Author: Matt Johnson

I want to lead with this: I did not get paid for this review. I reached out to Zhiyun and asked if they’d send me the lights so I could make this video, they said yes, and here we are. No sponsorship, no script handed to me. Just my honest take.

And my honest take? This light is really, really good.

This is the Zhiyun Molus X100 RGB Cam Mackey Edition, and I’ve been testing it as a wedding filmmaker, YouTuber, and freelance commercial filmmaker. If you’re like me and you’ve been hunting for one light that can do it all, keep reading.

First Impressions: The Case and What’s Inside

Right out of the gate, I hope you like the color brown and small semi-flightless birds, because Cam Mackey’s logo and branding are all over this light and its carrying case. Personally, I don’t mind it at all. In a sea of black and gray light cases, a little color is a refreshing change.

But the real story here isn’t the case’s look. It’s what’s inside. The word that keeps coming to mind whenever I think about this light kit is versatility, and the included accessories are exactly why.

Here’s what you get straight out of the box:

• The Zhiyun Molus X100 RGB light itself
• Fresnel lens attachment
• Metal magnetic barn doors
• Compact collapsible softbox
• Bowens mount adapter
• Included battery (55Wh)
• AC adapter
• The carrying case

That is a full kit. In one case. That you can carry onto a plane.

The Fresnel Lens: A Surprisingly Great Spotlight

The fresnel lens attaches to the front of the light and gives you roughly a 15 to 20 degree beam angle. To be clear, the beam is not adjustable. You can’t tighten or widen it. But here’s the thing: I didn’t miss that feature at all when I tested this at a real wedding reception.

I set it up in the corner of a dance floor and let it rip, and it lit up the entire space without me once wishing it was wider or narrower. The beam angle is just in the right sweet spot.

That said, I want to be upfront: compared to a dedicated fresnel spotlight like the Practilite 602 or the Aputure 60x, the beam on this light is not quite as crisp. There’s a decent amount of falloff on the edges. But given the wide beam angle, even on a tight dance floor, this light has more than enough spread to cover the space. For the price and what you get in the full kit, it’s a more than reasonable trade-off.

And beyond weddings, this fresnel is equally useful as a hair light or background kicker for YouTube videos, corporate interviews, or commercial shoots. Versatile, as promised.

Barn Doors: Control the Spill

The included metal magnetic barn doors attach directly to the fresnel lens, and they are excellent. They help compensate for the beam’s softer edges by giving you real control over where the light goes and where it doesn’t.

At the wedding I used this at, I was able to dial the barn doors in so the light only hit the dance floor and didn’t bleed onto the walls or ceiling around it. If you’re shooting weddings or events where you need to control spill, you’re going to love these.

The Softbox: A Complete Studio Setup In One Case

Here’s where things get really impressive. This light comes with a compact, collapsible softbox included in the box. That’s not something you expect at this price point.

With most lights, if you want soft, flattering light for an interview or a talking head YouTube video, you have to go buy a separate softbox, figure out how to rig it up, and then figure out how to transport it. With the Molus X100, you just pull the softbox out of the case and you’re good.

And the way Zhiyun designed the case to transport the softbox is genuinely clever: the bottom of the case has ring straps that hold the collapsed softbox perfectly. Slide it in, and the whole kit stays organized and compact. It’s the kind of thoughtful design that makes you realize someone actually used this thing in the field before shipping it.

Bowens Mount Adapter: Maximum Compatibility

If you already own a larger softbox, a spotlight attachment, or other Bowens-compatible modifiers, Zhiyun also includes a Bowens mount adapter so you can use any of that gear with this light. That’s a smart call on their part, and it opens up the modifier ecosystem considerably.

One small gripe: I couldn’t find a good way to store the Bowens adapter in or on the case. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it does mean you’ll need to toss it in your bag separately. A minor inconvenience for an otherwise extremely well-organized kit.

RGB and Bi-Color: Yes, It Does Both

This isn’t just a bi-color light that lets you dial between warm and cool. This light can output any color in the RGB spectrum.

That means if you’re filming a wedding reception and the DJ forgot to bring lights, you can add some color to the dance floor and give the whole thing a vibe. Or if you’re filming a YouTube video and you want to change the color of the background, mimic the look of moonlight coming through a window, or dial in a specific mood, this light can do all of that.

