I've been using it for many years, and it's grown in power and functionality with every release. BMD has offered free upgrades to Pro users (with no subscription) for many years, which is refreshing given the current state of software licensing.
For those upset with the new agent integration, keep in mind that one of the big knocks on DaVinci Resolve is that it's hard for beginners. Powerful tools like color grading and nodes take years to truly master (and that won't change), but making it easier for users to collaborate with the agents they already use to help learn and perform basic tasks should help with the learning curve.
Ultimately, professional video editing is an art. An agent might save time with asset management, project/timeline setup, etc., but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects. I would rather spend the extra time on the nuanced/deeper creative work.
Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice. Variety affords us downtime. As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
And great for beginners, now they get to pay some chatbot company to cover the gaps left by detereorating software design. Lucky they're already using agents... are they?
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
Not only are the upgrades free, the full license is still only $295 and can be freely migrated between macOS, Linux, and Windows (unless something has changed, serial numbers can be activated on two systems at a time and transferred freely so long as you have Internet access).
I'm no expert, but I never found Resolve materially more difficult to learn or use than Final Cut Pro or Premiere. And if you're doing anything moderately complex, it's potentially easier to learn because things that require external tools in FCPX and Premiere are built in to Resolve Studio.
I suspect the agent integration is primarily workflow/UI related, but regardless, I don't see it as any more anti-creative than incorporating precanned effects and presets into a project, and potentially a very useful learning tool since the Resolve UI is quite good at letting you see how the sausage is made.
$295 one time permanent license with free upgrades and can be migrated between different computers?
I don't have a single reason to do any form of video editing, let alone professional video editing, but that kind of pricing model makes me want to buy a license just to make sure that companies like this stick around.
No offense whatsoever. But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it. I wish people are more humble at this juncture of AI progress. This is not to say humans won't play a part but saying xyz cannot be replaced is a big stretch. Saying its not there currently is okay but saying it won't replace I don't see where that's coming from.
The way I see it, it’s all about how you use it. Let people have tools; their output stands on its own legs.
As pro software, the UI has a learning curve. Many YouTube videos are out of date, or unnecessarily drawn out.
Additionally, as a hobbyist, project settings, color spaces, clipping, etc can be tricky to miss.
I’ve already been using Claude to (1) help me with UI, (2) QA my delivery, and (3) occasional fixes for audio repair; waveform sync (can’t afford time codes).
I make all creative decisions - including most menial ones - myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way; I enjoy the act of creating. I welcome this integration.
I’m sure some users are gonna agentically grade or whatnot. I don’t like it, but I’m also don’t believe in telling other people what they should do with their own work and creative process.
Because there has to be demand for it. There are hundreds of tasks that could be automated right now, and people still choose to do them by hand. Just because something is technically replaceable doesn’t mean it will be replaced and editing is a deeply personal part of the process for almost every director. It will change, but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI. Sure, for low effort marketing videos you’d outsource to Fiverr, it’ll happen sooner or later but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
> ...but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI.
Maybe not entirely handed by AI but when AI starts doing it better than most and in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, why do you think it wont be at least partly delegated to AI?
fair but that's also a matter of time, in my opinion.
1) software doesn't commit suicide like some pilots did.
2) software has superhuman reflexes, processing power and are not affected by emotion.
3) software also will eliminate a whole class of failure modes that caused many crashes in the past like: "I won't seek nearest and safer airport because that will be expensive in fuel costs"
> I won't seek nearest and safer airport because that will be expensive in fuel costs
If, and that's a big if, a pilot did choose a less safe airport because of monetary cost to his airline, it would be because those are the guidelines of the airline. And those guidelines would obviously be in the software too.
There's a fuzzy gray line here. Whether formalized or not, the way I see it, pilots will de facto be penalized for making decisions that cost an airline a ton of money, especially if it turns out to not have been an actual emergency.
I have no idea what legislation is in place regarding this topic and protecting pilots. But even with really good protections, there's no way that it won't affect your social standing with the higher ups if you divert and cost the company exorbitantly.
So pilots do have to make judgment calls about how much they're willing to risk their lives and the lives of their passengers versus a perceived risk, and worse, this judgment call exists in a weird fuzzy area where they're "allowed" to make the safe bet, but in practice, they will be punished for it.
Software doesn't (generally) have this luxury. It decides whether to land or continue flying based on some defined set of conditions.
It can still decide to risk the lives of the passengers. But that decision has to be approved by the airline, and can't live as an informal "you will lose brownie points with management" sword over the necks of the flight crew.
Unless we start to incorporate LLMs and probabilistic models into autopilots... but no-one would ever do that, right? ....
Because there is no demand for it to be fully handled by AI. Nobody is denying that parts will be handled by AI but that’s also you moving the goal post.
The process is the point for any passionate creative. And yes, for every passionate creative you have a burned out creative who's trying to make ends meet who will use more AI centric tools because both that creative and the people paying them likely do not care how things look when they're completed, only that they're completed, on-time, and under budget.
However, again, an actual creative wouldn't. Imagine you and I are climbing a mountain: I'm climbing the mountain because I love climbing mountains. Climbing mountains is what I live for. I work full time and hard as hell so I can afford trips to climb mountains. You, on the other hand, have a terminal illness and you know that at the top of this mountain is a plant you can eat that will cure you with no side effects. So we're both doing this thing, but for WILDLY different reasons.
If as we're climbing a helicopter flies up and hovers behind us and the pilot says "hey I'll take you to the top of the mountain if you want!" we're going to have very different responses: you don't care about climbing mountains, and even if you do, you're not on this particular climb to enjoy it; you're here because you need this plant to cure your illness. You'd be crazy to not jump in that helicopter and get what you need to live. However, I'd be equally crazy to do the exact same thing, because climbing the mountain is why I'm here, I live for climbing mountains, and I want to climb this one.
