DaVinci Resolve 17.4 includes a host of new features to enhance your post production workflows. This update transforms the speed of DaVinci Resolve to work up to five times faster on Apple MacBook Pro models with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. With this massive speed increase you can now playback edit and grade 8K projects even faster and can work with up to 12 streams of 8K footage. The update also increases the decoding speed of 12k Blackmagic Raw files making it over three times faster and the DaVinci neural engine performance is up to four times faster for real time face recognition object detection and smart reframing. DaVinci Resolve Studio 17.4 also includes integration with Dropbox and Dropbox Replay. You can now render directly into Dropbox for easy video review and approval. Frame accurate colored markers, comments and annotations made in Dropbox Replay are almost instantaneous synced to your DaVinci Resolve timeline. On the edit page there have been a number of improvements to the timeline. Individual timeline gaps can now be marked with in and out points using the mark selection command or pressing shift A. Audio clip gain adjustments can also be more precisely made by holding the shift key when dragging the volume overlay. Navigating quickly between timeline tabs is now possible using a customizable keyboard shortcut. Simply open the keyboard customization window and set your desired shortcut to easily move to the next timeline tab. And any unneeded timeline tabs can now be closed with a middle click. Speed Editor functionality has been improved in the edit page allowing you to cut multi camera clips using the Speed Editors camera buttons. Single press the camera number to add a cut the playhead position or double press it to switch the current angle. And adding subtitles to your timelines has also been refined. Subtitles backgrounds now automatically resize correctly to fit the text and when adding a new subtitle the text box automatically becomes active allowing you to type your subtitle text straight away. Changes to edit page effects include the ability to be able to asymmetrically trim video or audio transitions. Simply hold the command or control key when making your selection to be able to just trim on one side of the transition. The easing of keyframe clip positions in the timeline is now much simpler with the improved position curves providing more intuitive control over the acceleration along the motion path. Choosing the correct composite mode is also faster. Simply move your mouse through the list to seen the highlighted composite mode preview directly in the viewer And the new 3D keyer has also been updated. Real time black and white highlight gives precise feedback when making selections. And a new pop up details each strokes RGB selection allowing you to select and even remove a specific stroke and the you despill slider allows you to adjust the level of despill applied. Detailed key refinement controls including the option to display the key map of viewer overlay make this one of the most powerful keyers available. And if you create your own custom Fusion effects titles and transitions, it's now easier to organize these for use on the edit page. Simply place the Fusion template in an appropriately titled folder in the Fusion templates location on your system. Any Fusion templates in this folder will then be displayed in that category in the edit page of effects library. The Text+ tools has had numerous improvements to character styling and animation. Including support for combined glyphs and right left layouts for Arabic, Hebrew and other languages. Vertical text support has also been improved with better handling of layout, character rotation, line direction and even underlining. And for supported fonts you can now choose between stylistic sets of characters. Finally, timeline markers of specific color can now be exported as chapter markers for Quicktime and MP4 formats. Just select the options in the render settings on the deliver page and choose which colored markers you want to use to use as chapters. And when choosing any of the YouTube presets, you can use the timeline markers to automatically create video chapters. In the color page, the DaVinci Resolve 17.4 update accommodates emerging industry standards, improve and expand the open effects library and feature feature multiple interface improvements that will simplify and speed up your grading workflow. To begin, automatic color management takes much of the guest work out of setting up a project for color grading. In the project settings, when the color science is is first set to DaVinci YRGB Color Managed automatic color management is on by default. This reduces the color processing mode to just two options. SDR or HDR. These will quickly establish a working color space and gamut for standard and high dynamic range projects. The output color space dropdown features only the most predominant output standards. Click save and you are good to go. Colour management can be especially helpful in projects with a variety of video standards. With a few clicks, you can bring them to a similar starting point and begin grading. You can disable automatic color management to bring back the extended list of color processing modes and output color spaces and as before you can select custom in the color