There’s also a companion app so you can control the light wirelessly and really fine-tune the color output. I found it intuitive and easy to use.

If you’re interested in pushing your color work even further in post, you might want to check out my LUTs to help shape the look of your footage after you’ve nailed your lighting.

The Battery: Better Than It Looks On Paper

Here’s the part of this review where I want to push back a little on the spec sheet, because the specs can be misleading.

The included battery is 55 watt hours, which keeps it under the carry-on limit for air travel. Zhiyun rates it at about 34 minutes of runtime at full power. When I first heard that number, I thought, okay, that’s not great.

But then I actually used it at a wedding. A two-hour wedding reception. And the battery still had about 75% charge left when I took the light down at the end of the night.

How? Because in a real-world reception environment, I didn’t need this light at 100% power. I only needed around 20 to 30% brightness to make a meaningful difference on the dance floor. At those power levels, the runtime is dramatically longer than the rated spec at full blast.

This is the kind of thing you can only learn from actually using the gear at a wedding, not from a spec sheet. And it completely changes the value proposition of the included battery. At moderate power, this light can feasibly run an entire wedding reception on the included battery alone. That is a big deal for a light this compact.

The Bottom Line: Is The Zhiyun Molus X100 RGB Worth It?

The Pro Kit of this light runs somewhere between $450 and $500, and for that you get the light, carrying case, fresnel lens, barn doors, softbox, Bowens mount adapter, and battery.

Here’s my honest take: if you want a single lighting kit that can handle a YouTube video on Tuesday, a corporate or commercial shoot on Wednesday, and a wedding reception on Saturday, this light can do all of that. You don’t need multiple different lights. You just need this one.

For filmmakers who are just starting out and looking at buying their first real light, this thing checks a ton of boxes in one purchase. And for experienced filmmakers looking to add something compact and versatile to their kit, it fits right in alongside whatever else you already own.

I would have absolutely loved to have something like this back when I was getting started. Instead I was running Home Depot work lights in 2008. Those things were hot. Literally.

If you want to level up not just your lighting but your entire video production, check out my guide Edit Videos Like a Pro for more tips on producing better content from start to finish.

And if you want to see more of the gear I use and recommend for wedding filmmaking, check out my posts on destination wedding videography gear and how to film a wedding reception.

Both Adobe and Blackmagic have been aggressive about releasing updates every year, and in 2025, both programs are better than ever. But which one actually wins?

I put them head to head in five categories, and I’m going to tell you what I like, what I dislike, and who I think takes the W in each one.

And before we dive in, if you want help editing your videos regardless of which program you use, grab my free Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. It’s completely free and covers my biggest rules for making better edits. Let’s get into it.

1. Stability

Let’s start with arguably the most important category, because it affects literally everything you do when editing: stability. For context, I use both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve pretty interchangeably. It’s almost a coin flip on which one I’ll open for any given project. So when I say that, even now, after Adobe has been working on stability improvements for years, Premiere Pro is still behind DaVinci Resolve in this area, I am not sugarcoating my experience.

The issues I run into most often in the 2025 version of Premiere Pro on PC aren’t hard crashes where the program freezes and closes. That’s actually become less frequent. What I keep running into instead is that the play button will literally stop working while I’m editing.

I’ll be in the middle of a cut, and suddenly I can no longer play back the video. The play button is completely unresponsive. Pressing the spacebar, clicking repeatedly, scrubbing the timeline, none of it works. The video just stays frozen on whatever frame it paused on, and the only fix is to fully restart Premiere.

It’s annoying.

And it happens at least once in every YouTube video I edit in the program. DaVinci Resolve, on the other hand, is not a perfect program either. I do still experience crashes where the program will shut down, especially on very large projects. But here’s the key difference: Resolve has a feature called Live Save, which constantly saves every edit you make in the background.

So even when it does crash, you can restart the program in 10 to 15 seconds and be back exactly where you were. That makes a huge difference. The crashes are still annoying, but the quick recoverability puts Resolve significantly ahead of Premiere when it comes to stability in 2025. 

Winner: DaVinci Resolve

2. Exporting

This one is more nuanced, and it’s actually an area where Premiere Pro has a meaningful advantage in one specific way. In terms of raw export speed, DaVinci Resolve is significantly faster than Premiere Pro, often by several minutes.

