Why DaVinci Resolve? And why again?
I’ve been having plenty of problems with Movie Studio Platinum 15 for quite some time. There are bugs, you can’t place some “special” characters into texts (not even n-dash), it freezes a lot (watch those dots after the frame counter, if they accumulate, stop the playback!) and transitions are far from modern. But I was used to it and it got the job done.
Why can’t I stay with Movie Studio?
Movie Studio 18 changed everything. The company behind Movie Studio (MAGIX or the Vegas part of it) decided to kill good old Vegas-style Movie Studio. But instead of making it clear, they decided to sell a different product under the same name. There is no decent word for this kind of scam.
I haven’t upgraded to “Movie Studio” 18 because I found YouTube videos mentioning this problem. I wanted to upgrade in the hope of better stability and some new stuff (16 and 17 weren’t good enough upgrades for me). But that is out of the question now.
But Movie Studio 15 – with all its familiar problems – is fine, right? Yes, for my kind of family videos it is OK. But it doesn’t render anymore on my computer! After I upgraded my GPU to RTX 3060 it crashes the moment I try to open the render dialog. So it’s not about the render settings – I cannot even see and change those render settings. I googled – of course – I tried many suggested fixes, but no luck.
With my last video, I was saved by my old computer which is now in the kid’s room. That one still renders the videos just fine. But this is not the way I want to go on.
Why is it hard to move from Movie Studio to Resolve?
I badly wanted to make my relationship with Movie Studio as long as possible. I mentioned the problems above, but those were known problems. Resolve has tons of strange unknown problems and I’m googling half of the time I use it, even after watching some tutorial videos. Confined tutorials are fine, but the moment you start exploring, Resolve throws surprise after surprise on you – most of them far from intuitive.
The last time I tried to use Resolve I failed miserably with something I do a lot and thought it was very simple. I move the video frame on the large picture (a map in my case) but the point of reference in Resolve is not the centre of the video frame, but the centre of the picture – which is annoying for this kind of work. When you want to rotate the video frame around a certain point, you need to move the pivot to the current centre of the video frame which is far from trivial in Resolve. This was a showstopper for me.
Perhaps the Fusion page solves this, but Fusion didn’t work on my computer, it was extremely slow. Now I upgraded, so I’ll see about that.
Add tons of other differences – like super simple crossfading in Movie Studio, tricky (for a beginner) copy/paste behaviour in Resolve, and much more complicated pan and crop compared to Movie Studio – you get the picture. The transition is very difficult – especially if your workflow is tied to some Movie Studio specifics. You don’t even realize how things are different for some tasks that are super simple in Movie Studio.
Perhaps it would be easier to start with Resolve. But I’m not sure, there are still many things that are not intuitive whether you’re used to something or not.
Why DaVinci Resolve again?
With all the troubles with Resolve – why do I even try to move to it anyway? The most obvious reason is the price. The basic edition (not Studio) is free and offers more than I need. Sure, I pay with my time, but I’m learning something and that’s hardly a bad thing. There are tons of materials online related to DaVinci Resolve – much more than three years ago when I tried it for the first time. Also, the quality of Resolve itself got better, I see many UI/UX improvements already.
What would be the alternative?
- Another cheap video editor: Now, if I just could pay something around 100 $/€ for a piece of software that more or less suits me, I’d do it instantly. I definitely haven’t paid more for both versions of Movie Studio I bought previously (11 and 15) combined. I’m not a professional, I don’t need that much and I don’t use the software that often. Resolve lacks a lot in the simplicity department but I chose it because other offerings are even less attractive – and much more expensive.
- Adobe Premiere Pro: I use Lightroom already – so I could start paying Adobe 24€ more each month for Premier Pro, right? Well, sometimes there are months I’m not doing any video editing. I don’t want to manage my plan, switching it on and off – and actually, if I do then it’s 36€ per month – 24€ works only with annual payment. This is totally off for my level of video editing.
- Free video editor: You may say: “Try some simple free editor then!” Well, I tried a couple, and those are not sufficient for me anymore. Not even my son who tasted Vegas-like Movie Studio a few times wants to work with something so limited. Just pasting a few clips together is not enough for me anymore.
- Vegas Pro: What about Vegas Pro then? That’s the software in the same breed, I’d be familiar with it. But they went for the subscription model as well! These guys just want their money whatever your actual usage of the software is. Plus, I’d like to avoid MAGIX for a while after how they misused the “Movie Studio” name after killing the product line (which, by itself, is totally legitimate, of course).
Resolve just needs a bit stronger computer (which I more or less own now) and perseverance and a lot of googling. That’s acceptable. I’ll be frustrated, I’m sure about it. But I’ll start with simpler videos – videos where I really just need to paste a few clips together and add some titles. This way I’ll manage that frustration and get familiar with Resolve as I do more and more complicated stuff.
My second attempt (Resolve 17)
Let’s return to February 2021 for a while. That was my second stab at Resolve after the first one at the end of 2019. I didn’t go for my typical hiking video because I knew I’d not be able to do “the map stuff” I wanted. I tried something simple – a few video clips and some photos over it here and there. Can’t be that hard, right?
Resolve surprised me again in minutes.
- With photos on the Media page, in the Media Storage, it’s easy to miss that numbered sequences of images are changed into a single video media. If you accidentally import it this way – which happens easily – you’re stuck with the “photo videos” and there is nothing in the right-click menu to separate them. There is this switch behind the three dots to fix it:
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This is a prime example of Resolve having silly defaults for the beginner. If I wanted it that way, if there is such a feature, I’ll find out eventually and turn it on. If I don’t know about it, it makes the simplest workflow with a few photos a nightmare right away. - But even if you switch it on the Media page it’s not honoured when you just drag-n-drop pictures from the Explorer/Finder to the timeline. The pictures in the sequence are treated as a “video”. Even worse than a video, actually – you can’t just cut it, freeze frame and make it longer. This is not possible.