This is what AI people do not get about creatives and why we talk past each other. AI people think creative people make things to have finished works, and that's certainly a part of it, and basically a requirement if you'd like to monetize your creativity. But like, I work in software as my day job and I'm bloody good at it, but I use AI to generate code sometimes because the process of developing software doesn't do nearly the same thing for me as creating art. I love making art, and I'd do it even if it made me no money. And I know that, because I've been doing it my whole life and it's never made me money. I feel depressed if I go too long between making works of art. I get ideas building up inside me and they itch and scratch at my being until I sit down and spend several hours turning said idea into something I can see, but like, if I just put a prompt into an AI image generator, I feel absolutely nothing doing that.
All of that to say: I genuinely do not believe AI will completely replace all of this, for no other reason than only a fraction (sizable though it may be) of creatives will ever want it, let alone use it. The quality of it and arguing about if it can "match" a human creative isn't the point, the humanity is the point. I don't want to look at AI generated art, and so I won't, and I especially do not want to replace my creative output with that of Midjourney. Ever. I don't care how good or cheap it is which is why those arguments just bounce off of me. I'm here to climb a mountain and you're offering me a staircase.
> But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it.
Why not? Personally (although I'm not saying others have to see it this way too), I'd wait until I can see what AI can replace, before believing so, rather than the opposite.
So far, AI isn't able to "set direction" at all in any sensible way, especially for a creative project like TV or movies, the results are just too bad (today). Although it's excellent at "following directions", which is why these new APIs are great and exciting, it lets people who are good at setting direction to leverage these tools to have the direction concretely followed by something, without having to create a group of collaborators.
Until we've seen proven that AI can indeed "set directions" ("have taste"), I think it's fair to assume they're unable to do so in a way that it produces something that humans generally enjoy. And very far from the kind of masterpieces a human can create.
I understand what you're saying and I agree, ostensibly, but on the caveat that it's hinged on the "we don't know what we don't know" aspect of reality. If we restrict our domain to what's forseeable, it's still apparently the case. Astra's demos have me scratching my head, diminishing returns are kicking in harder and faster than anticipated. It seems we've entered a phase to where frontier companies have completely abandoned improving the substrate because they can't justify it. It seems like it's all just harnesses and reasoning orchestration at this point. Hell, everybody but Google seems to have given up even on projection layer improvements (and Gemini is unusably bad in other ways).
Watching this next generation closely, because there are just a shitload of red flags starting to crop up that don't seem to be going away.
The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.
It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.
Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.
I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.
But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.
I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.
I would gladly enjoy to collaborate with an agent if I can learn more about video editing.
I edit my video only for passion and to learn something new though, so I guess that professionals may see this in a different way.
But I don’t think that it’s much different from how Claude code revolutionised the software scene.
I'm all for AI features here. The software is so feature packed and conplex, that after years of usage I still need to search and look up tutorial videos every single time I edit something.
How to ease key frames, how to fix my HDR captured footage for SDR, how to export the best quality video, how to burn in subtitles with word highlights, how to fix my audio aaand so on.
Either the AI will show me the particular feature and setting or a YouTube tutorial will. I think the AI might be faster and easier in this scenario.
> DaVinci Resolve 21.1 now supports integration with AI assistants such as Claude, Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, allowing customers to analyze projects, organize media, adjust settings and batch render using everyday conversational language. Customers can ask their AI assistant to create highlight edits from long form video, remove unwanted clips and render deliverables, so they can spend more time being creative rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
I have videographer friends, and this is exactly what they've been asking for. Their dream is to be able to say "sync the A and B camera footage, chunk the whole interview down into segments, and then pull together the highlights based on this outline."
Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
I would not be surprised if engineers who laid the groundwork for this back then would be happy with this workflow.
I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.
The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073
The irony being that a lot of older practical VFX artists aren't able to tell when CGI is terrible. They're often so enamored with what the tech enables, that they're the last to see how quickly it becomes shoddy. Not sure what the equivalent of the hedonic treadmill is for CG, but it ages very rapidly, versus the best practical effects which maintain a charming physicality - even when they're no longer convincing.
Is it that surprising that a bunch of old guys don't have the same energy and excitement as the new ambitious up-and-comers?
George Lucas seemed pretty satisfied when filming the Star Wars prequels to plop himself down in a chair in a room with a giant bluescreen set where he didn't have to walk around and direct in a hot, sandy desert for hours like in the original films. But the movies looked a lot worse for it.
I just watched the entire cycle of Don Quixote films by/about Terry Gilliam. That is a master class in how to ensure that your magnum opus is the worst film you've ever made.
If we can get the environmental impact of this stuff ameliorated (a big if), this is the real benefit of this kind of AI assistance imo- it transforms everyone into a director and frees them from being a surrogate for a director.
See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.
A lot of professional skill nowadays is misdirected from ‘knowing how to do the thing’ into ‘learning how to use a computer to do the thing’.
The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples and drums and effects’. The role of industrial designer includes a lot of ‘knowing how to model things in CAD’. Even roles like academic researchers require skills like ‘formatting LaTeX’.
I’m genuinely quite excited for a shift in human computer interaction which reduces that ‘knowing how to do things on the computer’ tax.
But there are a whole swathe of jobs where a lot of what people do is ‘know how to do the thing on a computer’. Some of that is really because the bureaucracy has been embodied in a computer system so for example the job of handling an insurance claim seems to involve a lot of ‘knowing how to operate the claims computer system’ - actually that person’s skill is ‘knowing how to navigate the claims bureaucracy’.