The reason isn’t that Resolve has a faster video encoder. From what I’ve found, both programs encode at a similar speed. The difference is in what happens during the export process. When you export from Resolve, it creates the final .MP4 or .MOV file directly. The file starts at 0 MB and builds up as the export runs. Premiere, for some reason, creates a large temporary file first, renders the video to that file, and then copies the video from the temporary file to the final exported file.

If you’ve ever copied a large video file from one location on your hard drive to another, you know that can take a while. That extra copying step is where most of Premiere’s additional export time is spent, and it’s completely unnecessary. That said, there’s one area where Premiere holds a big advantage: multitasking while exporting.

With DaVinci Resolve, once you hit Export and head to the Render page, you’re stuck there until it’s done. You can’t go back to editing. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, lets you send your video to Adobe Media Encoder, which renders it in a completely separate program while you keep editing in Premiere. That is genuinely one of my favorite features in the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

If I have a batch of smaller videos to export, I will often choose to edit in Premiere specifically for this reason. Even though Premiere is slower to render, being able to keep editing while it exports means I save more time overall. 

I would love to see Blackmagic build something like Adobe Media Encoder. They already have the Blackmagic Proxy Generator app that renders proxies in the background. Just make it work for full exports too, and they’d be right there.

Winner: Split (Resolve wins on speed, Premiere wins on multitasking)

3. Color Grading

This is where DaVinci Resolve absolutely dominates, and it shouldn’t be a surprise. Resolve was originally built as a world-class color grading program, and editing tools were added on top of that foundation. Getting good color out of it starts before any of that though, with color management, which Resolve can set up in one click.

At a professional level, I have no complaints about Resolve’s color tools. They are still significantly ahead of Premiere Pro. If you want to go deeper on color grading your videos, I’ve put together a collection of LUTs that I use in my own work, which you can check out here.

That said, there is a real caveat: if you’re a beginner, Resolve’s node-based color workflow can be incredibly intimidating. I know plenty of video editors who have refused to even try Resolve because they don’t want to learn nodes. That’s a legitimate barrier.

Premiere Pro, on the other hand, borrowed the slider-based workflow from Adobe Lightroom and brought it into the color panel. Want to adjust exposure, contrast, or saturation? Just drag a slider. It’s intuitive, and beginners can get results quickly without a steep learning curve.

In a perfect world, I’d love to see Premiere continue adding more robust color tools, and I’d love to see Resolve add a simple, beginner-friendly panel with basic sliders right upfront. Put it on the Cut page, Blackmagic. That’s where all the beginner-friendly stuff lives anyway. So many new editors would appreciate it. 

Winner: Split (Resolve wins for pros, Premiere wins for beginners)

4. Text Tools

Pre-warning: this is another area where Premiere Pro pulls ahead, and it’s not especially close. Adding text in Premiere is genuinely a pleasure. Press T on your keyboard, click anywhere on your video, and start typing. You have full control over fonts, shadows, colors, backgrounds, everything, directly from the properties panel. There are even rulers in the playback window to help you align and position your text. It’s fast, it’s intuitive, and I use it constantly.

DaVinci Resolve has been adding more text controls, and credit where it’s due, they keep improving. But I still find myself fighting against Resolve to get my text looking the way I want. It’s not nearly as fast or easy as Premiere, and that friction adds up over the course of an edit. The one area where Resolve does pull ahead is animated captions.

The DaVinci Resolve 20 update added the ability to automatically generate animated captions similar to what you’d see on TikTok, and having that built natively into the program is great. I want to see them keep pushing this forward.

Honestly, CapCut still does captions better than either of these programs, and I’d love to see both Adobe and Blackmagic catch up there. 

Winner: Premiere Pro

5. AI Tools

This is the biggest buzzword across the entire tech industry right now, and both companies have been investing heavily here, but in very different ways. Adobe has added some genuinely impressive features, like a search panel with media intelligence that lets you search for clips by the objects in them, and their Generative Extend tool, which uses AI to lengthen a video clip by up to two seconds or an audio clip by up to 10 seconds.

That’s cool. But right now it feels like it’s still in its infancy. Videos are limited to lower resolutions, and if you look too closely, the glitches and errors in the generated footage are noticeable.

I’ve talked about my feelings on Adobe’s heavy focus on generative AI in a separate video, but the short version is this: it feels like Adobe is pouring resources into generative AI at the expense of the core speed and stability of Premiere Pro.

