While my position on Resolve remains intact; my chums and me are coming to the conclusion that perhaps, just possibly the upgrade to Resolve 19 might be just an upgrade too far. Too much AI and too much feature bloat makes Da Vinci a tubby boy. Even on M? it’s not as snappy as before. Perhaps for me v17 was as far as it was good to go. Might regress a couple of versions and be in a happy compromise?
I like editing. I like all kinds of editing be it pictures, films words or copy. To chop is good.
I started editing by cutting my student films on 16mm film. Where a bin was actually a cotton lined bin any sound was on 1/4" tape and needed physically syncing to the clap from the board. It was difficult, really difficult to keep tabs on all those hanging lengths of film. At least the rubbish literally ended up on the floor never to be seen again. 16mm was also a really small image and holding it up to the light wasn’t much help if you needed to see what was there. Handling the film required dexterity while wearing white cotton gloves so as not to mark or scratch the celluloid, not a job for ‘sausage’ fingers. Images flickered to life with either hand cranked wheels on a tiny viewer or if you were lucky a Steenbeck flatbed editor.
Roll-on and slip to past the era of Sony/Ampex based tape edit suites where vast darkened rooms full of humming really expensive kit and myriad flashing lights: HiBand U-Matic, 1 inch, Beta-cam, Digi-Beta.
I tended to keep out of edit suites, but I did learn the tape based edit craft. Editors were pale and pasty they were like battery hens.
Then one day, it was all wiped away by non-linear Avid. Out of the darkened room and into a crummy office with sunlight streaming onto the CRT monitors. Not really much of a step forward.
Mix to where we are today. Editing is cool again, every one does it. The kit is cheap, reliable, ubiquitous. Got a drone, or an influencer’s ring light; be an editor too. Chimp work.
I’ve worked in the modern milieu for long enough to know there is still a level of skill and thought which needs to go in to the process. You still need to know the basics of how shots interact, how timings work and how to bring it all together if only enough to get paid at the end of a job.
I was a committed FinalCut Pro X user. I never really got on with the previous incarnation I liked FCP X. It still appears deceptively simple while hiding complexity as the best software does. FCP X, somewhat neglected by Apple over the last few years is leading to concerns that it may well go the way of ‘Aperture’ Apple’s former excellent RAW photo tool which for no good reason was just dropped one day and we all had to go off scuttling after alternatives, me to CaptureOne and DXO Pro, most sheep went; Lightroom.
I was lucky to have some excellent FinalCut hands–on training with Chris Roberts who in my opinion is one of the best trainers in anything I’ve ever come across. His almost Zen like delivery and huge knowledge really sticks with you.
FinalCut can’t really be seen without it’s siblings: Motion and Compressor. I use Compressor a lot of the time even without FCP X but Motion has always for me been a bit of a dark horse. I’ve done some things in it but it’s not my playground.
When I go back to FCP X now, which I did recently I’m always struck by just how deceptively simple it is, just throw stuff in and drag it around and the magnetic timeline takes care of all the connected media, the sounds, graphics et al. There in lays one of its biggest criticisms. Sometimes you just don’t want everything to be sticky like children’s jammy fingers making a mess and unable to put things down where you want them. Stuff just sticks. There are no bins in FCP X, I need bins. You need to allocate keywords to group together clips into virtual bins. Just call them bins. But I suppose with Apple’s revulsion to all things skeuomorphic a bin as we saw earlier is a convention we no longer need and is outside of most of its user base.
For most of my editing now I use DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic Design and it makes me happy. Resolve has a great pedigree; originally a colour grading tool, robust editing functions have been grafted on so now in version 18 it’s an amazingly comprehensive tool set. You really don’t need to stray out of Resolve all day apart from making coffee and going to the loo. It’s all there.
Resolve’s versions of Motion and Compressor are integrated right into the software with ‘Pages’ for: Media | Cut | Edit | Colour | Fairlight (audio) | Deliver. Theory being you of work across the modules from initial ingestion to final delivery and can swap around at any point and still be in the same place on the timeline wherever you change.
Most recent into the Resolve mix is the Cut–page. Resolve’s answer to FCP X’s magnetic timeline. Cut out shots and the timeline ripples to close the gaps where in the more fully featured Edit page a gap may be left. The rationale for the Cut– page is that it’s an easy way to quickly put a story together and is designed for the smaller screens of laptops where editing always looks cramped. One long narrow timeline spanning the entirety of the programme sits at the top of the timeline it’s the same length regardless of having one or 100 shots assembled there. Below this is a fixed (can also be mobile) playhead where the shots roll past like the 16mm desks of old, what’s under the cursor is what you see on screen. This all works well until things get a little complicated and the number of tracks increases then I find my self moving to the Edit page which is a much more traditional timeline multi track editor with separate preview and program views.
