Big Idea

The argument in one line.

DaVinci Resolve 21 turns years of Adobe exclusives into free features overnight, and the gap between what Blackmagic gives away and what Adobe charges for is now wide enough to make the subscription conversation uncomfortable.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

A working video editor using DaVinci Resolve who wants to know what changed and whether it's worth upgrading.
A freelancer or small studio editor who handles client work involving re-touching, de-aging, or multi-deliverable timelines.
Someone currently paying for Lightroom or Adobe Creative Cloud who is curious whether Resolve can replace part of that stack.
A wedding or event videographer managing large clip counts who needs smarter bin organization tools.

SKIP IF…

You're looking for a deep hands-on demo — this is an announcement overview, not a tutorial.
You edit on Final Cut Pro or Premiere and have no interest in switching ecosystems.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Blackmagic promised a bug-fix year and then kept adding features until Resolve 21 became one of their biggest releases. Nine distinct AI tools cover everything from clip content search and voice cloning to depth-of-field simulation and face de-aging. A new photo editing page puts Lightroom-comparable tools — raw support, node-based color, tethering, multi-user — directly inside Resolve. Background rendering finally eliminates the blocking proxy and transcript dialogs. All of it ships as a free update, with the beta available the same day as the announcement.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:35

01 · Cold open — premise reset

Host sets up the surprise: Blackmagic promised a minimal update, then kept adding features until it became one of their biggest releases.

00:35 – 02:32

02 · AI IntelliSearch + AI Speech Generator

IntelliSearch analyzes footage for faces, objects, colors — searchable by text. Speech Generator clones a voice from 10 seconds of audio and generates speech from typed text.

02:32 – 05:04

03 · AI Cinefocus + AI Face Age Transformer

Cinefocus adds post-production depth of field to flat footage. Face Age Transformer offsets apparent age with wrinkle add/remove — framed as a practical client service tool.

05:04 – 06:11

04 · AI Face Reshaper + AI Blemish Removal

Face Reshaper adjusts facial geometry; also usable for animating still photos beyond Ken Burns. Blemish removal handles acne and bruising for talent-sensitive clients.

06:11 – 08:13

05 · AI Slate Detection + Ultra Sharpen + AI Motion Deblur

Slate Detection auto-reads clapper board metadata. Ultra Sharpen recovers unusable footage. Motion Deblur removes camera shake artifacts from low-shutter-speed clips.

08:13 – 10:08

06 · Photo editing page

Full Lightroom-comparable workflow inside Resolve: raw files, node-based color for photos, lightbox, albums, tethering, multi-user. Positioned as a direct Adobe challenge.

10:08 – 12:03

07 · Edit/Cut page + Color improvements

HTML + Lottie animation support. Spell checker and emoji in text tool. Multi-master trim manager for SDR/HDR. Magic mask render cache. Nodes-as-layers view.

12:03 – 13:07

08 · Fusion updates

Crocodove acquisition adds a polished preset library. Audio-driven fusion animation syncs motion to audio automatically.

13:07 – 14:51

09 · Fairlight + Fairlight Live + Background Rendering

Fairlight gets folder tracks and 6-band EQ. New free Fairlight Live app for live production. Background rendering for footage, proxies, and transcripts — no more blocking dialogs.

14:51 – 16:43

10 · Pricing + CTA

Free update for all users. Beta available same day. CEO acknowledged they may charge in the future. Subscribe + free guide CTA.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

