I’ve been using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 15 for some time to produce my family videos and I was quite satisfied with it. For some time all I needed was to cut a couple of shots, use the most basic transitions and add some text. To document our family hiking project I started to add YouTube free music (that was a big game changer, really) and more effects like map overlay, sometimes as picture-in-picture, photos, more titles including final credits and more transitions. For this the software was more than enough and it was also reasonably stable. While it crashed occasionally I never lost any considerable work as it keeps autosaves.
Discovery
But recently there was this “new” kid on the block, or so it seemed. I found it when, just out of curiosity, checking what free video editors are out there. And that’s how I found DaVinci Resolve. The first look on the page, and then the second revealing what else this company (Blackmagic Design) produces, including hardware – and it was clear it better be serious product.
The first version I downloaded was 16.0 – it was in October 2019. First I had a problem working with H.264 clips, but this problem disappeared with 16.1 version that came out a couple of days into my first experiments. I started to watch YouTube videos about DaVinci Resolve – and while there are not that many as for Adobe products they are pretty good and the authors seem passionate about DaVinci Resolve.
Expect workflow changes
Going from one video editor to another – or NLE as this category of editors is called – you always have to expect workflow changes, often considerable. Getting used to timeline suddenly starting at 01:00:00:00 (1 hour mark) is the least of them. Clicking on the top of the timeline to move the head (instead of anywhere in the timeline like in Vegas) was annoying but also not a problem. I liked that many actions were bound to simple keystrokes like A, S or T for changing tools.
The biggest change are the “pages” of DaVinci Resolve, each focusing on a specific part of the workflow (Cut, Edit, effects, colouring, sound). This can be very efficient. I will not talk about Resolve’s strengths in the colouring department as I don’t play with colours for my family videos (yet) or any other specialized pages. Most of my observations cover the Edit page I’d use most.
UI polishments needed
In overall the UI looks slick and is well designed, really, but there are some problems. While menu items displayed shortcuts, which is a good style for any power tool, it didn’t show tooltips on many UI elements, e.g. icons in the track header. Other elements have working tooltips, even with shortcuts, so this was unlucky really.
I liked some playback control, but they didn’t come close to what I got used to in Vegas. In Vegas you could start or stop playback with either Enter or Space – one returns the cursor back (stop) and the other leaves it where it is (pause). So you can decide whether you want to move back during playback which is very flexible.
In Resolve the Space key stops the playback and decides what to do with the head depending on a toggle – the toggle is switchable with Alt+K but not indicated anywhere in the UI. Alt+L (Play again) seems more useful as you can use it even after the playback is stopped – it starts from the previous start position. But Alt+K is still needed when you decide to go back and stop – luckily you can mix them, if Space stops without returning the head where you wanted it, you can just hit Alt+K (toggle it), Alt+L (play again from the previous position) and then Space. That is obviously cumbersome.
Playback experience aside, UI could have more consistent tooltips throughout and more status information (like the head behavior toggle) would be nice.
On the good side you can customize the keyboard quite extensively.
Working with clips and transitions
Vegas supports automatic crossfade with many crossfade shapes, including asymmetric – all you have to do is overlap the clips. If you want a different transition, you just drag and drop it on the overlapping section and optionally customize some parameters.
With Resolve you can’t overlap the clips. One clip always cuts the other as you move it. Copy/paste clip to another track is super easy with Vegas, with Resolve I had to google it up, as my clip didn’t want to go to selected track and I had to switch a toggle in the track header. Don’t ask how it was named (Auto Select?) as it was one of those without a tooltip – and here it would be really handy.
To add a transition in Resolve you place it over the cut point and then adjust its length. With crossfade (called cross dissolve here) you then start seeing something from the following clip at the start of the transition. So it works effectively the same. I don’t have problems with this, but seeing this post I’d argue that Vegas way is more natural. If you can’t drag the edge of the clip it’s more obvious that it’s probably the start or end of it. It’s easy to fix in either of the editors, but I have yet to discover the advantages of the Resolve way.