Completely agree. How many people over the past 20 years have been musically gifted, but found ProTools or Logic impenetrable? The AI unlock is about enabling that creativity, not replacing it.
AI is elevating one’s capability but not replacing it.
Then you have experience and skills.
Someone with zero skills in music will be able to make a 'song' but a savvy producer would use tools differently and could leverage them to actually make something creative.
Anyone can make an app those days (or a website or whatever) but mileage varies based on one's nature, also the gotchas of someone with zero knowledge of a field could result issues that someone with experience would've noticed and resolved much earlier or avoided completely.
Me with zero knowledge in architecture can "design" my house but I wouldn't trust my plan without someone looking at it.
AI and AGI provides great lengths in empowering but it might also introduce the false feeling of being capable.
Creativity, capability and motivation still takes important place even with AI.
Exactly. Sometimes I just need a 3D printed part to finish a DIY project, I don't want to waste hours designing it. I had my fair share of time playing around with SketchUp when I was a teenager, but that's it.
I'm not complaining either, I wouldn't call myself a video editor, but I do end up spending some of my time in Resolve, and anything to remove the dreadful monotonous tasks of editing interviews is welcome. Although Resolve already makes it pretty easy, with the "edit by moving the transcript around" feature which is amazing. Anyway, I'm happy about being able to sick Codex at Resolve now :)
For example: the guys on youtube using AI to make new Star Wars movies [1] still did tons of work putting it all together, including the 3d renderings and editing, and they are leaning on old scriptwriting/dialogue from a 1991 Star Wars book. AI is just helping them automate the process and generate some visuals/voice acting, but it still takes a skilled artist with lots of technical knowledge to guide it in the right direction and properly utilize their existing tools/workflows... and most importantly good taste.
It's already possible, but in my opinion it will never be popular. In some ways this has already been proven through other media; ChatGPT can easily generate a novel, but how many people are reading pure-AI novels?
These 'integrations' everywhere just mean we get more APIs that can be accessed programmatically, which I think is good for users, even if you don't plan to use to use AI. It's like the optimistic web 2.0 APIs everywhere days
No no, if you've ever spent serious time editing, it's a big deal -- if they pull this off correctly, it will be a game changer.
Editing has so much grunt work, where you just have to spending time organizing, collecting files, renaming things, finding missing files... Just tedious project management stuff that is excellent for an AI to do.
It’s because those codecs require SDK’s that are expensive to license. That’s not a Linux specific issue - it’s always been that way for the non-studio version of Resolve (with some exceptions on MacOS since the ProRes codecs are already part of the OS).
I've edited well over a thousand hours of video on my (Debian) DaVinci Resolve workstation. It's a rock-solid video editor that I can spend a day in without having to worry about a crash.
But I desperately wish Blackmagic would bring support for VST3 plugins and JACK to Linux. Or, at the very least, allow me to use my MIDI control surface in Fairlight on Linux.
As it stands, I have to do all of my audio production in Reaper, and that's a bit cumbersome.
I've had Claude Code drive DaVinci Resolve before in three ways:
- Generate .otio files that are imported. Unfortunately, .otio doesn't fully support everything Resolve can do.
- Resolve has a scripting engine. Claude can write Lua scripts, then execute the script (through UI Automation)
- Computer Use. It's quite token intense, but it works.
I didn't try it, but for the paid version, someone also built a MCP server based on the scripting engine.
I'm programmatically adding analysis to sim racing lap guides, therefore my flow is probably different from the usual editing flow, but I have to say I found Claude Code + Opus to be quite capable of making edits with computer use.
I used IntelliScript a lot. I give Claude a subtitle export, ask it to cut it and import the cut subtitle track with IntelliScript. Resolve then creates a video version that’s cut based on the subtitle changes
I had AI write a program to edit with resolve. It does transcription, looks at the transcript and decides where to make cuts. If does a decent job and saves me a bunch of time.
Would be SO sick! I feel like there is such a big appetite for it and people would do the free labor to support it. I wonder what keeps it in this horrible purgatory of install hell.
This aur package [1] works well for me. Unfortunately the new maintainer removed the automatic download and you need to manually download the zip via the form on Blackmagic's website (however not even the email is validated).
As an anecdote, I recently needed to colour-grade some short footage for personal purposes. My workflow at the time was to essentially ask an LLM for guidance on how to use DaVinci Resolve to perform the task, step by step. I would make an adjustment, take a screenshot of the controls and the result, and repeat that process a handful of times, eventually ending up with a pretty nice result.
I can definitely see the utility of something like this for cases where a media budget just wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Seems like an unusually boring Resolve release. There's nothing there I particularly want to try out. Nothing wrong with that, I've just got used to every release having a ton of shiny new stuff in it.
I guess the agentic stuff is probably exciting to somebody.
Resolve is extremely RAM hungry. For 4K video I wouldn't want to be editing with less than 12GB of VRAM. I'm guessing that excludes most integrated graphics.
Source - I work as a professional editor (amongst other things). Please commenters, do not come at me with your five minute low bit rate projects that required only a LUT and some contrast and 'worked fine' in DaVinci on a potato.
For people like me who have no idea what this is, I looked it up:
DaVinci Resolve is a proprietary application for non-linear video editing, color correction, color grading, visual effects, and audio post-production. It is developed by the Australian company Blackmagic Design for macOS, Windows, iPadOS and Linux.
...
