DaVinci Resolve 12.5 public beta brings improved editing workflow and HDR grading

Apr 19, 2016 by CGP Staff

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Blackmagic Design has released a public beta of v12.5 of its editing and conforming tool. The new version is a major update with over 1000 enhancements and 250 new features, and continues to strengthen the application’s editing capabilities. New features include:

Additions to the editing toolset – dozens of new editing and trimming features such as new swap and shuffle edits, seven entirely new trim operations, paste inserts, an expanded edit overlay with ripple overwrites and append edits, etc. In addition, timeline performance has been greatly improved.
New way to navigate clips using audio waveforms – the source viewer features an audio waveform overlay that allows you to see the audio waveform and video clip at the same time. This is the fastest way to navigate to different parts of a clip based on spikes, silent areas or other visual cues in the audio waveform.
New way to create custom retime effects and speed ramps – there are now separate curves for both frame position and playback speed. This allows any frame to be moved to any point in time, while also allowing variable speed changes between any range of frames. These new controls make it easier to create custom retiming effects.
New and enhanced color features – enhancements to the node editor make it possible to quickly navigate between nodes, swap nodes, select multiple nodes with a lasso, copy node contents, extract nodes, use embedded alpha channels in mattes and more. When dragging a saved grade from the gallery, customers now have the option to drag the grade in as a single compound node, or as a fully expanded node tree. In addition, there is a new single point tracker, new temperature and tint sliders have been added to the primary grading controls, additional XRite Colorchecker charts are now supported in the Color Match palette and customers can now select and modify multiple control points at the same time when working with Power Curve Windows.
Improved HDR support – specific nodes can now be set to HDR mode which enables the grading tools in Resolve to work in an extended dynamic range especially designed for HDR deliverables such as Dolby Vision and HDR10. In addition, caching formats such as ProRes 4444 XQ and DNxHR now support extended dynamic range to serve as an efficient storage alternative to uncompressed 16-bit float files.
ResolveFX – a new framework for native GPU and CPU accelerated effects has been implemented. This release includes ResolveFX plugins such as GPU-accelerated color space and gamma transformations, along with more traditional effects such as lens blur, light rays, emboss, dent, vortex, mirrors, gaussian and other blurs, glows, ripples, and more. Advanced ResolveFX tools like film grain, lens blurs and flares are available with DaVinci Resolve 12.5 Studio. For more advanced visual effects work, the new Fusion Connect feature lets customers send clips to Fusion for additional visual effects.
DaVinci Resolve 12.5 Studio features – the new version offers improved spatial noise reduction that uses a quality multi GPU accelerated algorithm to reduce noise while retaining detail. When combined with DaVinci Resolve 12.5’s enhanced temporal noise reduction controls, customers get a great noise reduction toolset. Studio customers also get a new automatic correction tool for fixing barrel, pin cushion or perspective lens distortion, along with high quality de-interlacing, support for Camera LUTs, the DaVinci Color Transform Language (.dctl), and the ability to create ProRes remote render jobs on Windows machines. Customers can even use a terminal command to run a headless version of DaVinci Resolve without the GUI for remote rendering.