processing mode to access the full list of color management parameters. Another exciting addition to DaVinci Resolve's color management is the support for the latest ACES version 1.3 with gamut compression, new CSC transforms and other improvements. The open effects library has seen many improvements to its existing effects and features two new additions. Halation, emulates the light reflections and scatter found in film stock. A look that has previously required multiple nodes to achieve. The custom mixer allow you to combine effects and grades with much finer control. In blend mode, you can set a composite type and adjust the RGB strength to achieve a perfect balance of your nodes. While combine mode opens up individual and offset controls for more nuanced mixing. Some changes in the node editor will speed up how you interact with nodes and make it easier monitor your grading workflow. when hovering over a node the tools tips indicate the name of an applied effect or look up table. When dragging a connector to a mixer node such as the parallel, layer or key mixers inputs automatically appear to accommodate additional nodes in the stack. Other interface changes allow you to more quickly navigate the color pages primary and secondary palette. Use the individual tool icons in the top right corner to access different palatte modes in the color wheels curves qualifier tracker and other palettes. Hover over these icons to see their name and the tool tip. When tracking in the window or the magic mask palettes, you can track forward and back with the single action. This is helpful for many tracking workflows where the optimal starting point for track might be in the middle of the clip. First, pick your optimal starting frame and make your initial selection as usual. Then click track forward and reverse to allow the tracker analyse the clip in both directions. The result in track would be completed across the whole clip with a keyframe in the tracker graph to mark the frame we started from. Disabled clips appear grey in the mini timeline giving you a representation of the media hidden from the thumbnail timeline. In the viewer, right click the audio icon to reveal volume controls. This setting will affect the monitoring levels of all DaVinci Resolve pages, but will not impact the actual volume of the timelines audio clips. When you have Dolby Vision enabled in the project settings, you’ll see a clip filter option to isolate clips based on Dolby Vision analysis or trim status. This will simplify the process of preparing your timeline for Dolby Vision delivery and ensure all clips are trimmed prior to render. The Fairlight page is packed with new features based on feedback from audio professionals such as multi channel output for Linux systems and support for VST 3 plugins for both Mac and Windows platforms. In the Fairlight mixer there's now manual plug in control on each channel strip. So you can quickly drag to reorder plug ins move them to another channel or option drag to duplicate them from track to track or bus to bus. There’s also improved user defined processing so you can choose the order the effects built in dynamics and EQ processing independently for each track with a single click. The Fairlight timeline includes enhanced gain controls for each clip so you can option click to set new keyframes and command or shift click for multiple keyframe selections. In edit selection mode you can drag a range for ganged keyframe control. You can even show or hide the clip gain line in the timeline view options menu which is now on the left side of the timeline tool bar just like the edit page. Hiding the clip gain line makes it easier to see the automation curves mixing and with DaVinci Resolve 17.4 automation curves display current values with a dark line when no automation is present and a bright line for automated parameters. In the improved edit index you can select clips and even search for and select multiple clips directly in the index allowing fast access to apply changes to multiple clips at once like adjusting levels adding effects to all selected clips at the same time. Navigating to timeline markers now selects the marker so you can press M to open the marker dialogue press tab to toggle through the active fields and press escape to close. Dragging fades in the timeline is an easy way to finese your edits. To apply custom fades to a range clips at once there's the batch fade settings in the Fairlight menu. Here you can enable fade in, cross fade or fade out choose the shape fade limit in milliseconds or frames the length and option to overwrite existing fades. Select a range in the timeline and apply the batch fades. You can even assign a shortcut in the keyboard customization window. With DaVinci Resolve 17.4, all audio transitions and fades added on the edit page appear as fades in the Fairlight page for seemless picture editing to professional audio workflows and precision control of each fade in the Fairlight timeline. Finally, in the tracks index, you can now change the order of tracks or buses to customize your timeline and mixer. Just drag a bus to a different position in the track list and the interface updates accordingly. These are just some of the exciting new features that you’ll find in DaVinci Resolve 17.4. If you’d like more information about DaVinci Resolve, go to blackmagicdesign.com.