- When I placed the photo on the timeline I had trouble scaling it properly to cover the entire frame. I tried right-clicking everywhere to find the action to do so. Now I know there is this Mismatched Resolution setting on the timeline – or even better, in the Project Settings, Image Scaling tab, Mismatched resolution files setting. This was not a show-stopper, I just used Transform zoom before learning about the proper solution (Mismatched resolution set to Scale full frame with crop).
- When I wanted to do a simple transformation on the photo, it was more or less easy and yet annoying. I learned about the Transform tool, different from Pan&Crop in Movie Studio, but no problem. I learned how to create keyframes in the Inspector, I created one, pressed the next clip shortcut (which is cool after those years in Movie Studio where keyboard control was less than ideal) and created another keyframe. But at this moment I was out of the clip already. It seems one has to go one frame back and place the keyframe there to see the result.
- Related to this, Resolve exhibits this one-frame-off behaviour occasionaly. Time selections in Movie Studio were much more clearer and logical. Here you place the playhead somewhere, press O to place the out point – and:
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It feels strange. Irresolute. Tentative. Wiggly. Use your own thesaurus. - That is until you use fade in/out or transition! Then you don’t see the transformation result properly. In Movie Studio the Pan&Crop window is not affected by fade-in/out or transition effects. No wonder you find questions like these quite often. Now, that one has a solution – because it is the Color page – but I haven’t found any for the Edit page yet.
- Mentioned in that question is also a possibility to edit a keyframe and yet place the playhead somewhere else – for instance in the middle of the clip. I wanted to do this quite often just to see the effect of the keyframe on some other part of the clip. But so far I have no idea how to do this.
- And then you want to ease in/out from the keyframe… In Movie Studio you just position the video frame for the first keyframe, again for the last one and then choose the style of the point. It’s not perfect, various sequences of slow/fast/linear/smooth keyframes are not completely predictable, but it gets the job done – and it’s super easy. You have a single keyframe covering all the parameters and the whole movement is eased together.
With Resolve, you have to right-click each keyframe for each parameter and choose the easing. This is reportedly simpler on the Fusion page – which I plan to revisit after the computer upgrade – but going to Fusion for something that simple seems overkill.
That’s enough about photos and simple keyframing them. Quite a list for a task that took under a minute in the previous editor. Some things are simply wrong expectations, but some things are gaps in the Edit page.
I’m sure, I’ll get to Fusion, but there were good reasons why I hadn’t. Mostly because of how sluggish it is on an average computer. And let’s not open the topic of media optimization because that is another can of worms altogether. That’s not a simple answer to a simple problem. That’s adding fuel to the fire.
My third attempt (Resolve 18)
Resolve 18 is not that much different from 17 when it comes to my previous problems. But I decided to start and finish one simple video. No photos, just a few video clips, background music, simple titles, and perhaps some transitions.
I already knew why it didn’t work when I placed the transition on the edge of the clips (trim was needed). I already had some effort invested. I was afraid I’ll have to relearn a lot of stuff again – but some of it came back surprisingly quickly.
Yes, I googled the answers most of the weekend and watched some videos to get some “preemptive knowledge”. Yes, I discovered that Titles/Text is not to be zoomed with the Zoom X/Y on the Title tab, but with Zoom X/Y on the Settings tab (Transform section) – as it’s not smooth otherwise. I got the job done. I got energy… the resolve to go on with… well, Resolve.
Some notes from this attempt:
- This time I experimented more with some custom keyboard shortcuts focused around the left hand in the basic touch-typing position (index finger on F). This allowed me to focus on a simple workflow and also have some fun learning.
- I used the shortcut to add transitions. There is one incredible feature related to this which makes it user-friendly for untrimmed clips:
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I mean, why isn’t the same dialog used when I drag and drop the transition from the Effects pool? That would immediately stop dozens of questions on forums! - Next/previous clip (arrows down/up) works fine one way on the Edit page (let’s call this the intuitive way) but differently on the Delivery page. There it jumps not to the clip edges, but to the ends of transitions – and completely ignores some clip boundaries.
- Copy/paste behaviour requires some higher education I guess, because the moment you set I/O points and forget about those, you may be surprised why it pastes somewhere else than to a playhead. This is emphasized by the fact that those I/O points are reset after the Paste, so one may have no idea what happened. I’m even not sure it always behaves the same way. Again, there are multiple discussions of confused users on the forums.
- Stability – Resolve feels stable. Compared to Movies Studio, definitely. There are things I can’t do while the playback is running (e.g. adjusting the audio level, the handle simply doesn’t appear for me) – but that’s fine. If I can’t do something during playback, it’s easy to deduce why. I stop it and do the stuff. It’s better than letting me do something that would crash the program. One may think audio level adjustment should be easy even during playback, but I’m not a programmer… actually, I am! But not a Resolve programmer. So I don’t judge.
I definitely crashed Resolve 17 previously with quite a common slider in the inspector. I can’t remember which one it is, but for the last few days there was no crash and that makes me happy.
To wrap it up…
For a beginner, it’s important to get to some tips and tricks videos. Or videos covering some of the frustrations you encounter – for instance, videos like this one.
All in all, me and Resolve are on much better terms now. I’m going to give it another try with something more complicated. And I will check whether Fusion is usable – and what it actually fixes for me.