DaVinci Resolve has been used for the color grading and/or editing of feature films such as Alien: Covenant, Avatar, Best of Enemies, Deadpool 2, Jason Bourne, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, La La Land, Love & Mercy, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Prometheus, Anora, Robin Hood, Spectre, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and X-Men: Apocalypse.
Tried to work with ut for 5 months on Ubuntu. Installation was painful. Have to use some tutorial. No AAC audio codec support as well, which is the code of my smartphone camera. Randomly decided to not work after Ubuntu updates. I'm on Windows now...
The biggest issues are the supports of video cards (nvidia is the king) and different popular codecs. The problem is partly solved by using paid version, but the gpu/codec support is still not even with Windows, so you have to use ffmpeg to re-encode from/into supported formats.
I’ve been using it in Linux for >2 years, including their special cutting keyboard (blanking on the name).
Works without a hitch, including multi monitor, gpu acceleration etc
I use it on Manjaro, installed via AUR.
That said, IIRC it only works with nvidia GPUs and requires X11, and is supposedly finicky to get the environment right for (but the AUR gets it right for me)
I don't know about recent versions, but I managed to install 18 on Linux Mint.
Making it run wasn't easy, and it can't decode MP3 and some video codecs because of licensing issues. It also can't decode WebM. This is kind of a problem because of a lot of free music you can download to add to videos and a lot of video clips you can download from Pexels for example are encoded with codecs it can't decode, so you have to re-encode it with FFMPEG first to a supported codec.
I don't see how companies like this can survive going forwards. DaVinci Resolve is effectively ~200 Astra/Fable prompts, maybe even fewer if you're willing to forgo polish.
I'd give you $100K no questions asked if you manage to get something even close to Resolve with 2K Astra/Fable prompts, polish included. You vastly underestimate how much work goes into "polish" when software with huge surface area is decades old.
I think there's a really interesting tension between what you're saying and what the parent post is saying, and it's something that's been discussed for a long time but LLMs are throwing a new wrench into it: a given user probably only uses 5-10% of the features of a piece of software, but across the whole body of users you get close to full coverage.
I use DaVinci Resolve for editing GoPro, Canon DSLR, iPhone, and Drone FPV footage. I import clips, use the razor to cut them and rearrange them, occasionally crop and zoom, and then encode them down to h264 or whatever. There are a bazillion features that I sort of know exist but haven't ever had any need to use. Could I make a tool using an LLM that covers my DaVinci workflow? Almost certainly, and I don't think it would take anywhere near 200 prompts. I've made significantly more complex bespoke data analysis pipelines for drone flight telemetry in like... a dozen prompts. But I have no illusions that what I would make as my "DaVinci Clone" would have anywhere near the functionality of DaVinci, just the tiny piece of that functionality that I use.
regardless of whether it’s possible, there is enormous value in the community, ecosystem, and learning materials centred around Reaolve as it is right now. the workflow has been refined over years. no one shot slop effort will have that network effect behind it, and if the workflow isn’t a drop-in replacement it’s dead in the water anyway.
You can say anything, why stop at claiming 200 prompts, why not say you think Astra/Fable can one shot Davinci Resolve! And you can EASILY make the BM cinema cameras and other hardware by prompting Fable to run a 3D printer. (≧▽≦)
Black Magic Design's primary business is selling cinematography hardware. Anyways, those ~200 prompts are going to cost you more money than a license once you factor in the cost of your own time. Value proposition of AI still ain't there, and it probably won't be until the hardware bubble pops, and it very well might never pop without market intervention. This is assuming your 200 prompts is a realistic figure, which I'm frankly skeptical of.
you do know this company also sells myriad of hardware , can't Fable those just yet. and I am sure majority of their income comes from that part of their business, selling equipment to studios etc.
I've been using it for many years, and it's grown in power and functionality with every release. BMD has offered free upgrades to Pro users (with no subscription) for many years, which is refreshing given the current state of software licensing.
For those upset with the new agent integration, keep in mind that one of the big knocks on DaVinci Resolve is that it's hard for beginners. Powerful tools like color grading and nodes take years to truly master (and that won't change), but making it easier for users to collaborate with the agents they already use to help learn and perform basic tasks should help with the learning curve.
Ultimately, professional video editing is an art. An agent might save time with asset management, project/timeline setup, etc., but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects. I would rather spend the extra time on the nuanced/deeper creative work.
Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice. Variety affords us downtime. As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
And great for beginners, now they get to pay some chatbot company to cover the gaps left by detereorating software design. Lucky they're already using agents... are they?
> Variety affords us downtime
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
This I agree with, though.
Not only are the upgrades free, the full license is still only $295 and can be freely migrated between macOS, Linux, and Windows (unless something has changed, serial numbers can be activated on two systems at a time and transferred freely so long as you have Internet access).
I'm no expert, but I never found Resolve materially more difficult to learn or use than Final Cut Pro or Premiere. And if you're doing anything moderately complex, it's potentially easier to learn because things that require external tools in FCPX and Premiere are built in to Resolve Studio.
I suspect the agent integration is primarily workflow/UI related, but regardless, I don't see it as any more anti-creative than incorporating precanned effects and presets into a project, and potentially a very useful learning tool since the Resolve UI is quite good at letting you see how the sausage is made.
$295 one time permanent license with free upgrades and can be migrated between different computers?
I don't have a single reason to do any form of video editing, let alone professional video editing, but that kind of pricing model makes me want to buy a license just to make sure that companies like this stick around.
No offense whatsoever. But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it. I wish people are more humble at this juncture of AI progress. This is not to say humans won't play a part but saying xyz cannot be replaced is a big stretch. Saying its not there currently is okay but saying it won't replace I don't see where that's coming from.
