Blackmagic just announced DaVinci Resolve 21, and honestly, it’s a WILD update! They originally said this was going to be more of a bug fix year, focused on smoother performance and fewer big feature drops. But then they just kept adding things, and before they knew it, they had a massive update on their hands. So let’s break down everything that’s new and what you’re actually going to care about as a video editor.

AI Tools

Of course, we have to start with AI. That’s what everyone wants to know about. What new AI stuff is going to make us better editors?

AI IntelliSearch is the first big one. Adobe has had something similar in Premiere Pro for a while, and it’s great to see it land in Resolve. Basically, you can have Resolve analyze all of your footage and it will detect things like people’s faces, objects, colors, and a wide variety of other details. Everything gets cataloged so you can search for it. So if you type “dog,” it’ll pull up every clip with a dog in it. Not super useful if you’ve only got 10 clips, but if you’re working on a wedding video with 500+ clips? That’s where this becomes genuinely powerful.

Next, and this is where it gets a little crazy: Blackmagic introduced an AI speech generator. You type text into a box, and it generates an audio file of that text being spoken. You can use pre-made voices they offer, or you can create a custom voice using an existing audio file. As long as you have at least 10 seconds of someone speaking, you can clone their voice. In the previous version of Resolve, voice cloning required 5 to 10 minutes of audio, and you still had to record yourself speaking in the same cadence and then layer it. Now? You just type what you want and it spits out the voice. Wild stuff. Just… don’t trust everything you hear on the internet.

AI CineFocus is another new one, and it’s very similar to Apple’s Cinematic Mode. If you’ve filmed something on your phone or with a camera that doesn’t have a shallow depth of field, you can now add depth of field in post. You just click around, tell it what to keep in focus, and blur the rest. You can control the bokeh shape and intensity too. It’s not going to undo a shallow depth of field you already shot, but if your footage is flat, this could be a real alternative to spending money on a fast lens.

Remember Benjamin Button? Aged in reverse, old then young. Yeah, they basically added that to Resolve. There is now an AI face age transformer tool where you record someone, tell Resolve their current age, and offset it older or younger. It tracks their face and actually adds or removes wrinkles to make them look different. This is the kind of thing Marvel was paying a fortune for a few years ago, and now you can do it at home. Weird, yes, but also genuinely useful if you have clients who want to look a little younger on camera.

On a similar note, there’s a new AI Face Reshaper tool that lets you adjust people’s facial features, make them wider, tighter, and so on. Blackmagic mentioned comedy as a use case, but I actually think it’s really interesting for animating still photos. Instead of just the Ken Burns pan and zoom effect, you could have the subject subtly moving too. That’s a cool tool for documentary work.

And we’re not done with faces yet. There’s also an AI blemish removal tool. As someone who has to be on camera, I can absolutely see myself using this. Woke up with bad acne? Black eye from bumping your head? There’s now an AI tool in Resolve that looks like it’s going to handle that pretty well. Great for clients who are sensitive about that stuff too.

Keeping on the AI train, there’s a new feature where Resolve can detect a slate or clapperboard in your footage. If you’re running a bigger production with multiple takes and different setups, Resolve will automatically read the slate data, generate markers, and add all of that to each clip’s metadata. You don’t have to do that by hand anymore. This is a massive time-saver for bigger productions.

There’s also a new Ultra Sharpen tool that Blackmagic says can rescue footage that might otherwise be unusable. I’m a little skeptical until I’ve tested it myself, but if it can salvage blurry shots, that could be really exciting. And along those same lines, there’s a new AI Motion Deblur feature. If you have clips with heavy motion blur from a low shutter speed, this tool analyzes the footage and clears up a lot of that blur to make things sharper and easier to see. I’ve had so many shots over the years where I’m like “why is that so shaky?” This could genuinely fix some of those.