DaVinci Resolve 21 adds nine separate AI tools in a single free update — Blackmagic called it a bug-fix year, then kept shipping features.
AI voice cloning in Resolve 21 requires only 10 seconds of source audio, down from the previous requirement of 5-10 minutes.
The new photo editing page supports raw files, node-based color grading, tethering, and multi-user — a direct challenge to Lightroom inside an app editors already own.
AI Cinefocus adds simulated shallow depth of field to flat footage in post, removing the need for a fast lens if the shot is already captured.
Background rendering in Resolve 21 means proxies and AI transcripts generate while you keep editing — no more blocking dialogs that freeze your workflow.
The nodes-as-layers view is the most significant on-ramp change Blackmagic has made — it gives Premiere and Final Cut editors a familiar entry point into Resolve's color tools.
AI Slate Detection reads clapper board metadata automatically and tags clips — useful once a project exceeds ~50 takes.
Fairlight Live is a free standalone live-audio app that integrates with ATEM switchers — Blackmagic is building a closed loop from camera to edit to live production.
The Multi-master trim manager lets SDR and HDR versions of a timeline coexist without duplicating timelines — a long-requested color workflow fix.
DaVinci Resolve 21 is the third consecutive year Blackmagic has shipped a major release as a free update, and the CEO signaled they may charge for it in the future.

Takeaway

What Resolve 21's AI wave actually means for your workflow

WHAT TO LEARN

Blackmagic delivered more than a bug-fix year, and nine AI tools collectively lower the cost of production-quality output for solo editors who previously needed expensive gear or separate subscriptions.

AI IntelliSearch makes large-project clip management practical for the first time — once a project exceeds 100+ clips, content search pays for itself in search time alone.
The voice cloning update drops the source-audio requirement from five to ten minutes down to ten seconds, making clip repair and client voiceover work genuinely fast rather than a last resort.
AI Cinefocus and the Face Age Transformer are post-production substitutes for expensive production decisions — a fast lens or a de-aging session both have workarounds now that exist in a free update.
Blemish removal and face reshaping are client-service tools, not novelties — editors who work with talent-sensitive clients now have a professional answer to common retouching requests.
The photo editing page gives a video editor already in Resolve a reason to drop a separate Lightroom subscription — raw file support, node-based color for stills, and tethering are all there.
Background rendering removes the biggest workflow interruption in the previous version: proxies, transcripts, and footage render while you keep editing — no more blocking dialogs.
The nodes-as-layers view is the most significant on-ramp change Blackmagic has made for editors coming from Premiere or Final Cut — Resolve's steepest adoption barrier now has a navigable bridge.
Fairlight Live being free and ATEM-compatible closes a loop for live production setups that already use Blackmagic hardware, adding a proper mixing desk at zero additional cost.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

AI IntelliSearch: A Resolve feature that analyzes footage for faces, objects, and colors, then lets you search clips by content — similar to Adobe Premiere's Content Analysis. Most valuable on projects with 100+ clips.
AI Cinefocus: A post-production tool that adds simulated shallow depth of field to footage that was shot flat, using AI to isolate a subject and generate believable bokeh.
AI Face Age Transformer: A tool that tracks a face in a clip and offsets its apparent age older or younger by a specified number of years, adding or removing wrinkles and facial aging markers.
Magic Mask: A Resolve color tool that automatically isolates a region of a frame (e.g., a person or object) for targeted grading. Resolve 21 adds a render cache so it no longer has to recalculate on every scrub.
Multi-master Trim Manager: A color workflow feature that stores multiple color versions (e.g., SDR and HDR) on a single timeline, replacing the previous approach of maintaining parallel timelines.
Fairlight Live: A new free standalone app from Blackmagic for live audio production, supporting dozens to thousands of inputs and integrating with their ATEM video switchers.
Crocodove: A company acquired by Blackmagic that produced preset and tool libraries for Resolve's Fusion compositing page. Their library ships bundled with Resolve 21.
Lottie: A JSON-based animation format originally from Airbnb that plays vector animations at any resolution. Resolve 21 adds native Lottie import for graphics workflows.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:50productDaVinci Resolve 21 beta ↗

12:04productCrocodove presets

16:15productEdit Videos Like A Pro (free guide) ↗

16:15productWhoIsMatt LUTs ↗

00:00toolSoundStripe ↗

00:00toolArtlist ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

09:51

“They've added a whole photo editing page and suddenly Lightroom users are like, hold up. What?”

visceral reaction moment — punchy, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

16:42

“You can now do that in DaVinci Resolve. Yes. Yes, you can. And it feels kinda like DaVinci's gunning for Adobe here.”

direct editorial take on the competitive angle→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

15:10

“If you leave Resolve alone for a little bit, it will start background rendering all of your footage to make it smoother and easier for you to play. Heck yeah.”

emotional payoff for a workflow pain everyone has felt→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

25:03

“I wrote it, AI did not write it. Okay? I feel like you have to say that these days.”

self-aware aside that lands as a punchline — cultural moment→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

analogy

00:00Blackmagic just announced DaVinci Resolve '20 one with some wild updates. And in this video, we're gonna talk about all these changes and upgrades, and I'm gonna tell you about the best new features that you're gonna be the most excited about as a video editor. So let's get into it.