The way I see it, it’s all about how you use it. Let people have tools; their output stands on its own legs.
As pro software, the UI has a learning curve. Many YouTube videos are out of date, or unnecessarily drawn out.
Additionally, as a hobbyist, project settings, color spaces, clipping, etc can be tricky to miss.
I’ve already been using Claude to (1) help me with UI, (2) QA my delivery, and (3) occasional fixes for audio repair; waveform sync (can’t afford time codes).
I make all creative decisions - including most menial ones - myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way; I enjoy the act of creating. I welcome this integration.
I’m sure some users are gonna agentically grade or whatnot. I don’t like it, but I’m also don’t believe in telling other people what they should do with their own work and creative process.
Because there has to be demand for it. There are hundreds of tasks that could be automated right now, and people still choose to do them by hand. Just because something is technically replaceable doesn’t mean it will be replaced and editing is a deeply personal part of the process for almost every director. It will change, but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI. Sure, for low effort marketing videos you’d outsource to Fiverr, it’ll happen sooner or later but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
> ...but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI.
Maybe not entirely handed by AI but when AI starts doing it better than most and in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, why do you think it wont be at least partly delegated to AI?
the "never" is what gets me here.
Autopilots have been able to fly planes better than humans at almost zero cost for years yet no one has replaced pilots.
fair but that's also a matter of time, in my opinion.
1) software doesn't commit suicide like some pilots did.
2) software has superhuman reflexes, processing power and are not affected by emotion.
3) software also will eliminate a whole class of failure modes that caused many crashes in the past like: "I won't seek nearest and safer airport because that will be expensive in fuel costs"
4) software is already landing planes and saving lives in the process: https://youtu.be/XawXSLRCM3o
5) Most part of a comercial flight is already controlled by software anyway. Pilots mostly take off/land and input coordinates and altitudes.
6) push for fully automous aircraft during modern war is going to speed up development and test of the tech.
I think it's a matter of time here too.
> I won't seek nearest and safer airport because that will be expensive in fuel costs
If, and that's a big if, a pilot did choose a less safe airport because of monetary cost to his airline, it would be because those are the guidelines of the airline. And those guidelines would obviously be in the software too.
There's a fuzzy gray line here. Whether formalized or not, the way I see it, pilots will de facto be penalized for making decisions that cost an airline a ton of money, especially if it turns out to not have been an actual emergency.
I have no idea what legislation is in place regarding this topic and protecting pilots. But even with really good protections, there's no way that it won't affect your social standing with the higher ups if you divert and cost the company exorbitantly.
So pilots do have to make judgment calls about how much they're willing to risk their lives and the lives of their passengers versus a perceived risk, and worse, this judgment call exists in a weird fuzzy area where they're "allowed" to make the safe bet, but in practice, they will be punished for it.
Software doesn't (generally) have this luxury. It decides whether to land or continue flying based on some defined set of conditions.
It can still decide to risk the lives of the passengers. But that decision has to be approved by the airline, and can't live as an informal "you will lose brownie points with management" sword over the necks of the flight crew.
Unless we start to incorporate LLMs and probabilistic models into autopilots... but no-one would ever do that, right? ....
Nothing about modern airplanes prevents pilots from doing a Malaysian 370.
Because there is no demand for it to be fully handled by AI. Nobody is denying that parts will be handled by AI but that’s also you moving the goal post.
What makes you say that? You think people like paying professionals to edit their videos? Surely some do, but everyone?
you're right. ads are already infested with AI videos which means it works for some and those are no longer paying the price of fully manual editing.
Maybe read again.
> the "never" is what gets me here.
The process is the point for any passionate creative. And yes, for every passionate creative you have a burned out creative who's trying to make ends meet who will use more AI centric tools because both that creative and the people paying them likely do not care how things look when they're completed, only that they're completed, on-time, and under budget.
However, again, an actual creative wouldn't. Imagine you and I are climbing a mountain: I'm climbing the mountain because I love climbing mountains. Climbing mountains is what I live for. I work full time and hard as hell so I can afford trips to climb mountains. You, on the other hand, have a terminal illness and you know that at the top of this mountain is a plant you can eat that will cure you with no side effects. So we're both doing this thing, but for WILDLY different reasons.
If as we're climbing a helicopter flies up and hovers behind us and the pilot says "hey I'll take you to the top of the mountain if you want!" we're going to have very different responses: you don't care about climbing mountains, and even if you do, you're not on this particular climb to enjoy it; you're here because you need this plant to cure your illness. You'd be crazy to not jump in that helicopter and get what you need to live. However, I'd be equally crazy to do the exact same thing, because climbing the mountain is why I'm here, I live for climbing mountains, and I want to climb this one.
This is what AI people do not get about creatives and why we talk past each other. AI people think creative people make things to have finished works, and that's certainly a part of it, and basically a requirement if you'd like to monetize your creativity. But like, I work in software as my day job and I'm bloody good at it, but I use AI to generate code sometimes because the process of developing software doesn't do nearly the same thing for me as creating art. I love making art, and I'd do it even if it made me no money. And I know that, because I've been doing it my whole life and it's never made me money. I feel depressed if I go too long between making works of art. I get ideas building up inside me and they itch and scratch at my being until I sit down and spend several hours turning said idea into something I can see, but like, if I just put a prompt into an AI image generator, I feel absolutely nothing doing that.
All of that to say: I genuinely do not believe AI will completely replace all of this, for no other reason than only a fraction (sizable though it may be) of creatives will ever want it, let alone use it. The quality of it and arguing about if it can "match" a human creative isn't the point, the humanity is the point. I don't want to look at AI generated art, and so I won't, and I especially do not want to replace my creative output with that of Midjourney. Ever. I don't care how good or cheap it is which is why those arguments just bounce off of me. I'm here to climb a mountain and you're offering me a staircase.