Photo Editing (Yes, Really)

Okay, this one I genuinely didn’t see coming, but the moment you hear it, it makes total sense. DaVinci Resolve 21 now has a full photo editing page. Like, Lightroom-style photo editing. Sliders, RAW support, cropping, reframing, a lightbox mode, albums, and even tethering so you can shoot directly into Resolve.

And here’s the part that makes it different from Lightroom: you also get all of Resolve’s color grading tools on top. You can color your photos with nodes if you want to. There’s even multi-user support so multiple people can edit photos at the same time.

So right now, DaVinci Resolve is going after Premiere Pro with the Edit and Cut pages, After Effects with Fusion, and now Lightroom with the Photos page. All in one app, all free (or a one-time Studio purchase). The competition this creates with Adobe is great to see.

Edit and Cut Page Updates

There are some solid quality-of-life updates on the editing side too. HTML graphics and Lottie animation support is now built in, so you can import those animations and they’ll play natively in Resolve without any extra steps.

There’s now a spell checker in the edit text tool, which honestly was long overdue. I’ve caught misspellings in my own videos before that I really wish I’d caught sooner. That’s now a non-issue. And there’s also emoji support now in the text tool. Finally. No more importing a PNG just to get an emoji into a title.

Color Page Updates

The Color page got some good updates too. The big one is the Multi-Master Trim Manager. If you need to deliver multiple versions of a project (say, one in standard dynamic range and one in HDR), you used to have to manage multiple timelines. Now you can have one timeline with multiple color versions, keeping everything consistent and saving a ton of time.

There’s also a Magic Mask Render in Place feature now, which lets you cache a magic mask so working with them is way smoother. And here’s an interesting one: you can now view your nodes as layers if you prefer that workflow. Resolve knows that nodes are intimidating for some people, so they added a layer view option. I’m curious to try it.

Fusion Updates

Blackmagic recently acquired a company called Crocodove, and their library of presets and tools for Fusion is now included. If you’ve been wanting more motion graphics presets to work with, this is a fantastic addition.

There’s also a new Audio Driven Fusion Animation feature that lets you sync your Fusion animations directly to an audio file, quickly and easily. If you’ve ever had to manually keyframe animations to music, you know how much of a pain that can be. This looks like it fixes that in a big way.

Fairlight Updates

On the Fairlight side, you can now organize audio tracks into folders, which is great for keeping complex timelines clean. There’s also a six-band clip EQ and EQ level match, plus in-chain effects. It’s more incremental on the Fairlight page, but there’s a good reason for that.

Blackmagic also announced a completely separate free app called Fairlight Live. As the name suggests, this is built for live video production. Whether you’re running 20 inputs or hundreds of inputs, Fairlight Live gives you all the mixing controls you’d expect from the Fairlight page in a standalone app. It’s also going to be compatible with Blackmagic’s ATEM Mini Switchers through a software update. Really useful for anyone doing live production work.

Background Rendering

This one doesn’t get the flashy AI headline, but it’s one I’m genuinely most excited about: background rendering is finally here. If your computer is struggling with playback, you can leave Resolve alone for a bit and it’ll start rendering your footage in the background to make it smoother. You can also generate proxies in the background now, instead of having Resolve lock you out while it processes. Same goes for AI transcripts. All of this now happens in the background while you keep working. Huge.

And It’s Still Free

Just like last year, Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty said this is a free update. Yes, even with all of this. He acknowledged they probably should be charging for it, and they may in the future, but enough people have been picking up DaVinci Resolve Studio to make it work. So if you already own Resolve Studio, this is a free update. And if you’re on the free version, it’s still free.

I’m very interested to dig into exactly what’s in the free version versus Studio once I get hands-on with it. The beta is available to download right now if you want to jump in.

If you want to get better at video editing regardless of what software you’re using, check out my Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. It covers my biggest rules as a video editor for making better videos, and it’s completely free. I wrote it, AI did not.

And if you want to see more DaVinci Resolve tutorials and breakdowns, make sure you’re subscribed over on the YouTube channel. I’ve got a lot more Resolve content coming!