DaVinci Resolve 20 is a significant update as Blackmagic Design has written all new code to support the 100 extensive new features, including DaVinci AI tools, keyframe editor, voice over palettes, multi-layer compositing tools, plus chroma warp, Magic Mask 2, and more.

DaVinci Resolve 20 brings a major upgrade, as Blackmagic Design rewrites its code to incorporate 100+ new features, such as DaVinci AI tools, a keyframe editor, voiceover palettes, multi-layer compositing tools, Chroma Warp, Magic Mask 2, and more.

This version includes powerful AI tools to enhance editors’ workflows. AI IntelliScript helps create timelines from text scripts, AI Animated Subtitles animates words as they’re spoken, and AI Multicam SmartSwitch arranges camera angles based on speaker detection. The cut and edit pages feature a dedicated keyframe editor and voiceover palettes, while AI Audio Assistant analyzes timeline audio to create a professional audio mix. In Fusion, explore advanced multi-layer compositing. The Color Warper now includes Chroma Warp, with Magic Mask and Depth Map receiving significant updates.

Blackmagic Cloud introduces new features like Cloud folders, allowing editors to easily share extra clips, images, and graphics with collaborators. All cloud content appears as virtual clips and folders until added to a project, at which point it syncs locally. Editors can manage large media collections while keeping their media pool organized.

Editors can now review projects in Presentations with clients who don’t have a Blackmagic Cloud account. Simply generate a URL link for the presentation and share it with clients to enable guest access. During the review, you can view clips, add notes with timeline markers, and engage in group chat.

Cloud storage has been enhanced with an icon view, showing thumbnails of clips for easy visual identification and media management. Hovering over thumbnails lets you scrub through content for quick previews. The inspector panel now displays camera and clip metadata, along with production notes.

Cut, Edit and Color Pages

On the cut, edit, and color pages, when a vertical timeline or project is opened, the page layouts automatically adjust to optimize the vertical viewer. Tools and palettes are repositioned to maximize screen space without unnecessary zooming, ensuring an efficient workflow.

The voiceover palette on the cut page allows editors to record a voice-over track during timeline playback. It provides cue, record, and stop controls, along with quick access to voice isolation and dialogue leveling tools. A dedicated track is added automatically, and you can load and work with a prompter script and countdown.

A new keyframe editor on the cut and edit pages enables more precise parameter animation. Editors can adjust keyframe curves and parameter modes to customize animation shapes and refine control. The keyframe tray below the timeline also allows easy review and navigation of keyframes.

The Text+ tool has been upgraded to offer more control over text graphic layouts, including point, text box, circle, or path styles. When working with PSD files, editors can now split the PSD layers directly within the timeline to edit each layer individually.

The MultiText tool creates multiple text layers in one place for greater flexibility. Customers can use the inspector tabs to set individual style parameters within each text layer, including appearance, layout, warping, and keyframe animation. The text list lets editors navigate, rearrange, lock, and delete layers.

On the cut page, editors can now drag directly in the viewer to live overwrite a camera angle directly into the timeline. With the sync bin active or when in multi-source mode, editors can drag horizontally to live paint at the playhead or drag down to turn the angle into a draggable clip.

The cut page now has a safe trimming mode to prevent crucial edits from being accidentally overwritten. Editors can drag trim points to quickly fill gaps in the timeline. When they reach a cut point, DaVinci Resolve will pause. If they want to overwrite the edit, keep dragging to trim the adjacent clip.

The cut page also features a full audio mixer with professional loudness metering. Each channel strip has a left-right pan slider, fader, solo, and mute buttons, plus professional panning, EQ, Dynamics, and FX controls. Editors can now mix and monitor audio while they record, edit, and finish.

The voiceover tool lets editors record directly into the timeline on the edit page. There are quick controls to set the file name, audio input, and destination track. With automatic track selection and customization options like countdown and input monitoring, creating a voice-over has never been easier.

On the color page, the new chroma warp lets editors intuitively adjust color and saturation with a single motion in the viewer. The stroke control moves colors in one direction, while the point-to-point mode isolates regions for more precise hue correction. Editors can add pinpoints to isolate regions they do not want to affect.

When streaming remotely, editors can choose to display power windows and other overlays on the reference monitor. This is helpful for remote workflows where the grading system is in a separate location from the colorist, or their client, and their local monitor. Editors can also now stream H.265 4:2:2.

Fusion

Fusion now offers deep image compositing tools, so editors can access the depth data found in deep image EXR files. A range of new nodes allows editors to merge, transform, resize, crop, recolor, and generate holdouts. Render from Fusion’s 3D environment and export deep EXR’s with the Fusion saver node.

