Testing my resolve

I’ve been editing with Adobe Premiere since the late nineties, and it’s always been my software of choice, especially as a windows PC user.  I just never got into the whole Mac ecosystem beyond phones and tablets so I missed out on final cut despite hearing great things about it.

Since the transition to Adobe Creative Cloud I’ve been finding it a lot harder to justify the monthly outlay on subscription fees given the amount of shooting I do at home.  

Recently I was involved in a narrative shoot for my day-job which included an extensive post process and edit at The Mill in London.  Watching their professional colourists working magic with Davinci Resolve really inspired me to take a closer look at that software.

Resolve has a free version which is almost fully featured but even the paid studio version is very reasonably priced at £225 and that means that for less than six months of Adobe CC you can own Resolve outright.

It wasn’t until I started looking at it seriously that I remembered I already had the software.  I received a license as part of the package when I bought my Blackmagic Pocket 4k but I’d never looked at it.  After a bit of a hunt around in my storage room I found the original box for the camera and sure enough there was the license card and the software on SD card.  

The version that came with the camera is Resolve 15 but Blackmagic offer free upgrades so the serial number works with the latest version 17 of Resolve.

So after a quick download and install, I’m now learning a new editing package for the first time in a long time.  It’s very straightforward to use, and Resolve even gives an option to set up the workspace to look similar to Premiere to help smooth the transition.

So far I’ve successfully edited a short mood-piece using some pro-res test footage from my BMPCC while trying out a newly purchased Lensbaby lens, and I found the editing process fairly straightforward.  There are definitely some quirks to Davinci Resolve but I’m pleased with the progress so far.

I found some great introduction videos by Casey Faris on YouTube which do a great job of quickly walking you through the basics, I’d highly recommend them if you are jumping into Resolve.  Search for DaVinci Resolve Crash Course, it’s about an hour and a half long and definitely worth checking out.

Blackmagic... Intensifies

So the plus-side and the downside of clearing out storage boxes is you find all sorts of filmmaking projects and things that you forgot existed or thought were lost. I’ve unearthed a bunch of old old projects from the 90’s including the master tapes for a short film I made in college.  

Naturally I started thinking about what to do with them, and I had the idea that maybe, just maybe it would be possible to convert these old analogue formats over to digital and try doing a ‘directors cut’ with better grading etc.

So that led me down a rabbit hole of jerry rigging old VCRs and DV cameras to try and get the footage in via FireWire, and it worked, I can get these old analog tapes copied to MiniDV and then do a standard EEE 1394 cable transfer.  So far so good.

But then I started thinking what if there is a better way to do it?  One without the intermediate DV compression step?

So it turns out that Blackmagic make this Intensity Pro capture card which accepts analog inputs including S-Video which should (should) be cleaner than converting to DV using the cameras internal hardware.

My shiny new Intensity Pro 4k card arrived this morning.  Time to get out the toolkit and get it installed.