DaVinci Resolve 21 Officially Released

PHOTO Editor

DaVinci Resolve’s powerful post-production workflow now integrates still photo editing. The new Photo page allows you to import and manage photos, and work in conjunction with the Color page to apply node-based grading. Colorists and photographers can now use Hollywood-grade color grading tools on still images.

You can artistically adjust the colors of your entire project using Primary Color Correction, curves, qualifiers, Power Window, and the node editor. Additionally, the DaVinci Color panel allows you to adjust multiple parameters simultaneously.

DaVinci Resolve’s powerful node-based workflow is now available for still photography. Add nodes in series or parallel to build complex grades, apply different corrections to multiple parts of an image simultaneously, and use shared nodes to apply a specific look to an entire photo album.

The photo page allows you to reframe and crop images while maintaining their original source resolution and aspect ratio. Since the quality of the original file is perfectly preserved in all adjustments, you can adjust the composition at any time without affecting image quality.

The LightBox view on the photo page displays an entire album with grading applied. Select any image and grade it live, and the results are reflected in real time across the entire collection. You can filter by grading status, star rating, flags, and clip color for quick library management.

Albums

Albums allow you to create and manage collections directly within DaVinci Resolve. You can create albums based on any criteria, such as shooting date or camera model, and significantly reduce working time by handling tagging and RAW settings all at once. Albums are displayed as a timeline on color pages, cut pages, and edit pages for easy access.

Camera Control allows you to tether your Sony or Canon camera directly to DaVinci Resolve and capture images live. You can adjust camera settings such as ISO, exposure, and white balance, monitor them in live view, and save capture presets to fix a consistent look before shooting. Images are saved directly to your album.

ResolveFX and OpenFX plugins are also supported for still photos in the Photo Page, allowing you to apply effects, graphics, transformations, and DCTL. You can apply looks directly using LUTs in the Photo Page, or you can generate and save LUTs to apply in-camera or while monitoring.

The Photos page gives you access to DaVinci Resolve’s powerful native AI tools. Tools like AI Magic Mask allow you to select people or objects with a single click and color grade each element in the image individually. Or, you can upscale low-resolution images using the new AI UltraSharpen.

The photo pages are integrated into DaVinci Resolve’s multi-user collaborative workflow using Blackmagic Cloud. In addition to album content, all relevant metadata, tags, grades, and effects can be shared simultaneously with colorists, VFX artists, and editors worldwide.

AI tools

AI IntelliSearch allows you to instantly search for people and content. It analyzes media and uses the IntelliSearch tool to find keywords contained within specific objects or conversations. You can even search for individual faces. Results appear as clips in your media pool, making clip management and editing faster.

Using an AI voice generator, you can generate speech from text using Blackmagic’s voice models or your own voice samples. The DaVinci AI Neural Engine can generate unique voices from clips as short as 10 seconds. You can adjust the speed, pitch, and even intonation to create multiple versions for voiceovers, narrations, and more.

AI CineFocus

AI CineFocus allows you to adjust the focus of your shots. Click to focus on a specific area of ​​the scene, then adjust the aperture and focal length to change the depth of field. Advanced controls allow you to select aperture shapes and add lens effects such as bokeh. Rack focus is also possible by controlling parameters with keyframes.

The AI ​​Face Age Change Tool allows you to change the age of actors. By analyzing faces, entering the subject’s age, and adjusting the age offset slider, you can add or remove aging features such as wrinkles and facial roundness, making it ideal for maintaining consistency in flashbacks and future scenes.

AI Face Shape Adjustment allows you to modify the shape and position of facial features in moving subjects. It detects and tracks faces within a clip, and uses various AI Face Shape Adjustment parameters to adjust the shape of the eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, and even the entire face. The results can be fine-tuned manually.

The AI ​​blemish removal tool is ideal for minimizing the appearance of blemishes such as acne, uneven skin tone, dark spots, and pores while maintaining the natural texture of your skin. The intensity slider allows you to adjust the amount of the tool applied depending on the subject in the scene.

AI Slate ID automatically detects slate (clapperboard) information. It intelligently extracts metadata from the slate within the frame, even in dark or out-of-focus clips, significantly reducing the time required for metadata input. Media can be made editable with unprecedented speed.

DaVinci Resolve’s cutting-edge sharpening tools allow you to produce incredibly clear, high-quality videos. Applying AI UltraSharpen to upscaled videos can sharpen previously unusable footage to high resolution. AI UltraSharpen can also improve and correct even slight focus errors.

Motion Blur Removal

AI motion blur removal can eliminate common motion blur artifacts, such as streaks and blurring, from video content. By analyzing the source media file and generating a new render with significantly reduced blur, you can achieve a more dynamic image. This is ideal for creating impressive slow-motion or freeze-frame effects.

