a shitload of red flags starting to crop up that don't seem to be going away.
[Citation needed]