00:14Now, when Blackmagic first started talking about these updates to DaVinci Resolve, they said that they were planning on being more of a bug fix year. More of a year where, hey, there's not as many feature updates, but we made the program smoother and better overall. But then they said that they just started adding new things, and then more new things.

00:31And then before you know it, it was a very full featured update, and, yeah, it's crazy. So right off the bat, we gotta talk about the new AI tools because that's what everybody cares about.

00:41The AI. We all wanna know what cool new AI stuff is gonna help us be better as video editors. And the first thing they announced was something called AI IntelliSearch.

00:50And this is a feature that Adobe has already had in Premiere Pro and it's something that I'm so glad to see now available in DaVinci Resolve as well. So with it, you can have Resolve now analyze all of your footage and it can detect things like people's faces. That way you can tell exactly who is in a scene.

01:06It can detect objects. It can detect colors.

01:09A wide variety of things can be analyzed by the AI and then catalog. So if you have, let's say, your dog and you're filming and you're like, I wanna find all the clips of my dog, you can type dog in and they'll bring up all the clips with the dog, which is not super useful if it's only like 10 clips, but if you're working with a very large project, maybe it's a wedding video with 500 plus clips.

01:28That's whenever a feature like this AI IntelliSearch can start being really beneficial. Next, and here's where things get really crazy, Blackmagic introduced an AI speech generator where you can literally type some text into a box and it will then generate an audio file of that text being spoken. And you can either use pre made voices that they offer or you can create a custom voice over using an existing audio file.

01:51So as long as you have at least ten seconds someone speaking, you can take that audio and use it to create an AI voice which is really crazy and is honestly kind of terrifying because it's something that Adobe actually created almost 10 ago now.

02:06They showed off a feature like this and then they canned it because it was pretty controversial. Right? But now with the advent of AI and so much AI voice over stuff, I think Blackmagic says, hey, we're gonna offer it now.

02:15To be clear, this voice clone feature is something that was already available in the previous version of DaVinci Resolve, but you literally had to have five to ten minutes of someone speaking and then you could clone their voice and then you have to record yourself speaking in the same cadence as them and then you could turn your voice into their voice.

02:32A bit more work. Now, in DaVinci Resolve 21, you literally just type the words that you want and it will be made into someone else's voice, which is wild. Just don't trust anything you see in the Internet.

02:43Okay? Next, keeping on this crazy sci fi futuristic trend where we're cloning voices and things like that with AI, there's a new feature called AI Cinefocus, and this is very similar to Apple's cinematic mode or there was a camera back in the day called a Lytro light field camera that you could basically record something and then change the focus after the fact.

03:04Well, you can now do that in DaVinci Resolve, kind of. If you already have filmed something that has a very shallow depth of field, you can't remove the shallowness and get more depth.

03:14But if you have a very flat video that does not have a shallow depth of field, maybe it's something you filmed with your phone for example, you can then take that video and add depth of field to it. And from the previews, this looks very easy to do.

03:29It's not like you're having to manage multiple layers and create a depth map like you have to do currently in DaVinci Resolve. No. In DaVinci Resolve 21, you can learn just click around and say, hey, I want this person or object being focused, blur out the rest of it and you can control things like the bokeh and the shape and how exactly it looks which is really crazy.

03:48So if you've been filming a lot with a camera that does not have a shallow depth of field and you don't want to spend money on an f 1.2 lens, maybe just add your blur in post in DaVinci Resolve. Next, we gotta talk about Benjamin Button.