Support has also been added for multi-layer images across all nodes. Fusion can read multi-layer EXRs or photoshop files, preview the layers in the viewer, and access and manipulate any layer in any node. Now artists have seamless layer interaction without needing independent renders of a source file.

Vector warp, vector transform, and vector denoise are new optical flow vector tools integrated within Fusion. These tools enable intricate temporal effects by leveraging motion vectors. Utilizing a clip’s natural movement for warping and denoising presents a powerful time saving solution.

Fusion’s PanoMap, spherical stabilizer, LatLong patcher, 3D VR camera and the 3D viewers have been updated to support 180-degree angle of view to allow production of immersive content. Editors can also render 3D scenes to VR180 using a spherical camera and Renderer3D for a simplified production process.

The enhanced Dome light is a 3D tool that simulates natural ambient lighting in a 3D scene. It allows the integration of 360 HDRI images for accurate reflections and global illumination. You can create more realistic environments, ensuring their 3D models respond convincingly to light conditions.

Editors can preview color page clip grades directly in the Fusion page viewer through the MediaOut node. This will give editors a better representation of their final composition and save you time by not requiring you to leave the Fusion page every time you need to review the final look of a clip.

Clip EQ now features 6 bands on the cut, edit, and Fairlight pages. This allows for more tonal control at the clip level and matches the track EQ in the mixer. So now you can easily copy and paste settings between the clip, track, and EQ plug-in for more consistent, flexible, and precise control.

Fairlight

Fairlight has two new clip processing options that let you adjust a target clip’s audio to match a reference clip’s level or tonal spectrum. EQ match is dynamic and is automatically automated across their clip to maintain a tonal match. Level Matcher lets customers seamlessly intercut clip sections without manual changes.

If customers have a favorite group of plugins that they need to apply together, they can now build a Chain FX to include them, each with customized settings and saved as presets. Editors can have up to six effects within a chain and also combine Chain FX plugins for longer chains in the channel effects slots.

Fairlight now features per-channel automation mode selection allowing for more flexibility and creative control when mixing their projects. In a single pass you can now dynamically adjust multiple individual tracks and have some channel automation settings in Snap, some in Latch, and others in Trim.

The AI Set Extender creates a scene extension to fill an entire frame based on a simple text prompt. Highlight the area customers want to extend, and missing regions caused by limited clip angles, blanking and cropping will be auto generated. You can even create new backgrounds behind foreground objects.

Apple Immersive Video

DaVinci Resolve Studio 20 also introduces powerful new features for Apple Immersive Video on Apple Vision Pro. Filmmakers can effortlessly edit, color grade, mix Spatial Audio, and deliver Apple Immersive Video captured using the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera, which is starting to roll out to an initial set of users. You can pre-order URSA Cine Immersive here.

New tools and parameters are being added in DaVinci Resolve to support Apple Immersive workflows, including support for spatial audio. This means users will be able to import clips shot on Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera to edit, grade, mix and professionally deliver media for Apple Vision Pro.

AI Features

Users can use AI IntelliScript to automatically generate timelines based on the original project script. AI IntelliScript will match the transcribed audio in media clips to the script and construct a timeline of the best selected takes, with any alternative takes placed on additional tracks for editor review.

AI Dialogue Matcher is a powerful tool that automatically matches the tone, level, and room environment of dialogue. Customers can match audio from two totally different clips for audio consistency. Match dialogue recorded in different environments, on different devices, or on shoots spanning several days.

Automatically adjust a music track’s length to fit a video using AI Music Extender. The audio clip is analyzed and a music edit is extended or shortened to match. Customers get four versions to chose from, visual edit indicators, and the ability to decompose sections. It’s a fast, flexible way to tailor music to visuals.

Keep a viewer’s attention in videos with subtitles that are animated as words are spoken using AI Animated Subtitles. Use the transcription tool to generate a subtitle track on their timeline and then drag the animated Fusion title templates onto the track header to change the appearance and animation style of the text.

In the edit page, AI Multicam SmartSwitch automatically switches multi-cam angles based on the active speaker in a scene. After creating a multi-cam clip, click SmartSwitch in the multi-cam viewer. SmartSwitch analyzes and automatically selects clip angles based on audio, and lip movement in the video.

The AI Voice Convert tool applies a pre-generated voice model to an existing voice recording, retaining its inflections, pitch variation, and emotion. Improve their own voice if recorded in a noisy environment, or create perfect ADR using the original actor’s own voice.