Cut and Edit

The keyframe update includes new ease animations (loop/ping-pong/relative modes) and simultaneous adjustment of multiple clips. The curve editor’s zoom mode automatically scales curves based on available vertical space. 4-point bejacing helps with complex timing adjustments in videos.

Fusion effects can now be directly adjusted in the keyframe and curve editors on the cut and edit pages. This allows for a more seamless workflow, as you can adjust text, transitions, and motion graphics without leaving the edit page. For advanced VFX adjustments, simply click the Fusion button.

OGraf natively supports HTML graphics and Lottie animations, allowing you to drag and drop .json and .lottie files directly into the media pool and treat them like rendered animation clips. Alpha channels are also recognized, allowing you to overlay graphics and titles onto video tracks.

Multilingual spell checking can now be enabled for all text elements, fonts can be previewed in a dedicated font browser window, and emojis can be used in text. Character-level styling is also supported, allowing attributes such as font size, weight, and color to be set within a single text box, making title design easy.

The bin list menu on the cut page now includes Smart Bins and buttons for quick access to creating new bins. Smart Bins allow you to refine your media pool search in a sophisticated way based on a wide range of rules and conditions. For example, you can set it to display only .braw clips that are flagged in green.

Color

The MultiMaster Trim Manager in allows you to generate multiple HDR/SDR trims for delivery from a single timeline. When enabled, an additional layer for trimming appears in the node editor, allowing you to manage the timeline’s color for each output format and render all versions at once.

The “Magic Mask” palette now includes a “Render and Replace” function, allowing tracked masks to be cached as traveling matte nodes. The generated matte is automatically linked to the active node. This significantly reduces processing load while enabling continuous real-time grading and effect application.

In this view, nodes are displayed in numerical order within the node graph. This makes the interface easier to read and facilitates operations such as adding, labeling, switching, pinning, bypassing, and deleting nodes.

Fusion

Fusion now includes the popular and evolving Krokodove compositing tool library. This collection includes a wide range of features, from productivity-enhancing utility tools to basic vector/data tools and customizable 2D/3D graphic templates usable throughout DaVinci Resolve.

The macro editor in DaVinci Resolve 21 has also been updated, making it easier than ever to build Fusion tools and templates. The interface has been dramatically improved, allowing you to create custom tools and templates more quickly and intuitively. Take advantage of the new Inspector View to easily set up, format, publish, and use your macros right away.

Fairlight’s Animator Modifier connects Fusion to Fairlight’s audio engine, enabling automated animation based on audio analysis. Parameters such as eyes and lips are controlled based on the audio level of clips in the timeline or media pool, resulting in dynamic animation.

The USD toolset has been updated to USD SDK 25.11, which includes the Hydra 2.0 API for the Storm renderer. This gives VFX artists an enhanced USD environment in Fusion, with support for 3D matte objects and textures, USD Texture Projector and Catcher, and in/out controls for the entire USD loader.

Fairlight

To optimize the Fairlight timeline space, audio tracks can now be assigned to folders that can be collapsed into a single composite view. When collapsed, the contents of the folder are displayed as small squares, showing the number and length of clips. Expanding the folder gives access to the individual tracks.

Next-generation engineering

Apple Immersive’s powerful image processing capabilities now include support for foveated rendering, improving playback performance and the viewing experience. Foveated rendering simulates human vision by prioritizing high-resolution rendering of the area the viewer is looking at, reducing the GPU load in the peripheral field of view.

DaVinci Resolve 21 offers the most comprehensive immersive tools and workflow support to date. Using the standard immersive options in the master project settings, you can create content in any supported immersive format for distribution on platforms such as MetaQuest and YouTube VR.

Immersive media orientation can now be adjusted using spherical Panomap rotation, allowing for more intuitive control of pitch, tilt, pan, yaw, and roll. Furthermore, ILPD retargeting data can now be applied in the Fusion page, enabling more advanced processing and compositing of stereoscopic media.

Tools for content creators

ResolveFX’s new picture-in-picture feature lets you quickly resize video clips and overlay them as floating frames on top of other clips. It’s perfect for presentations, reviews, and reaction videos. You can adjust parameters such as size, placement, frame rounding, and drop shadows.

IntelliScript now supports Final Draft and plain text script formats, allowing for quick timeline construction. Upon import, the script text is compared to the original transcript audio, generating scene cuts that can then be fine-tuned using standard editing tools.

The new DaVinci Resolve 21 Media Pool column makes media management even easier. New star rating and tagging parameters are now accessible in the Shot and Scene categories of the Metadata panel. Clips can be rated with a 5-star scale, and you can use tags like Good Take, Untagged, and Rejected to narrow down to the best takes and performances.

Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design, commented as follows:

Features of DaVinci Resolve 21