DaVinci Resolve Studio

About DaVinci Resolve Studio

Resolve started as a colour grading system and grew outwards until it covered the whole post pipeline. The page model reflects that: Media for ingest, Cut and Edit for assembly, Fusion for node based compositing, Color for grading, Fairlight for audio, and Deliver for export. Everything lives in one project database, so there is no round trip and no conform step between departments.

The Color page is still the reason most people install it. Node based grading with primaries, curves, qualifiers, power windows and tracking gives control that layer based tools cannot match, and the HDR grading wheels make wide gamut work tractable. Magic mask isolates a person or an object across a shot and follows it without a manual roto pass.

The Studio edition is the one that matters for finishing. It unlocks the neural engine tools including face refinement, depth map generation, super scale upscaling and automatic depth of field, plus temporal and spatial noise reduction, film grain, lens distortion correction and the whole ResolveFX set. Rendering above ultra HD and multi-GPU support are Studio only as well.

Fairlight handles audio properly rather than as an afterthought: a full mixer with buses, sends, automation, plugin support and enough track count for a real mix. For a small post house the whole toolchain sits inside one licence and one project file.

What is included in this build

• Edit, Cut, Fusion, Color, Fairlight and Deliver pages in a single application
• Node based grading with primaries, curves, qualifiers, power windows and tracking
• Magic mask for isolating people and objects across a shot without manual roto
• Neural engine tools including super scale, face refinement and depth maps
• Temporal and spatial noise reduction, film grain and lens distortion correction
• Fusion node compositing with paint, tracking and particle systems
• Fairlight mixer with buses, sends, automation and plugin support
• Multi-GPU rendering and delivery above ultra HD, both Studio only

Changed in version 21.0.4

• Improved magic mask tracking stability on fast motion
• Faster Fusion render caching on complex node trees
• Additional camera raw decode paths
• Fairlight plugin scanning made faster on large plugin sets
• Reduced project load times on databases with many timelines

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Install the current graphics driver from the GPU vendor before starting.
2. Extract the archive to a short path and disable protection during setup.
3. Run the installer as administrator and accept the bundled runtime components.
4. Create or select a project database on first launch, preferably on a fast internal drive.
5. Set the cache and gallery locations before beginning any real work.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title