Resolve 21

[Emanuel]

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20260414-01

 

In Portuguese.

 

In conclusion, now in English:

The big leap in Resolve 21 is this: it is no longer just an editor and colour-grading system for video. It now also includes a new Photo page, designed for still photography, with album management, node-based grading, crop and reframe at original resolution, tethered capture with Sony and Canon cameras, support for LUTs and Resolve FX, and collaboration through Blackmagic Cloud.

On the AI side, the package has become much more aggressive. It now includes IntelliSearch to find people, objects, and even words spoken in dialogue, a voice generator from text, CineFocus to recreate depth of field, Face Age Transformer, Face Reshaper, skin-imperfection removal, automatic slate reading with AI Slate ID, UltraSharpen, and Motion Deblur.

In the Cut and Edit pages, the most visible additions are improvements to keyframes and curves, the ability to adjust Fusion effects directly inside those editors, native support for HTML and Lottie graphics, improvements to Text+ and MultiText, and more practical smart bins for filtering footage in the Media Pool.

In colour, VFX, and audio, Resolve 21 adds MultiMaster Trim Manager to generate HDR and SDR versions from the same timeline, Magic Mask render in place, list and layer views in the node editor, and group versions for grades. Fusion gains the Krokodove library, improvements to the macro editor, and an updated USD toolset. Fairlight adds track folders, 6-band clip EQ, EQ and Level Matcher, and Chain FX.

For creators and modern workflows, there are ready-made square and vertical resolutions for social media, direct upload to YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, and X, support for IntelliScript with Final Draft, import of ATEM Mini ISO projects, and major reinforcement of immersive workflows, including VR180 and VR360, Panomap, ILPD retargeting, MainConcept H.265/MV-HEVC, and foveated rendering for Apple Immersive.

In short, Resolve 21 seems to be three things at once: more useful AI, tighter integration between areas that used to be separate, and a much broader opening toward photography, creators, and immersive content. Blackmagic itself presents this version as a major update, with the new Photo page, dozens of new features, and many usability improvements.

 

This is no small improvement. And who said they were focused only on the SMPTE crowd?! ; ) LOL

Amazing upgrade, kudos to them! : -)

[kye]

1 hour ago, Emanuel said:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20260414-01

 

In Portuguese.

 

In conclusion, now in English:

The big leap in Resolve 21 is this: it is no longer just an editor and colour-grading system for video. It now also includes a new Photo page, designed for still photography, with album management, node-based grading, crop and reframe at original resolution, tethered capture with Sony and Canon cameras, support for LUTs and Resolve FX, and collaboration through Blackmagic Cloud.

On the AI side, the package has become much more aggressive. It now includes IntelliSearch to find people, objects, and even words spoken in dialogue, a voice generator from text, CineFocus to recreate depth of field, Face Age Transformer, Face Reshaper, skin-imperfection removal, automatic slate reading with AI Slate ID, UltraSharpen, and Motion Deblur.

In the Cut and Edit pages, the most visible additions are improvements to keyframes and curves, the ability to adjust Fusion effects directly inside those editors, native support for HTML and Lottie graphics, improvements to Text+ and MultiText, and more practical smart bins for filtering footage in the Media Pool.

In colour, VFX, and audio, Resolve 21 adds MultiMaster Trim Manager to generate HDR and SDR versions from the same timeline, Magic Mask render in place, list and layer views in the node editor, and group versions for grades. Fusion gains the Krokodove library, improvements to the macro editor, and an updated USD toolset. Fairlight adds track folders, 6-band clip EQ, EQ and Level Matcher, and Chain FX.

For creators and modern workflows, there are ready-made square and vertical resolutions for social media, direct upload to YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, and X, support for IntelliScript with Final Draft, import of ATEM Mini ISO projects, and major reinforcement of immersive workflows, including VR180 and VR360, Panomap, ILPD retargeting, MainConcept H.265/MV-HEVC, and foveated rendering for Apple Immersive.

In short, Resolve 21 seems to be three things at once: more useful AI, tighter integration between areas that used to be separate, and a much broader opening toward photography, creators, and immersive content. Blackmagic itself presents this version as a major update, with the new Photo page, dozens of new features, and many usability improvements.

 

This is no small improvement. And who said they were focused only on the SMPTE crowd?! ; ) LOL

Amazing upgrade, kudos to them! : -)

It's an interesting update for sure.

While I find the upgrading process to be too much of a PITA to upgrade unless there's a killer feature in the next version I really want to use, there are a few things in there that are interesting from an AI perspective.

The first is the AI Face tools, with AI Face Reshaper & AI Face Age Transformer.  This is interesting because it shows their ability to track and understand faces is vastly improved from the previous generation of Face Refinement tool, which was obviously designed to have very soft masks because their tracking wasn't that great.
I did an excellent course in Beauty Retouching which used Resolve and basically you apply different treatments to each area of the face as each has a different tone/colour/texture and you had to mask each one manually yourself.  The ultimate would be for the AI face tools to detect the face and output a mask for each area of the face, automating the masking/tracking.

The second is the Adjust Focus with AI CineFocus, which simulates a shallower DOF, and is a combination of a blur plugin with their depth map plugin.  When the depth map plugin came out I tried it on some deep DOF shots to see how it did, and the results were worse than the iPhone 'cinematic mode' with the edges being a very obvious blurry transition, and you couldn't apply anything more than a barely perceptible blur before the edges ruined the shot.
The fact this is now an integrated plugin means it's gotten better to the point they're willing to put it forward for this application.  It's probably still a long way from blurring the background but keeping each hair on the subject in-focus, but it shows increased confidence.

I know they are also doing tonnes of little things in the background too.  I went through a phase of posting to the BM forums and suggesting features as I came upon things that annoyed me, and to my amusement I had professional colourists (including from Company3) reply and say they've been suggesting the same improvements to BM for year after year, and I notice that a number of these have gotten fixed in the last few versions.

Still, there are gaps in the things I'd really like.  One is the stabilisation, which can't handle any kind of shot that isn't perfectly rectilinear, and has no support for removing rolling shutter etc.  This is possible, and I went down a deep dive at one point some years ago looking for a solution and there was a product that did it flawlessly, but the product was in the thousands-of-dollars price range so wasn't worth it for me.
The stabilisation also lacks the ability to stabilise the tilt/pan/roll/zoom in different amounts.  If I shoot with the BMMCC and an OIS lens for example, the lens stabilises the tilt/pan quite well but has zero roll stabilisation.  I'd like to stabilise the roll almost to 100% to keep it almost perfectly fixed, while also stabilising the tilt/pan maybe 40% just to smooth off the rough edges.  This isn't possible, except if I build something in Fusion, which apart from forcing me to learn Fusion, also requires I go into the Fusion window to track the shots as well, I can't build a custom OFX and then apply it in the Edit or Colour page.
I don't know why BM didn't just make the stabilisation occur in a node, that way you could just apply it several times however you wanted, but it's a 'special' thing that happens once in the image pipeline, and once only.

My biggest wish for Resolve 22 is lens emulation.  Like the Face and CineFocus tools, the lens emulation ingredients are all there if you combine them yourself manually, but integrating them into one plugin would be pretty sweet!