Grant Petty on the future of DaVinci Resolve Studio pricing: "We'll probably eventually charge some kind of upgrade for this."

[maxJ4380]

I suspect the gap between the free version and paid studio version of resolve will grow wider, with the studio version getting all the good stuff. Honestly i'm surprised its taken this long for them to get around to charging for it. I'm also glad its taken this long 😀 I downloaded ver 20 last night, its still free, maybe the last "free" version.

The whole "We'll probably eventually charge some kind of upgrade for this." is just a way of softening the blow. its already been decided, its just the when may still be up in the air.

Personally i feel paying a subscription is a like cutting an artery and watching the life leak out. I can live with a modest upgrade fee if i feel like i need to upgrade for the features, however if bm go subscription, I'll stick with whatever is the last free version or move to something else. 

I'm also thinking if and when they do start charging for it, they might have to do something special to entice us. At least for the first upgrade anyway. Maybe that is where the magic part comes in. If they do manage to make it something magical i'd probably look at buying one of the controllers That comes with a studio licence key. Assuming that it comes with the upgraded studio version.

[JulioD]

Well it's been more than 10 years that you could have bought what...version 8 of Resolve and have never paid for an upgrade?  That's pretty insane to still be able to use V20 today after all that time with all the features it unlocks.  I can't think of any other vendor that is like this....

It seemed more like the cloud features would be where you start to pay for monthly fees which I guess is justified (storage)

It seems like though they aren't going to to subscription, just paid upgrades...maybe

[Clark Nikolai]

16 hours ago, JulioD said:

Well it's been more than 10 years that you could have bought what...version 8 of Resolve and have never paid for an upgrade?  That's pretty insane to still be able to use V20 today after all that time with all the features it unlocks.  I can't think of any other vendor that is like this....

Apple has done the same with Final Cut Pro, if you bought it ten years ago you still get free updates.

[BTM_Pix]

Oh…

On the surface this could appear to be the first step on the slippery slope but at least in this form it’s actually potentially a possible positive move.

Its difficult to get the detail as their link provides no further information but my reading of that tweet is that if you are working on something and need an additional seat for a collaborator then you can rent it for the time needed without having to buy them another full license.

Of course all of that still ties you in to having the paid version of their cloud account if you want to do collaborative working so there is an underlying subscription element involved albeit one with a useful every day function of storage.

Based upon the comments under that tweet, Blackmagic will be in no doubt from their users about any progression to a full subscription model for Resolve.

It might well be that this method of rented functionality tied to the Cloud account may be the way they go for access to what they consider premium new features in the future.

Time will tell.

[eatstoomuchjam]

Part of me wants to knee-jerk against anything even remotely resembling a subscription, but this is also something I've wanted when using BM Cloud on things like a 48 hour film project to collaborate with others.  If the studio rental is cheap, I might even do this sometime.

[Anaconda_]

5 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Of course all of that still ties you in to having the paid version of their cloud account if you want to do collaborative working so there is an underlying subscription element involved albeit one with a useful every day function of storage.

That's no different to Adobe's subscription. Access to the apps, and cloud storage.

I hope it's not a slippery slope, but I also don't really understand how Resolve makes Blackmagic any money at all. As a solo op/editor, I have 3 Studio licenses from camera purchases, each one can run on two machines at the same time. So in theory, I could hire 5 other editors and we can all run the full version at no extra cost. 

Even if I didn't have the spare licenses, the rental cost would have to be very low to make it worth it for customers. How long could you rent it, while staying under the $300 for the full license?

I hope they start introducing big features as plug-ins instead. Studio licence + $50 for Magic Mask 3 for example - and that's tied to your serial number / cloud account. (Cloud account is free if you don't need extra storage)

[eatstoomuchjam]

15 minutes ago, Anaconda_ said:

That's no different to Adobe's subscription. Access to the apps, and cloud storage.

 

I just checked and my initial enthusiasm for the cloud option for something like a 48hff or similar faded quickly.  It looks like the option is not granular enough for a weekend project - minimum interval is 1 month and it's $30.  At that price, I might just deal with the headache of sharing one of my licenses/seats with the editor for the weekend (bought one, got one with the UC12K, each has two seats).
I was really more hoping for a thing that would let me toggle it on for the weekend for around $10.  At least the free version of Resolve is able to download the proxies from BM cloud that were made when the DIT (which is sometimes me) imported media into my laptop on-site.  I'm also kind of excited to experiment with the same with the UC12K's wifi since I think it can sync proxies to BM cloud directly from the camera.  Hope they don't change that to push that use case into a $30 cost.

FWIW, the rest of my cloud plan (that I am not actively using right now so I should probably cut down on) is $12.50 for 500GB of storage and $5 for a cloud project library.  That's the minimum that I've found is needed to create Cloud projects with shared proxies.  Wish I could pay a bit less for 100GB, though - proxies ain't that big.