04:00Yeah. You remember him, right? Aged in reverse.

04:02He was old and he was young. Yeah. Very weird movie with Brad Pitt.

04:06Well, they just added that capability to DaVinci Resolve and you're like, Matt, what the heck are you talking about? Well, there is now an AI face age transformer tool in DaVinci Resolve where you can literally record someone, tell DaVinci Resolve that your clip is of a person, type in their age, and then you can offset the age either older or younger and it will actually track their face and make them look older or younger which is crazy.

04:34We're talking about adding or removing wrinkles. Literally making people look way older or way younger and this is something that it feels like Marvel had a while ago where they're like, hey, we're de aging people and it all just kinda looked weird. Well, now you can de age people on your computer at home.

04:50Look, I know this is weird. Okay? But at the same time, I know that there are a lot of clients out there that you may be filming that want to look younger and you're like, hey, you wanna look younger?

05:00Yeah. We can do that now. Cool.

05:02And then they're gonna be really happy. So viable option for you.

05:06Now, keeping on this face warping trend here, there's actually a new tool called an AI face reshaper which will literally let you adjust people's facial features. Make them wider, make them tighter, adjust exactly how they look in DaVinci Resolve.

05:21And so Blackmagic said this could be really useful for comedy if you wanted to really exaggerate people's facial features, but also what I think is really interesting is that you can use it animate still images. So if you're trying to animate some photos for a documentary, you know, you can do the Ken Burns effect where you're slowly having them animate across the screen, but what if they were moving a little bit too?

05:42That's kind of intriguing. Right? So that is now possible with this AI face reshaper tool in Resolve.

05:47We're not done with the faces yet either by the way. Sorry. There's also an AI blemish removal tool as well.

05:53So I think this could be really useful as someone that has to be on camera lot the amount of times I've woken up and I'm like, oh, I have terrible acne today or wow, I bumped my head and I got a black eye which has happened before and I had to make up myself. Well, there's now an AI blemish removal tool in Resolve that looks like it's gonna work pretty darn well to help minimize facial blemishes And I think this could be really useful if you have clients that are sensitive about that and they say, hey, can you airbrush me a little bit?

06:18Yeah. Of course, can. AI can do it in Resolve.

06:20What other AI stuff do we got? Well, keeping on that trend of AI IntelliSearch where Resolve can now analyze your video clips and knows what's in them, there is a new feature where Resolve can actually detect a slate or clapper board that is visible in the shot.

06:34So if you are filming a bigger production and you have a clapper and so you're doing different takes and different dates and different times and you wanna have that all catalog, Resolve will actually detect that there is a slate that's being held up in front of the camera.

06:47It will generate markers and it can also read all the slate data and add it to the metadata of each video clip. So you don't have to do that manual anymore, it'll just work which I think that is a great time saving tool that's gonna be really really useful for bigger productions.

07:03Now, there's one thing that I'm really excited about AI being able to improve, it's gonna be in the area of sharpening and upscaling things. And I'm very excited to tell you that there's a new ultra sharpen tool in Resolve that they say can make things significantly clearer and can even help you if you have footage that may be unusable and actually make it sharper.

07:22So I'm a little skeptical. We're gonna have to test this and see how good it is, but if it can save footage that you may have be a little bit too blurry, that could be really exciting. Last but not least for AI editing tools, there's a feature called AI motion deblur and as the name implies, if you have a video clip that has a lot of motion blur, maybe you're shaking the camera back and forth like Cloverfield, but your shutter speed is set too low, so everything looks really shaky.

07:44It's hard to see what's going on. This motion deblur feature will literally analyze the video file and remove a lot of that motion blur and make it clearer and easier for you to see which I think is actually really useful considering how many shots I've had over the years that have been blurry and I'm like, why is that camera shaky there?

08:01Now, if I had a bingo card that listed off all the things that I can see Blackmagic adding to DaVinci Resolve this year, I can tell you what wouldn't have been on the list, but now that I see it, it's not surprising at all. Photo editing.