And on top of that, they’re starting to charge for these features, which feels like a money grab when video editors are already paying a significant monthly subscription for Creative Cloud. Compare that to what Blackmagic has been building with DaVinci Resolve, and it feels like they are genuinely more in tune with what editors actually need.

The Resolve 20 update added an AI multicam switcher that automatically cuts between camera angles based on who’s speaking, similar to a paid plug-in for Premiere called AutoPod. They added an AI audio assistant that mixes all of your spoken dialogue and music with one click. They added an AI beat detector that analyzes your audio and places markers on all the beats. And one of the most impressive additions is AI Voice Convert, which lets you take a person’s voice and generate an AI voice clone of it.

I’m working on a full video about that last feature because it’s so powerful. If a subject says the wrong word or stumbles through a line, you can potentially recreate that line using their own voice with AI. Back in 2016, Adobe actually showed off a similar technology called Project Voco at their MAX conference and then never shipped it.

Here we are nine years later, and Blackmagic said “if you’re not going to do it, we will.” And they did. 

Winner: DaVinci Resolve

Final Score

Here’s how it breaks down: 

DaVinci Resolve wins outright: Stability, AI Tools 

Premiere Pro wins outright: Text Tools 

Split categories: Exporting, Color Grading

Giving each program half a point on the split categories, the final tally comes out to Resolve: 3 points, Premiere: 2 points.

But here’s the thing: that score doesn’t tell the whole story. These aren’t dramatic blowouts in most categories. If Adobe can get Premiere as stable and fast as Resolve, or if Resolve can leapfrog Premiere on ease of adding text, these rankings shift. Both programs are genuinely good, and the right choice depends on what matters most to your specific workflow.

For me personally, I’m going to keep using both. They each have real strengths and real weaknesses, and being comfortable in both gives me flexibility. I’m also planning to get more serious about Final Cut Pro to round things out even further. If you want to get better at editing regardless of which software you’re using, download my free Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. And let me know in the comments which editor you use and which one you think is better in 2025. I’d love to hear where people land on this.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You decide you want to start filming weddings. You build out a website with info about you, examples of your work, and a contact form… but it’s been a while now and no one is actually reaching out to book you.

What the heck is wrong?

My name is Matt Johnson, I’ve been filming weddings for over 15 years now, and I’ve been teaching a lot of people how to do it too. In this post, I want to share three reasons why your website isn’t booking clients and give you some extremely practical things you can do to improve it right now.

Mistake #1: Treating Your Website Like a Portfolio Instead of a Sales Page

The first mistake I see so many wedding videographers make is that they treat their website like a portfolio page, not a sales page.

When I got started filming weddings about a decade and a half ago, my thinking was: I filmed a wedding, I better put that wedding video on my website. No thought whatsoever about how many wedding videos a couple was actually going to want to sit and watch.

This sounds like a good idea on the surface. You’re keeping your website updated with new content! But the problem is that it can actually hurt your sales. You’ve essentially turned your site into a museum. A couple could come and look at every single video you’ve ever made, five videos, ten videos, hundreds of videos, keep scrolling forever, maybe watch one or two, and then leave without booking you because there is just too much to sift through. And let’s be honest, not every one of those wedding videos is going to be your best work.

I knew a guy who had every single wedding he had ever filmed on a video page that felt like it scrolled forever. He had gotten better over the years, which meant some of those videos were from his first year of filming, and the quality was dramatically worse than his recent stuff. That is not what you want couples seeing.

The goal of your website is not to be a portfolio where people can watch all your work. The point of your website is for people to visit it, identify with you as a filmmaker, and then want to hire you because they can picture you filming their wedding. The entire goal of your website is for it to be a sales page, not a portfolio.

So instead of having 10 or 20 wedding videos on your site, start curating. Cut it down to three, maybe six if they’re all dramatically different from each other. Your goal is to show a very limited selection of your best work so that a couple won’t be overwhelmed and will actually want to book you.

If you’re building your wedding filmmaking business from the ground up and want to know how much you should charge to shoot a wedding film, I’ve got a post on that too.

Mistake #2: Having Too Many Pages on Your Website

This one may seem slightly counterintuitive, but once I explain the psychology behind it, you’re going to be like… oh, that makes total sense.

