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.

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!