Need a bit of colour tweaking or comprehensive colour grading? Then into the Colour page where the depth of Resolve’s long lineage can be seen and daunting it can all be too. Fiddle with care. If shooting RAW footage Resolve has great tools to manage the colour and make your flat boring milky rushes look at least presentable out of the box and if you are lucky right to the end, depending on the type of output you are looking for. These parameters are all set up in the Project Manager and best decided before or early on in the process. This is one area where Resolve can catch out the unwary or new user.
Need a bit of sound tweaking then right to the Fairlight page. This used to be a hugely expensive stand alone audio editing tool. Blackmagic will still sell you enormously capable physical consoles for both the Colour and Fairlight pages where you can tweak things literally till the end of time but for the more casual user it can be mouse driven.
The fact that Resolve gives away most of this goodness for free makes it even more appealing. I have to say after feeling increasingly guilty with using previous versions come V17 I felt obliged to pay the reasonable cost and purchase the fully featured Studio version and to my joy I qualified for a free Speed Editor console A full licence for the Studio version and the Speed Editor all for the price of the licence only. NB: BM now charge separately for this product.
The Speed Editor is a cut down physical edit controller and is a brilliant bit of kit. Harking back to the days of tape edit suites. One thing they all had were lots of knobs (some of them running the place) and a beautifully balanced multi function edit control wheels on the desk. These were the prime method of searching tape up and down and finding in and out points. Press the wheel down and it changed from shuttle to Jog, hit In and Out and edit and job done, once the tapes had whirred and pre-rolled and clonked the edit in. Come back to now and the Speed Editor has a Sony/Ampex style knob to shuttle, jog and scroll through the footage again plus big mechanical keys to In/Out and many other functions. It is truly brilliant, running down either USB-C or Bluetooth. Only thing for me and when I unpacked it I did actually force the wheel to click down but it doesn’t and I don’t think I did it any good! The action is smooth and well weighted but there is no clutch to damp the motion so it just spins freely.
The Speed Editor was specifically designed for use with the Cut Page but seems to work fine with Edit and all the others too. Indeed in Fairlight the scrubbing action is much smoother than in any of the other modules you can really hear and find all the groans and stutters of imperfect performance and door slams.
When I first started using the Speed Editor I literally unplugged the keyboard and mouse. This was a mistake you need to work between the three, some functions work best on the mouse, some the keyboard and some the Speed Editor. It comes down to personal preference, workflow and to an extent muscle memory. For example jumping between edits on the timeline is best done using the up arrow and down arrow keys on the (extended) keyboard. Jumping to the start and end of the edit with the home and it’s pair key. Marking in/out points with the Speed Editor then assembling with the Append key and there is always a place for the mouse. The Speed Editor is incredibly useful saving a lot of time. With another nod to the days of tape editing there is a ‘source tape’ function where Resolve will string together all the source clips into one continuous stream, like it was all contained on one tape so you can shuttle up and down and find the right place without having to constantly open individual clips. You can even mark in’s and out’s and Append on the fly without stopping then go back and tidy later. I like the Source Tape concept but in practice I’ve found it quite easy to go too far and hitting the right points isn’t that easy.
Multi-cam editing is given a large boos with the Speed Editor with a complete set of numbered keys in the middle of the interface allowing real time on the fly editing of pre-synced footage then just go back and tidy afterwards.
A big failing of the Speed Editor for me is the lack of an on/off switch. There is a big battery inside the unit to power Bluetooth for wire free editing. However, the unit won’t charge off say an iPad charger it needs the higher power from a USB-C connection thus taking up a port on the computer and it takes a long time to charge fully. But what is really annoying is if it’s not in use but Bluetooth is anywhere else in the studio or Resolve is being used elsewhere then the unit polls to the connection using up the battery so come the next edit the battery is flat. Just put a switch on it please.
There are a few things like this throughout the Blackmagic eco-system which make you want to slap your forehead. Dodgy clocks in BM Pocket cameras for example where timekeeping is definitely on the sloppy side of who cares.
Resolve copes admirably with (call me a curmudgeon) vertical video formats. Let’s not go there, but if you need to re-purpose material for things like Tick-Twat or other formats vertical its the way to go. With a bit of trickery, it’s not quite as simple as they make out but convincing vertical video pops out the other side. It’s an odd how our human perception increases the vertical. 16:9 looks really quite a reasonable format in the horizontal but strangely tall and thin in the vertical, more so than one would expect from just turning 90º. It’s the same phenomena as looking at a distant landscape then turning ones head upside down, suddenly those tall close hills look far away and low and so much sky. It’s the landscape photographers conundrum.
So to sum up, Final Cut or Resolve? It’s a matter of choice and fitting the package to the job. I come down more on the side of Resolve but might actually work faster, at least initially in FCP X. For the best of both worlds there are import/export options to move between the two. Sitting down in front of Resolve feels more like proper work is about to be done and adding the Speed Editor probably is the deciding factor.
©2023 SCMP - Split Template by One Page Love