The second mistake many filmmakers make is having too many pages on their website and not embracing the power of a one-page layout.

When you first start building a website, it’s easy to want a homepage, a videos page, an about page, a pricing page, and a contact page. The problem with that setup, even if you have a very clear menu at the top, is that a multi-page website ignores everything we’ve learned about how people interact with websites over the last 30 years.

The statistics are clear: the vast majority of people who visit a website never click away from the page they originally landed on. If someone clicks through to your homepage, only a small fraction of them will ever navigate to another page. If they come from Google and land on your about page, the odds are they are never going to click anywhere else on your site.

Why? I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s just human psychology and how we don’t like clicking on things if we don’t have to. But here’s what I do know: while the vast majority of people won’t click to a different page, if you put a lot of information on one page and all they have to do is scroll, people will keep scrolling basically forever.

Scrolling: good. Clicking: bad. Think about TikTok or Instagram Reels. What are those systems built around? Not clicking. Not tapping to navigate somewhere new. A simple swipe, a scrolling motion where you’re moving through content with zero friction.

I’m not telling you why it works. I’m just telling you that it works. And what it means for you as a filmmaker is that if you want to maximize bookings, you need to seriously consider moving away from the old multi-page website idea and instead embrace a one-page, sales-oriented layout.

The top of the page looks like a homepage. Scroll down a bit and there are your example videos. Keep scrolling and there’s information about you and your packages. And at the very bottom, as the natural conclusion of this journey you’ve taken the couple on, there’s a contact form where they can reach out.

You’re guiding them along a path. Introducing yourself, forming a connection, and then booking you at the bottom. Trust me. It works.

And if you’re groaning right now because you’ve already built a big multi-page website, don’t think of it like that. Just take your homepage and copy and paste all the contents from your other pages onto that one page. You’ll be turning your website into a booking machine faster than you think.

Mistake #3: A Contact Form That’s Way Too Long

The third mistake I see so many wedding filmmakers make is completely dropping the ball when it comes to their contact form.

For a while, there was this push in the wedding industry for you to “vet” your clients, basically to have them prove they were serious about hiring you. This resulted in contact forms that ballooned to 10 or 15 questions. Not just basic info like your name and email, but also things like: describe your entire wedding day, list all your other vendors, tell me exactly why you want to hire me… and on and on.

Here’s the reality: you’re going to annoy a ton of potential clients. When they get to the point of wanting to reach out to you, the odds are they’ll get halfway through your monster form, say forget it, and go to the next website they’ve already got pulled up, where that filmmaker is just asking for a name, phone number, and wedding date and the whole thing takes 30 seconds to fill out.

Who do you think they’re booking?

Look at your contact form and ask yourself: how can I make it as easy as possible for a couple to reach out to me?

Personally, I’ve always kept mine very simple: the couple’s names, email, phone number, wedding date and location, and an open-ended text box where they can tell me about themselves and their wedding with no requirement for what they need to write there. This gives them flexibility. If they just want to ask about pricing, they can do that. If they want to write me a whole book about their relationship, they’re welcome to do that too. And because the rest of the page has already built a real connection with them by the time they get to the form, a lot of them will end up telling me more without me ever requiring it.

Bonus Tips: Make It Easy for Couples to Reach You

Two bonus tips that are absolutely worth implementing.

First, include a regular email address typed out on your website that people can click or type directly into their email client, no form required. This is especially helpful for anyone who just hates filling out forms.

Second, and this is a big one: put your phone number on your website and tell people they can text you. You will be amazed at how many younger couples are going to text you because they hate email. And you would be shocked by the number of mothers of the bride who are going to actually call you, asking you to film their daughter’s wedding. There is a certain age group that still wants to make phone calls, and if you want bookings, you need to be ready to answer the phone for them.

Putting It All Together

If you can do all of these things, shift your website from a portfolio to a sales page, make it one page long, slim down your contact form, and make your phone number and email easily accessible, you are going to be amazed at how many more inquiries and bookings you start getting.

And while you’re working on getting more couples to your website, make sure the films you’re delivering are as good as they can be. My free guide Edit Videos Like a Pro will help you do exactly that. Check it out, it’s completely free.

Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!