For anything that can create better margins, and that is not outlawed, there will be demand.
> But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it.
Why not? Personally (although I'm not saying others have to see it this way too), I'd wait until I can see what AI can replace, before believing so, rather than the opposite.
So far, AI isn't able to "set direction" at all in any sensible way, especially for a creative project like TV or movies, the results are just too bad (today). Although it's excellent at "following directions", which is why these new APIs are great and exciting, it lets people who are good at setting direction to leverage these tools to have the direction concretely followed by something, without having to create a group of collaborators.
Until we've seen proven that AI can indeed "set directions" ("have taste"), I think it's fair to assume they're unable to do so in a way that it produces something that humans generally enjoy. And very far from the kind of masterpieces a human can create.
Yes people really need to take the AI’s feelings into account before they say things like that.
I understand what you're saying and I agree, ostensibly, but on the caveat that it's hinged on the "we don't know what we don't know" aspect of reality. If we restrict our domain to what's forseeable, it's still apparently the case. Astra's demos have me scratching my head, diminishing returns are kicking in harder and faster than anticipated. It seems we've entered a phase to where frontier companies have completely abandoned improving the substrate because they can't justify it. It seems like it's all just harnesses and reasoning orchestration at this point. Hell, everybody but Google seems to have given up even on projection layer improvements (and Gemini is unusably bad in other ways).
Watching this next generation closely, because there are just a shitload of red flags starting to crop up that don't seem to be going away.
The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.
It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.
Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.
I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.
But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.
I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.
Taste is subjective - that's why it can't be replaced.
I would gladly enjoy to collaborate with an agent if I can learn more about video editing. I edit my video only for passion and to learn something new though, so I guess that professionals may see this in a different way. But I don’t think that it’s much different from how Claude code revolutionised the software scene.
I'm all for AI features here. The software is so feature packed and conplex, that after years of usage I still need to search and look up tutorial videos every single time I edit something.
How to ease key frames, how to fix my HDR captured footage for SDR, how to export the best quality video, how to burn in subtitles with word highlights, how to fix my audio aaand so on.
Either the AI will show me the particular feature and setting or a YouTube tutorial will. I think the AI might be faster and easier in this scenario.
Not even BMD is safe from the agent apocalypse:
> DaVinci Resolve 21.1 now supports integration with AI assistants such as Claude, Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, allowing customers to analyze projects, organize media, adjust settings and batch render using everyday conversational language. Customers can ask their AI assistant to create highlight edits from long form video, remove unwanted clips and render deliverables, so they can spend more time being creative rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
I have videographer friends, and this is exactly what they've been asking for. Their dream is to be able to say "sync the A and B camera footage, chunk the whole interview down into segments, and then pull together the highlights based on this outline."
Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
I would not be surprised if engineers who laid the groundwork for this back then would be happy with this workflow.
I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.
The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073
The irony being that a lot of older practical VFX artists aren't able to tell when CGI is terrible. They're often so enamored with what the tech enables, that they're the last to see how quickly it becomes shoddy. Not sure what the equivalent of the hedonic treadmill is for CG, but it ages very rapidly, versus the best practical effects which maintain a charming physicality - even when they're no longer convincing.
Is it that surprising that a bunch of old guys don't have the same energy and excitement as the new ambitious up-and-comers?
George Lucas seemed pretty satisfied when filming the Star Wars prequels to plop himself down in a chair in a room with a giant bluescreen set where he didn't have to walk around and direct in a hot, sandy desert for hours like in the original films. But the movies looked a lot worse for it.
"guy with bad knees recommends we all take the gondola down"
I just watched the entire cycle of Don Quixote films by/about Terry Gilliam. That is a master class in how to ensure that your magnum opus is the worst film you've ever made.
If we can get the environmental impact of this stuff ameliorated (a big if), this is the real benefit of this kind of AI assistance imo- it transforms everyone into a director and frees them from being a surrogate for a director.
See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.
A lot of professional skill nowadays is misdirected from ‘knowing how to do the thing’ into ‘learning how to use a computer to do the thing’.
The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples and drums and effects’. The role of industrial designer includes a lot of ‘knowing how to model things in CAD’. Even roles like academic researchers require skills like ‘formatting LaTeX’.
I’m genuinely quite excited for a shift in human computer interaction which reduces that ‘knowing how to do things on the computer’ tax.
But there are a whole swathe of jobs where a lot of what people do is ‘know how to do the thing on a computer’. Some of that is really because the bureaucracy has been embodied in a computer system so for example the job of handling an insurance claim seems to involve a lot of ‘knowing how to operate the claims computer system’ - actually that person’s skill is ‘knowing how to navigate the claims bureaucracy’.
Completely agree. How many people over the past 20 years have been musically gifted, but found ProTools or Logic impenetrable? The AI unlock is about enabling that creativity, not replacing it.
Joe said it right in Halt and Catch Fire:
> Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing.
That was that character’s take on Jobs’s ‘bicycle for the mind’ concept.
AI is elevating one’s capability but not replacing it.
Then you have experience and skills.
Someone with zero skills in music will be able to make a 'song' but a savvy producer would use tools differently and could leverage them to actually make something creative.
Anyone can make an app those days (or a website or whatever) but mileage varies based on one's nature, also the gotchas of someone with zero knowledge of a field could result issues that someone with experience would've noticed and resolved much earlier or avoided completely.
Me with zero knowledge in architecture can "design" my house but I wouldn't trust my plan without someone looking at it.