08:15Yes. Like you would do in Lightroom. Yeah.

08:18You can now do that in DaVinci Resolve. They've added a whole photo editing page and suddenly, Lightroom users are like, hold up.

08:27What? Capture One users like, wait, If you are editing videos and photos, you cannot do that in the same app?

08:35Yes. Yes, you can. And it feels kinda like Da Vinci's gunning for Adobe here a little bit and I'm glad to see it.

08:42I love the competition. This is fantastic. So they've actually added photo editing capabilities for raw files, but also a lot of the DaVinci Resolve magic and power user tools that you would expect are also there.

08:55So it's a very interesting fusion as it were, which we'll talk about fusion here in a little bit. But you're literally looking at color grading tools that you would normally see in Resolve now being capable of being used for photos as well.

09:09So right off the bat, I'm sure you're thinking, Matt, could this replace Lightroom? And I have to say, in the previews they were showing, uh, maybe because there are sliders just like you would expect in Lightroom.

09:20It's a very similar interface in some ways to Lightroom, so there's gonna be some familiarity there if you're coming from it. But at the same time, you also get all of the color tools you may already expect from Resolve as well. So if you want to color your photos with nodes, you can now do that which is crazy.

09:38There's cropping and reframing. There's a light box mode. You can have albums just like you would in Lightroom.

09:45And then here's a pro feature. Tethering is supported as well. You can literally just connect your camera into your computer and start shooting photos and they will be instantly imported into Resolve.

09:54There's even multi user support where multiple people can be editing photos at the same time. So yes, we're seeing Blackmagic take on Premiere Pro with the edit and cut pages, After Effects with the Fusion page, and now finally Lightroom with the photos page. All in one app.

10:09You don't have to have the whole Adobe Suite. They're all right here in one application. Okay.

10:13Enough talking about photos. Let's talk about videos specifically with the edit and cut pages. There are some other nice updates here as well including HTML graphics and Lottie support.

10:22So if you want to use HTML graphics animations, you can now import those and they will work as animations natively in resolve which should save people a lot of time. Even better personally for me, I'm very excited about a spell checker now being included in the edit text tool which I think was needed for a long time.

10:39I know that I've misspelled a lot of stuff. I've seen a lot of misspellings in DaVinci Resolve edited videos. I think that's very useful and there's also emoji support now too.

10:47Finally, I've been waiting on that for a while. There's a man of times that I've wanted to add emojis to a video clip and haven't been able to. I've had to like get a PNG and import that.

10:54Now you can just do it natively and it's great. Let's talk about color now. There's a new multi master trim manager feature which is actually pretty sick because if you are working on a timeline and you know you need to have multiple deliverables, maybe if one version is gonna be standard dynamic range, another one that's gonna be HDR.

11:10In previous versions of Resolve, you would have to literally create multiple different timelines and be managing all them, but now with this trim manager, you can have one timeline and multiple different versions of the color on that timeline that will keep everything consistent.

11:26I think it's gonna save people a lot of time. What else do we have? There's a magic mask render in place feature now where you can literally cache a magic mask which will make work with magic mask a lot easier I think.

11:37Here's a weird one. Do you wish that you could use layers instead of nodes? Yeah.

11:41I know. I know. That's a little weird, right?

11:43Especially if you're already in the node ecosystem but resolve knows there's a lot of people that are intimidated by that. So they said, hey, what if you could view your nodes as layers?

11:53How about that? Right? You can now do that which is really an interesting workaround and I'm very excited to try this out.

12:00Now let's talk about fusion because there was some really exciting updates there too. Recently, Blackmagic acquired a company called Crocodove and what they offer is this library of different presets and tools for fusion and they look really really good.

12:16So if you've been wanting more presets to work with, I think this is a fantastic addition to fusion that's gonna save people a lot of time. Speaking of saving people time, there's also now a new feature called audio driven fusion animation which as name implies, whenever they show this, was like, oh, this is so cool. So you can literally have your animation sync up now with an audio file very quickly and easily.

12:38What about Fairlight? Did we get any Fairlight updates? Yes.