DaVinci Resolve 20 is here, and if you edit wedding videos, you are going to want to pay attention to this one. Blackmagic has packed in over 100 new features, and while a lot of those updates are great across the board, there are five in particular that I think are genuinely game-changing for wedding filmmakers specifically.

And even if you don’t edit weddings, don’t click away just yet. These tools apply to corporate videos, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and more. But if you are a wedding filmmaker like me, I think you’re going to be seriously impressed.

Let’s get into it.

#1: The AI Audio Assistant

One of my favorite new features in DaVinci Resolve 20 has to do with audio, and the reason I love it is simple: it takes a workflow that has traditionally been really complicated and uses AI to make it dramatically simpler while still giving you professional results.

The tool is called the Audio Assistant, and if you’ve edited video before, you know how involved the audio mixing process can be. You’re playing through your video, adjusting levels, adding effects to clean up voices, pulling the music down so it doesn’t drown out the ceremony audio. It’s a whole thing. And if you’re a wedding filmmaker, it’s even more involved because you’re commonly dealing with a ton of different sources at once.

Think about a wedding ceremony alone. You might have a lav mic on the groom, a recorder plugged into the soundboard, a mic on the officiant, ambient mics in the room. I commonly find myself recording five or six sources of audio for a single ceremony. When you import all of that into Resolve, getting it to sound great takes real work. I’ve talked before about how I approach wedding audio recording, and mixing all those sources properly has always been one of the more time-consuming parts of post-production.

That’s exactly what the Audio Assistant is designed to solve. Instead of going through that whole rigorous mixing process by hand, you edit your video like normal, and when it comes time to mix, you click a button. DaVinci Resolve analyzes all of your audio and mixes it for you in less than a minute.

If it works as well as Blackmagic claims, this has the potential to save wedding filmmakers a huge amount of time. I’m going to be putting it through a lot of different scenarios to see how it holds up in real-world wedding projects, so make sure you’re subscribed if you want to see a full tutorial on it down the road.

#2: AI Voice Convert (Voice Cloning)

Okay, this one is legitimately mind-blowing. Like, it almost doesn’t feel like it should be possible. But here’s the scenario that makes it make sense.

You’re filming a wedding and the groom is reading a letter to his bride. He misspeaks, says the wrong thing, stumbles over a line. If that moment is important to the story you’re trying to tell, you’ve historically had two options: track the person down and ask them to re-record the line somehow, or do serious editorial surgery, cutting up other lines they said to piece together individual words and sounds. Neither option is great. Both are going to cost you a significant amount of time.

The new AI Voice Convert tool in DaVinci Resolve 20 changes that entirely.

Here’s how it works: you use existing audio of the person speaking to create a clone of their voice. Then you re-record yourself reading the correct line and convert your voice into theirs using that clone. The result is the person saying what they meant to say, in their own voice, without them ever having to step in front of a mic again.

As editors, we can now fix mistakes, clarify moments, and help our clients actually say what they were trying to say. That makes our films cleaner and our stories stronger. I’ve already put together an in-depth tutorial showing exactly how to use this tool step by step, so check that out if you want to dig deeper.

#3: The AI Music Editor

This is a feature I have been waiting a long time for Blackmagic to add, and it’s finally here: the AI Music Editor.

If you’ve been editing in Premiere Pro, you might already know a version of this tool. But hold on, because Blackmagic has actually improved on it in a meaningful way.

The problem this solves is one every editor has dealt with. You have a song you love, but it’s the wrong length for your video. Traditionally, you’d duplicate the track, manually mix different sections together, find a natural transition point, and try to make it all feel seamless. It’s tedious and it takes time.

With the AI Music Editor in Resolve 20, you select your song, go to the inspector, enable the tool, and you can either type in an exact target length or use the live trim feature to drag the song to the length you want. In a few seconds, the AI remixes it for you.

And here’s where Blackmagic actually one-upped Adobe: instead of just giving you one remixed version, Resolve generates four different AI versions of the remixed song for you to choose from. You can click through them, give each one a listen, and pick the one that works best for your edit. That’s a genuinely better workflow than what Premiere offers right now.

I use this kind of tool constantly to adjust song lengths in my videos, and having it baked directly into Resolve is a huge time saver.

#4: Vertical Video Viewer on the Cut Page

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. The cut page? Does anyone actually use the cut page?

Hold on. Because this update might actually give you a reason to.