AI and AGI provides great lengths in empowering but it might also introduce the false feeling of being capable.
Creativity, capability and motivation still takes important place even with AI.
Exactly. Sometimes I just need a 3D printed part to finish a DIY project, I don't want to waste hours designing it. I had my fair share of time playing around with SketchUp when I was a teenager, but that's it.
Blender with fable and Astra is doing pretty amazing things it seems..
>Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
However it can lead to AI "doing the creative for them" and them out of a job in the near future.
Sure, in the future everything will have a healthy piss-tint yellow shine. =3
Yeah, exactly. I cannot wait to use this to take care of the boring stuff.
I'm not complaining either, I wouldn't call myself a video editor, but I do end up spending some of my time in Resolve, and anything to remove the dreadful monotonous tasks of editing interviews is welcome. Although Resolve already makes it pretty easy, with the "edit by moving the transcript around" feature which is amazing. Anyway, I'm happy about being able to sick Codex at Resolve now :)
Pretty soon there will be no need for recording and editing .
IIRC House MD was one of the first shows to use digital (5D mkII).
Soon there will be AI generated shows. Perhaps entirely personalized.
Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
> Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
It will never be that simple.
For example: the guys on youtube using AI to make new Star Wars movies [1] still did tons of work putting it all together, including the 3d renderings and editing, and they are leaning on old scriptwriting/dialogue from a 1991 Star Wars book. AI is just helping them automate the process and generate some visuals/voice acting, but it still takes a skilled artist with lots of technical knowledge to guide it in the right direction and properly utilize their existing tools/workflows... and most importantly good taste.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4gZR1BDzOw
We can always streamline creativity by allowing agents to post jobs on mechanical Turk
> We can always streamline creativity by allowing agents to post jobs on mechanical Turk
Which is maybe why Mechanical Turk will be shutdown in 3 weeks. No more people laundering AI.
Not anymore! [0]
[0]: https://www.mturk.com
It's already possible, but in my opinion it will never be popular. In some ways this has already been proven through other media; ChatGPT can easily generate a novel, but how many people are reading pure-AI novels?
… but set it in the Star Wars universe.
And full of product placements...
That's why there are no assistant editor jobs anymore.
Resolve has had de-aging filters, and TTS voice synthesis for awhile.
If the chat-bot/spy-ware aren't integrated, than I don't see a problem with LLM plug-in opt-in support. =3
These 'integrations' everywhere just mean we get more APIs that can be accessed programmatically, which I think is good for users, even if you don't plan to use to use AI. It's like the optimistic web 2.0 APIs everywhere days
No no, if you've ever spent serious time editing, it's a big deal -- if they pull this off correctly, it will be a game changer. Editing has so much grunt work, where you just have to spending time organizing, collecting files, renaming things, finding missing files... Just tedious project management stuff that is excellent for an AI to do.
They've added it as people are opting for stuff like Palmier Pro, FableCut, and likes, which can edit videos using AI.
So let them? A product that focuses on chasing the competition is effectively useless, because the competition will always be ahead.
I can imagine the conversation with Studio lawyers about contaminating IP with uncopyrightable generative content liabilities. =3
Furthermore, can one use custom API endpoint or is it forced use of corpo AI?
They'd rather add agentic AI support instead of adding proper codec support on the free Linux version (which is already supported on Windows).
smh
It’s because those codecs require SDK’s that are expensive to license. That’s not a Linux specific issue - it’s always been that way for the non-studio version of Resolve (with some exceptions on MacOS since the ProRes codecs are already part of the OS).
Is it surprising that they’d rather make features that cater to a large portion of their user base instead of a tiny fraction of it?
I've edited well over a thousand hours of video on my (Debian) DaVinci Resolve workstation. It's a rock-solid video editor that I can spend a day in without having to worry about a crash.
But I desperately wish Blackmagic would bring support for VST3 plugins and JACK to Linux. Or, at the very least, allow me to use my MIDI control surface in Fairlight on Linux.
As it stands, I have to do all of my audio production in Reaper, and that's a bit cumbersome.
I've had Claude Code drive DaVinci Resolve before in three ways: - Generate .otio files that are imported. Unfortunately, .otio doesn't fully support everything Resolve can do. - Resolve has a scripting engine. Claude can write Lua scripts, then execute the script (through UI Automation) - Computer Use. It's quite token intense, but it works.
I didn't try it, but for the paid version, someone also built a MCP server based on the scripting engine.
I'm programmatically adding analysis to sim racing lap guides, therefore my flow is probably different from the usual editing flow, but I have to say I found Claude Code + Opus to be quite capable of making edits with computer use.
I used IntelliScript a lot. I give Claude a subtitle export, ask it to cut it and import the cut subtitle track with IntelliScript. Resolve then creates a video version that’s cut based on the subtitle changes
Works pretty well!
I had AI write a program to edit with resolve. It does transcription, looks at the transcript and decides where to make cuts. If does a decent job and saves me a bunch of time.
This is a good place to share that MakeResolveDeb makes installing Davinci Resolve very easy on Ubuntu/Mint/Debian
Way more people should know about this solution.
https://www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb
I install, run and update via this container script [1] on Arch. It works very well.
[1] https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox
This aur package [1] works well for me. Unfortunately the new maintainer removed the automatic download and you need to manually download the zip via the form on Blackmagic's website (however not even the email is validated).
1: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/davinci-resolve
did they remove it based on policy? seems.. less convenient.
That's the experience on CachyOS. They package it up for their users and updates just work.