12:40You can now add audio tracks to folders which is nice. It can make your timeline look a lot cleaner whenever you're working with a lot of different audio tracks. I think that's really useful, but otherwise it was little stuff like a six band clip EQ and EQ level matcher and chain effects.

12:56There's nothing really big for Fairlight otherwise, but there's a reason for that. And the reason is that Blackmagic also introduced an entirely separate app today called Fairlight Live. And as the name implies, this is a standalone piece of software that is completely free by the way that you can use to control all of your audio inputs if you're running a live video production.

13:20So if you are running 20 inputs, 30 inputs, hundreds of inputs, thousands of inputs, you can run all of them through Fairlight live now and handle all of your mixing and all the controls you'd always expect to see on the Fairlight page now in this separate Fairlight Live app and I think that's gonna be really useful. They said this Fairlight Live feature was also gonna be compatible with the ATEM mini switchers that they make.

13:42They're gonna do a big software update to enable all of them to be compatible as well. Really good stuff there. Next, let's talk about another update that Blackmagic has not been shouting from the rooftops, but one that I'm actually extremely excited about and that is background rendering support.

13:57Yes. Finally, if your computer is struggling with playing back your footage, guess what?

14:02If you leave Resolve alone for a little bit, it will start background rendering all of your footage to make it smoother and easier for you to play. Heck yeah. In addition, you can also set up proxies for background rendering now.

14:15So before, you would either have to use the completely separate proxy generator app and have that all set up or you would have to create proxies in Resolve and it would bring up a box and not let you do anything else until it was done. Well, not any longer. Now it will run-in the background which is so great to see.

14:32And in addition, you can also have transcripts generated in the background as well. So if you've been enjoying creating those AI transcripts, don't have to wait for them to be made. Now, they'll be done in the background.

14:41As you can see, this is pretty full featured update for DaVinci Resolve and they really went hard on the AI features this year. And at the same time, I feel like Blackmagic was like, hey, what if we just take out Lightroom also? Okay.

14:53Well, let's see what happens there with that. I personally love to see the competition. I'm very interested in seeing how Adobe responds to this especially considering that yes, this is a free update.

15:04Wow. Right? Isn't that crazy?

15:05Yet again, just like last year, Grant Petty, the CEO of Blackmagic said, hey, uh, we should be charging for this basically. We may charge for it in the future, but we're not.

15:15He said that enough people have been buying the studio version of Resolve to make it worth it for them to still be able to offer it for free, which is great. So if you already own DaVinci Resolve Studio, it's a free update.

15:27If you want the free version of DaVinci Resolve, it's still free, which is so great to see. But now there's added features like photo editing and a lot of AI tools. And I'm very interested to test this and see what is available in the free version versus the studio version.

15:42So please subscribe if you wanna see that. And hey, if you wanna download DaVinci Resolve 21, the beta is available today. You can go download it right now and play around with it.

15:50That's what I'm gonna be doing. And like I said, please subscribe if you wanna see more videos about DaVinci Resolve and filmmaking and video editing because I have a lot of videos that I wanna make about this update as well as others. Thanks so much for watching.

16:02I will link down in the video description to my edit videos like a pro guide if you wanna check that out. Regardless whether you're editing in DaVinci Resolve or another software, it's gonna show you my biggest rules that I follow as a video editor to make and edit better videos. So you can download completely for free in the video description.

16:16I wrote it, AI did not write it. Okay? I feel like you have to say that these days.

16:20Hope you have a great day. Take care.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Blackmagic promised a quiet bug-fix year. Then they kept adding features. By the time DaVinci Resolve 21 shipped, it had nine AI tools, a full photo editing page, and enough Adobe-targeted upgrades to make the subscription math awkward for a lot of editors.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

09:50concept

Adobe Replacer Stack

Blackmagic is systematically targeting Adobe's paid tools: Premiere Pro with Edit/Cut pages, After Effects with Fusion, and now Lightroom with the photo editing page — all bundled free.

Steal forpositioning messaging for any tool competing against a subscription incumbent

CTA Breakdown