If you’re editing wedding films for clients, you know that delivering vertical content for Instagram and TikTok is basically expected at this point. Even if your main deliverable is a full horizontal film, your couple almost certainly wants vertical clips for social too. And editing vertical video in a horizontal preview window has always been kind of awful. You’re squinting at your footage crammed into a tiny preview, trying to judge framing that was designed to be seen at full height.

DaVinci Resolve 20 fixes this on the cut page. If you create a vertical timeline, you can now expand the video viewer and get a native vertical preview window that shows your footage the way it’s actually meant to be seen. No more trying to evaluate vertical framing inside a horizontal box.

If you’re not using this one, I went through DaVinci Resolve – A Premiere Pro Editor’s Perspective and Goodbye Premiere Pro! Why Editors Are Switching To DaVinci Resolve as well.

It sounds like a simple quality-of-life update, but if you’re outputting vertical content regularly, this is going to make your workflow feel a lot cleaner. It might even make you want to spend more time on the cut page. Maybe.

#5: AI Multicam SmartSwitch (Autopod, But Built Into Resolve)

A couple of years ago, a plugin called Autopod took the editing world by storm. It used AI to automatically edit long-form, multi-camera video like a podcast, cutting between camera angles based on who was speaking. It was incredibly useful and saved editors huge amounts of time.

I even made a video showing how you could use Autopod to edit a long-form wedding ceremony, letting it cut between cameras during the ceremony so you weren’t doing it all by hand. It worked really well for that use case.

But Autopod had two downsides. First, it cost money, which is a subscription I still think is worth it. Second, and more importantly for a lot of you: it only worked in Adobe Premiere Pro. If you edit in DaVinci Resolve, you were out of luck.

Well, Blackmagic apparently wasn’t going to wait around for Autopod to release a Resolve version. Instead, they built their own, called AI Multicam SmartSwitch, and it’s included in the free DaVinci Resolve 20 update.

Here’s how it works: you import your footage, create a multicam sequence, right-click on the sequence and select AI Multicam SmartSwitch. You choose your settings (I’d go with no wide angle and best quality), hit okay, and Resolve does the rest. It analyzes the audio to determine who’s speaking AND looks at the lips of the people on camera to confirm, which is actually something Autopod can’t do. Then it generates the multicam cuts for you automatically.

For wedding ceremonies with multiple cameras, this is enormous. And again, it’s free. You don’t need a subscription. It’s just part of the update.

This has the potential to save you a significant amount of time on every wedding ceremony edit you do. If you’re interested in other ways AI is changing wedding film editing workflows, I also did a full review of Plotline AI that you should check out.

Final Thoughts

Those are my top five DaVinci Resolve 20 updates for wedding filmmakers. And honestly, the fact that most of these are available in the free version of Resolve makes it even more impressive. Blackmagic is continuing to push this software into territory that was once reserved for expensive paid tools, and that’s great for all of us.

If you want to keep getting better at editing, regardless of what software you’re in, check out my Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. It covers the most important editing principles I’ve learned over years of editing wedding films and YouTube videos, and it’s completely free.

And if you want to see more DaVinci Resolve tutorials and breakdowns, including a deep dive into some of these new tools, make sure you’re subscribed over on the YouTube channel. There’s a lot more Resolve content coming!

Sigma just revived a legendary lens. This is the Sigma 17-40mm F1.8, and its release marks the return of one of the most iconic APS-C lenses they’ve ever made.

Let me explain by telling you a story about the birth of a legend.

The year is 2013. Up until that point, if you wanted a lens that performed well in low light, your choices were very limited. A fixed prime lens that doesn’t zoom was really the only viable option, because zoom lenses were at best F2.8 if you were lucky and had a big budget.

But that year, everything changed. Sigma realized there was a gap in the market and released what is arguably one of the most compelling zoom lenses ever made for a crop sensor camera: the Sigma 18-35mm F1.8. A relatively compact lens that, most importantly, did not compromise on low light performance. It had an extremely impressive constant F1.8 aperture on a zoom, which was basically unheard of at the time.

Oh yeah, and it had an internal zoom too, which made it basically perfect for filmmaking, especially on a gimbal.

Filmmakers loved this lens. They raved about it online. Left thousands of five-star reviews. It was, in a word, legendary.

But there were two limitations. Two flaws that this lens could never shake.

