This morning we woke up to an announcement from Blackmagic Design, letting us know that there is a new update to DaVinci Resolve. This has a big list of improvements but one of them stands out in particular, AI Stabilisation. The big question here for me is, are Blackmagic just jumping on the hype of AI or do we truly have something brand new? In this video we're gonna find out. So this video is something a little different from me and is just my initial reactions to Blackmagic announcing AI Stabilisation. I've not tried it out yet, I know nothing about it. I'm just going to download it right now and we can find out together what it actually means and is. Looking on X or Twitter right here, you can see that Blackmagic label an update as AI Stabilisation. But where things start to get a little interesting, if you come over to the Blackmagic Design website and click the DaVinci Resolve and Fusion software, you can see the update right here which is DaVinci Resolve 18.6.5. If we click on read more to find out more information about this update, you can see it is no longer labelled as AI Stabilisation. If we are going off the same order that Blackmagic used in their tweet, it is labelled as gyro stabilization with Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K. Now this would be Blackmagic's new full frame 6K Cinema Camera which I do own. So the first thing I did is just went right outside my office, I didn't have much time. So I just got some really quick and simple B-roll that we'll get to in a sec just so I could test it and see what is actually going on. If you've done an update for Resolve before, this one is no different but if not, you just click your operating system down here. You need to register and then download. Make sure you select Studio or Free version matching whichever DaVinci Resolve you are using. Once that's downloaded it's pretty straight forward. Just press next and keep going through and eventually you will see the installation was successful. What I've done here is I've created a new project just to run this test inside of and I've loaded in my test footage from the Cinema Camera 6K. Again I didn't spend much time capturing this footage. I used manual cine lenses, I used a 25mm and 85mm and I did some standing still and some walking. Just off screen here I have my Windows desktop PC which is still running the older version pre update and I've loaded this exact same project in there. Applied gyro stabilisation to all the clips, rendered them out so we can overlay them and compare side by side pre update and then after the update so we can see if it's actually got any better or doing anything different. So first up to keep it really simple, I just got a shot here of me trying to hold the camera still as possible. This has the 25mm lens on it. I tried balancing the rig as much as possible. I had a top handle on it and I was pressing into my body and just trying to keep it as steady as possible. And also all the shots are in 6K, open gate, Q5, 25 frames per second. So the first thing to note here is under the stabilisation tab there is no difference to me. We still see all the original stabilisations, what you get in Resolve and because it is detecting that it is a b-roll file from the Cinema Camera 6K we do see the camera gyro but this was the same in the previous before the update. If we jump over to the colour grading tab, come to the tracker, look under stabilisation under here. Again, I don't see any different options than what I normally there. And the last place I thought to look was in Fusion. If we just search for any stabilisation or AI. So unless I'm missing something here I'm guessing this AI stabilisation has been built directly into the camera gyro, normal stabilisation setting. So if we select camera gyro and hit stabilise, you can see it works quite fast. I would say this is maybe a little bit faster than previous. I am on a base model M3 MacBook Pro here. It looks pretty natural. I mean it's a really simple clip, not really seeing anything too jumping out at me. Watching them side by side here we have pre-update and after the update I think it's the same. Don't know if I'm missing something, don't know what you guys are seeing. Moving on to the next one, let's do the exact same again. So here let's try a walking one. This is what it looks like before prior to any stabilisation. Again I was trying to walk as gentle as I could just holding the camera in my hands. There is no in body stabilisation of anything in this camera. If we then come and hit the gyro stabilisation, again it definitely feels like it is working faster than normal. It's pretty good result to be fair. All said and done. To say that it's all done post production, I think that's really good stabilisation. Comparing it to the old gyro stabilisation, I'm not really seeing a difference here. Let me know in the comments whether you can tell a difference. Maybe the old one looks better. There is more footsteps in the newer versions. It's so indifferent here, I'm not sure. To me it looks the same but let's carry on. So this is on the 85mm lens so as you can see it's a lot more shaker. As you probably know the longer the reach on the lens the more you're going to pick up vibrations and shakes from the hand on the camera body. So 85mm, we're going to have a much more shaker shot than at 25mm. The gyro stabilisation, something it's not doing is working like a non gyro stabilisation where it would like warp. It's definitely trying to keep it looking as real as possible. Something else worth noting is I made sure that my 6K cinema camera is fully up to date as well in case it needed any kind of firmware updates. This is comparing the shot to before the update both using gyro stabilisation. This has now got me thinking that when Blackmagic are saying AI stabilisation, I wonder whether the results are the same but it's using an AI process to speed it up. Originally when gyro data stabilisation was added to resolve it was really slow and it used to crash a lot and this seemed really fast and stable. Although it has been getting better in each update also. One final test, I tried doing a focus pull and really not trying to hold the camera steady. So this is 85mm, I'm just holding it by the top handle and my other hand is on a focus wheel and I just want to pull focus to see how the stabilisation would react to moving focus in the shot. Something that people may be noticing here is the lack of focus breathing on this lens. This is my next video which is the Niset Athena Prime Lenders. They are quite amazing when it comes to focus breathing so make sure to hit the subscribe button to not miss that video when it comes out in a couple of days. Hitting the gyro stabilisation once again. Again I feel that it is not trying to like warp or look fake. Before with this it used to do a thing where it would like jump in and really kind of warp and I'm not seeing much of that but maybe it's just the type of shots we've got. And finally comparing this last shot with the focus pull to being gyro stabilised in pre-update resolve. Right to conclude this was just a quick little reaction video to what I thought maybe some new type of stabilisation. I'm now thinking that it was just Blackmagic's marketing team adding the word AI into something that already exists. Maybe they have added a new faster process to get you that gyro data and process it faster but from looking at the results here I'm not seeing any major changes and they look pretty identical to me. There is of course the probability that I'm totally missing some kind of section here but I have scoured through resolve and looked in fusion in the colour tab across all the menus at the top and I can't see anything. In the meantime until we get more information from Blackmagic if you want to know what it's like to own and operate a Blackmagic cinema camera in the real world watch this video right here.