As an anecdote, I recently needed to colour-grade some short footage for personal purposes. My workflow at the time was to essentially ask an LLM for guidance on how to use DaVinci Resolve to perform the task, step by step. I would make an adjustment, take a screenshot of the controls and the result, and repeat that process a handful of times, eventually ending up with a pretty nice result.
I can definitely see the utility of something like this for cases where a media budget just wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Seems like an unusually boring Resolve release. There's nothing there I particularly want to try out. Nothing wrong with that, I've just got used to every release having a ton of shiny new stuff in it.
I guess the agentic stuff is probably exciting to somebody.
It's a .1 release
Anyone knows if there os support for Intel integrated graphics in Resolve now?
I tried it a few times but I think it didn't work at all with those cards.
Resolve is extremely RAM hungry. For 4K video I wouldn't want to be editing with less than 12GB of VRAM. I'm guessing that excludes most integrated graphics.
Source - I work as a professional editor (amongst other things). Please commenters, do not come at me with your five minute low bit rate projects that required only a LUT and some contrast and 'worked fine' in DaVinci on a potato.
For people like me who have no idea what this is, I looked it up:
DaVinci Resolve is a proprietary application for non-linear video editing, color correction, color grading, visual effects, and audio post-production. It is developed by the Australian company Blackmagic Design for macOS, Windows, iPadOS and Linux.
...
DaVinci Resolve has been used for the color grading and/or editing of feature films such as Alien: Covenant, Avatar, Best of Enemies, Deadpool 2, Jason Bourne, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, La La Land, Love & Mercy, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Prometheus, Anora, Robin Hood, Spectre, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and X-Men: Apocalypse.
(Wikipedia)
After Effects still has some features that keep me stuck with it, but I'm excited for more competition. Adobe seems to be paying attention somewhat.
Off topic, but can anyone share their experience with DaVinci Resolve on Linux? It seems that they only officially support Rocky.
Tried to work with ut for 5 months on Ubuntu. Installation was painful. Have to use some tutorial. No AAC audio codec support as well, which is the code of my smartphone camera. Randomly decided to not work after Ubuntu updates. I'm on Windows now...
Installing on Mint/Ubuntu is easy with MakeResolveDeb. https://www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb
The biggest issues are the supports of video cards (nvidia is the king) and different popular codecs. The problem is partly solved by using paid version, but the gpu/codec support is still not even with Windows, so you have to use ffmpeg to re-encode from/into supported formats.
I’ve been using it in Linux for >2 years, including their special cutting keyboard (blanking on the name).
Works without a hitch, including multi monitor, gpu acceleration etc I use it on Manjaro, installed via AUR.
That said, IIRC it only works with nvidia GPUs and requires X11, and is supposedly finicky to get the environment right for (but the AUR gets it right for me)
I don't know about recent versions, but I managed to install 18 on Linux Mint.
Making it run wasn't easy, and it can't decode MP3 and some video codecs because of licensing issues. It also can't decode WebM. This is kind of a problem because of a lot of free music you can download to add to videos and a lot of video clips you can download from Pexels for example are encoded with codecs it can't decode, so you have to re-encode it with FFMPEG first to a supported codec.
Is it still a PITA to install? If I have to install a custom Linux distro to be able to run your app, it's not a good time.
Use MakeResolveDeb to easily install on Ubuntu/Mint.
That's what distrobox is for ;)
It installs on Windows 11 with one or two clicks.
AI? Yawn...
I don't see how companies like this can survive going forwards. DaVinci Resolve is effectively ~200 Astra/Fable prompts, maybe even fewer if you're willing to forgo polish.
I'd give you $100K no questions asked if you manage to get something even close to Resolve with 2K Astra/Fable prompts, polish included. You vastly underestimate how much work goes into "polish" when software with huge surface area is decades old.
I think there's a really interesting tension between what you're saying and what the parent post is saying, and it's something that's been discussed for a long time but LLMs are throwing a new wrench into it: a given user probably only uses 5-10% of the features of a piece of software, but across the whole body of users you get close to full coverage.
I use DaVinci Resolve for editing GoPro, Canon DSLR, iPhone, and Drone FPV footage. I import clips, use the razor to cut them and rearrange them, occasionally crop and zoom, and then encode them down to h264 or whatever. There are a bazillion features that I sort of know exist but haven't ever had any need to use. Could I make a tool using an LLM that covers my DaVinci workflow? Almost certainly, and I don't think it would take anywhere near 200 prompts. I've made significantly more complex bespoke data analysis pipelines for drone flight telemetry in like... a dozen prompts. But I have no illusions that what I would make as my "DaVinci Clone" would have anywhere near the functionality of DaVinci, just the tiny piece of that functionality that I use.
regardless of whether it’s possible, there is enormous value in the community, ecosystem, and learning materials centred around Reaolve as it is right now. the workflow has been refined over years. no one shot slop effort will have that network effect behind it, and if the workflow isn’t a drop-in replacement it’s dead in the water anyway.
You can say anything, why stop at claiming 200 prompts, why not say you think Astra/Fable can one shot Davinci Resolve! And you can EASILY make the BM cinema cameras and other hardware by prompting Fable to run a 3D printer. (≧▽≦)
Black Magic Design's primary business is selling cinematography hardware. Anyways, those ~200 prompts are going to cost you more money than a license once you factor in the cost of your own time. Value proposition of AI still ain't there, and it probably won't be until the hardware bubble pops, and it very well might never pop without market intervention. This is assuming your 200 prompts is a realistic figure, which I'm frankly skeptical of.
you do know this company also sells myriad of hardware , can't Fable those just yet. and I am sure majority of their income comes from that part of their business, selling equipment to studios etc.
LOL. I wish people could make good software that easy!