The first is obvious: there was no full frame option. It was APS-C only. (Sigma has since released a full frame version called the 28-45mm F1.8, which I’ve already reviewed and will link to below.)

The second flaw was arguably worse: this lens was only available for Canon EF and Nikon F mounts. There was no Sony E-mount, no modern mounts for mirrorless cameras at all. Over time, that limitation caused this legendary lens to slowly fall out of favor, not because it wasn’t good, but because filmmakers and photographers wanted native lenses they didn’t have to use an adapter for.

Now, 12 years after the initial release of the 18-35, Sigma is ready to show us what they’ve been working on. The successor to one of their most legendary lenses.

This is the Sigma 17-40mm F1.8.

A successor that improves on the original in every single way. And today, I’m reviewing it from the perspective of a wedding and freelance filmmaker. So if you make money with your camera and you want a super compact F1.8 zoom that gets you incredible-looking footage without breaking the bank, this review is for you.

Quick note on ethics: this is not paid or sponsored by Sigma. They loaned me the lens so I could make this review, and I will be returning it to them shortly.

It’s Tiny. Like, Shockingly Small.

The most obvious improvement whenever you actually hold this lens is the size. This thing is tiny. Ultra compact. I am genuinely shocked that, even though this is not a full frame lens, Sigma was able to make it this small and still keep the F1.8 aperture.

And they kept the internal zoom, too. So not only is this lens incredibly compact, it also doesn’t shift its weight around when you zoom in and out, because the barrel doesn’t extend. That’s a huge deal for gimbal work.

Compared to the original 18-35, the 17-40 is 4mm shorter and 5mm less wide, and the original wasn’t that big to begin with. It’s also very lightweight, coming in at only 525 grams, which is roughly 35% lighter than the original 18-35.

And keep in mind: this isn’t just a repackaged 18-35. Sigma has actually added more zoom range on both ends of the lens, picking up an extra millimeter on the wide end and five more on the tight end. You’re getting more range in a smaller, lighter package. If anyone tries to tell you lens technology hasn’t improved in the last 12 years, just show them this lens.

On top of the size improvements, Sigma included everything you’d expect from a modern lens: an aperture ring that can be made clickless (huge for video), an AF/MF switch, two programmable buttons, and a 67mm filter thread that is very easy to find adapters for. The 17-40 is extremely full-featured.

If you want to go deeper, I’ve also got Sony 35mm GM 1.4 Lens Review For Filmmakers – BEATS Sigma 35mm 1.2.

Image Quality, Autofocus, and the Stuff That Actually Matters

None of the size and weight wins would matter if the image quality took a hit. So let’s talk about that.

When I threw this lens on a rented Sony FX30, I was pleasantly surprised. The image quality is quite good, everything you’d expect from a modern zoom lens. It’s sharp, the colors are accurate and vibrant, and let me just say: that F1.8 aperture is putting in serious work once things get dark. It looks absolutely gorgeous in low light.

Autofocus? Really good. Fast, accurate, and I didn’t see it hunting at all. Solid work from Sigma here.

How about focus breathing? Minimal. It’s still noticeable if you do a full rack focus, but it’s very small and very acceptable in my opinion.

Is it parfocal? Ehhh, no. It’s close, but focus does shift slightly when you zoom in and out. Whether that matters to you depends on how you shoot. If you’re relying on autofocus, it probably doesn’t matter much at all.

Who Is This Lens For?

If I owned a Sony FX30 and wasn’t just renting one, maybe I was a newer filmmaker just getting started, looking for a super solid and extremely versatile zoom lens that would look incredible and still give me gorgeous low light shots, I would pick this Sigma up in a heartbeat.

Especially when you consider that Sigma is charging $920, which is kind of mind-blowing when you realize the original 18-35 is still on sale for $880 at the time of me making this video. Forty dollars more for all of these improvements? I’ll take it.

If you’re also in the market for something on the full frame side, check out my review of the Sigma 35mm F1.2 Mark II, another lens that Sigma improved in every single way over its predecessor. The pattern here is clear: Sigma is on a roll right now.

And if you want to take your editing to the next level once you’ve got great footage in the bag, my free guide Edit Videos Like a Pro is a great place to start.

The Verdict

The Sigma 18-35 is dead. But it had a son.

Long live the Sigma 17-40 F1.8.

Will you be getting one?