DaVinci Resolve’s SuperScale now features 3x and 4x enhanced upscaling, ensuring the highest visual quality of all media in a project, regardless of source resolution. Perfect for working with archival material or stock footage that needs to be matched to the deliverable resolution.

AI Magic Mask has been updated for even more accurate tracking within a single mode. Use points to select people, objects and regions, and paint tools to refine the selection faster than ever. Magic Mask intuitively tracks the motion of a selected area, even around obstructions and in low quality clips.

The AI Depth Map effect has been updated for faster scene analysis and more practical mattes. Quickly isolate foreground characters to make them pop against their environment or apply lens blur to the background of a shot. Customers can refine the resulting matte and isolate specific depths for grading.

AI IntelliCut provides powerful clip-based audio processing, automating time-consuming tasks in seconds. Removing silence removes low-level or silent areas for a cleaner audio track. You can split dialogue into a separate track per speaker for individual mixing and create an ADR list to replace dialogue.

When a timeline has audio elements that are not mixed or balanced, AI Audio Assistant can automatically create a professional audio mix. Audio Assistant organizes tracks, evens out dialogue levels, adjusts sound effects and music to the dialogue track, and automatically creates a mastered final mix.

When editing to the beat, editors can use the AI Detect Music Beats function to analyze audio clips containing beat-driven music and automatically place markers to indicate beats. Customers can use these as visual indicators for cut points, or drag to snap clips to the beat’s markers at the nearest frame.

“This is a massive update this year, with AI tools and new features hat help to speed up every stage of our customer’s workflow. By automating tasks that take a long time manually or are tedious, with features such as keyframe editing, voice over palettes, live overwrite and multi-layer compositing tools, our customers are free to spend more time than ever being creative. The new processing code we’ve been rewriting over the last few years is an amazing base to be able to build these new features on. It’s exciting to see how we can provide tools with DaVinci Resolve to help our customers spend more time exploring their creativity” Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design CEO

DaVinci Resolve 20 Features

• Import Blackmagic Cloud Shared folders to media pool.
• New optimized UI layouts option for vertical videos on cut, edit and color pages.
• Voiceover palette with cue, voice tools and teleprompter.
• Improved keyframing with dedicated curve view and timeline drawer.
• Text+ paragraph, line wrapping and bounding tools.
• MultiText tool with layers and easy transform, clip and wrap controls.
• Live overwrite now supports edit keys and search dial.
• Mouse drag to live overwrite multi source and sync bin.
• Trim with safe edit avoids overwriting adjacent clips.
• Full featured audio mixer added to cut page.
• Voiceover tool with record and monitor options in edit page.
• Chroma Color Warper grading.
• Display viewer overlays for remote monitoring.
• Stream and monitor H.265 4:2:2 on supported hardware.
• Deep image compositing toolset.
• Multi layer pipelining for OpenEXR, PSD and stereoscopic 3D.
• Vector warping toolset for image patching and cleanup.
• Fusion support for 180 VR.
• 3D Scene Dome Light.
• View color page grade in media out node on Fusion page.
• Clip EQ now features 6 bands.

• EQ and Level Matcher processes match tone and clip levels.
• EQ and Gain now also available as Fairlight FX plugins.
• Fairlight Chain FX to create and restore frequently chained plugins.
• Resolve FX AI Set Extender.
• AI IntelliScript creates timelines with a user provided script.
• AI Dialogue Matcher matches clip tone, level and reverberance.
• AI Music Editor automatically edits music to desired length.
• AI animated subtitles highlights or animates spoken words.
• AI Multicam SmartSwitch for automatic angle switching.
• AI Voice Convert with built-in and user trainable models.
• AI SuperScale now includes 3x and 4x enhanced upscaling.
• AI Magic Mask v2 with paint brush.
• AI Resolve FX Depth Map v2.
• AI IntelliCut to remove silences.
• AI IntelliCut to checkerboard dialogue by speaker.
• AI IntelliCut to generate ADR Cues using transcription speaker info.
• AI Audio Assistant automatically creates a finished mix.
• AI Detect Music Beats displays and allows beat snapping

Availability and Price

DaVinci Resolve 20 public beta is available now for download from the Blackmagic Design website.

DaVinci Resolve 20 is a huge update. It is still considered beta, so be careful when using it on professional projects. When software gets a big code update, there are bound to be bugs. What is also impressive is that Blackmagic Design didn’t change the pricing or offer a free version. It’s still only $295 for the studio version.