I also missed flash transition and I had to construct it with generator, white colour and opacity envelope. But that was easy. Talking about envelopes, let’s get to automation.
Speed ramps
Once I wanted to create a speed ramp (in my case slow down the video) and in Vegas Movie Studio Premium it was manual work. I had to cut the clip to small bits and stretch each in a different ratio and then move the bits together.
Speed ramps with Resolve are much easier with Retime Controls and Curve. Resolve always adjusts the length of the clip automatically – it works like magic. You can also freeze a frame easily while in Vegas I had to make a picture from it and import it as a different clip.
When changing the speed both editors try to preserve the pitch of audio, but sometimes I don’t want this – especially to emphasize slow-to-stop effect. And here I noticed the problem with the ramp in Resolve. It is not totally fluent and while you can’t easily see it on video, you can definitely hear it in audio. Instead of continuous slow down with pitch going down you can clearly hear jumps in the pitch. Even if you play with the curve it doesn’t get fluent.
While playing with the envelopes and keyframes I wasn’t satisfied. There are just few keyframe types, the handles are not flexible enough (you can’t direct them, only make them longer) and they can’t go beyond other handle from neighbour keyframe. All in all the envelope for speed ramp was bumpy and the audible result was more like stairs. But I take it, speed ramps are not necessarily a trivial thing to implement. Resolve still does it well enough, especially for a free software.
Working with envelopes and keyframes requires some getting used to. I missed envelopes over the track, as it takes less space. Also, when working with keyframes and curves a lot, divider between video and audio tracks moved lower on its own and I saw very little of audio tracks. I always had to move the splitter up after curve edits and it was annoying. In Vegas there is no hard division between audio and video tracks and as implemented now in Resolve it is not better really.
Final blow – transformations
For my hiking videos I often prepare a big image with a map and then move over it in my video. In Vegas you’d do that with Video Event Pan/Crop tool. If you wanted to resize the event (clip) to a portion of a picture you’d use Track Motion.
I guess Resolve has something comparable to Pan/Crop tool, but it’s not Transform and Cropping. While very capable tools they move media over the viewport, while in Vegas you move viewport over the media. This is similar difference like whether you control rotation of an object or orbiting around it in a 3D editor. In the end you can do the same, but the way to get there can be quite different.
For instance, I often find a place on the map and then zoom to it. With Resolve the zoom was not relative to the viewport position, instead it resized the media under the current viewport which also moved the part of the map away (unless you were exactly in the center of the media, of course). This was totally unacceptable for me – I couldn’t zoom easily. The same went for the rotation – in Resolve you rotated the media relative to its center, while in Vegas it did the natural thing, it rotated the viewport above the same point on the map.
EDIT Dec 2020: You can do this easily, but you have to start with moving the Pivot point, which is kinda “backwards”. Don’t change the position before changing the Pivot, it saves a lot of troubles.
I’m pretty sure there is a way how to do this in Resolve, perhaps on the Fusion page, but this was the moment when I realized I’m struggling and fighting with Resolve too much. Perhaps it’s just too powerful for me at this moment. I wasn’t interested in its strong sides like colouring and I had trouble with simple things I could do easily in Vegas.
Conclusion
I actually liked DaVinci Resolve and I spent a lot of time with it, starting one project before understanding that at this moment Vegas is still better for me. I see plenty of people migrating to Resolve and staying with it and I’d love to switch – and probably will some time later. Resolve has comprehensive manual (over 3000 pages) there is a training page and you can find plenty of videos on YouTube already.
I was also happy that Resolve worked fine on my machine with 8GB of RAM as it states it needs 16GB minimum. It didn’t crash on me during my experiments. I also experimented with optimizing my media, although this takes tons of your disk space compared to original media – but the editing process is much smoother.
All in all, I really wanted to switch, but then I realized that it can’t be just for the sake of switching. When I saw how much time I lost learning Resolve and considering the differences in transformations that I use a lot, I decided to swallow all the annoyances in Vegas (I didn’t cover those in this post) and stick with it some more.
But I see the potential and I guess I’ll revisit Resolve again some time soon.