From the moment I first launched Windows Movie Maker, I’ve been on the hunt for a good, free video editor. Not a perfect one, mind you. Not one that could replace a professional workflow, just one that’s good enough. After giving up on “free” and learning Premiere Pro, I thought my dream would remain dead. Then I found DaVinci Resolve.
For the uninitiated, DaVinci Resolve is a free video editor from camera and production gear manufacturer Blackmagic Design. While the software has an optional Studio version ($300 for a lifetime license, though many of Blackmagic’s products come with free codes), the free version is so robust and powerful that most users probably won’t need to upgrade until editing becomes a full-time job.
At first, I was hesitant to jump ship from the Adobe suite. Sure, Premiere Pro was janky and crashed way too often, but my subscription also came with access to tools like Photoshop and After Effects, which I relied on for my own video projects. Surely, a free video editor couldn’t replace all of that, I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Making the basics accessible
I’ve come to expect one of two major drawbacks from free video editors: either they have basic functions that work while advanced tools are busted, or they rely on gimmicks like AI to “edit for you” in a way that rarely works. The ByteDance-owned CapCut is a good example of both. It’s fine for editing TikTok videos, but if you want to grow your skill set, you’ll probably hit a ceiling quickly.
DaVinci Resolve, on the other hand, is built for professional-level video editing first. Which means if you need to sync footage for multi-cam shoots, or dive into color spaces, the options are available. For beginner users, though, all that extra stuff doesn’t get in the way. One of my favorite aspects of Blackmagic’s design (both in Resolve and its on-board camera software) is the company’s emphasis on user-friendliness without sacrificing power.
The foundation of this approach can be seen in the toolbar along the bottom. Pages labeled Media, Cut, Edit, and Deliver automatically arrange your workspace for different tasks. This is more than just moving windows around, though. The Cut page, for example, is an excellent tool to build rough cuts from raw footage, without worrying about precise edits, transitions, audio levels, or any of the other fiddly bits that video editors have to obsess over. Just get your clips in the right order, and move to the Edit page when you’re ready to fine tune.
The Color page is also Resolve’s most famous superpower. Here, the app offers pro-level color grading that, frankly, I’ve never seen even attempted in other free video editing software. While it’s built around Blackmagic’s own BRAW format, it can handle a wide range of RAW formats, including ArriRaw, CinemaDNG, and Canon Cinema RAW Light.
An ode to nodes
Credit: Eric Ravenscraft
DaVinci Resolve might be a good video editor, but that wasn’t going to be enough to persuade me on its own. After all, if I still needed After Effects, I may as well stay with Adobe. Though, now that I think of it, After Effects is also pretty clunky these days. And after getting used to node-based interfaces in apps like Blender, I was getting tired of AE’s approach of relying on layers, like animation cels, to build effects.
Enter Fusion. One of Resolve’s dedicated editing pages, Fusion is a full node-based effects suite. If you’re used to After Effects, adjusting to nodes can take some getting used to, but the benefits are worth it. Nodes are, essentially, a visual representation of a set of instructions. Think of it like a flow chart, where each node is a specific set of instructions. You can reuse nodes, create non-linear instruction sets, and best of all, easily preview your effect at any step in the chain.
For example, in the screenshot above, I have a simple node tree setup that I put together for a CRT pixel effect. I take the initial video, split it into three nodes that isolate the red, green, and blue channels from the video. In the next step, I multiply those channels by a repeating pixel texture. Then in the final step in the chain, I recombine them into a final image. The result?
Credit: Eric Ravenscraft
Not bad, right? Of course, there are a thousand ways to make (and improve) this effect—personally, I’m not happy with how dark the final image is, so I’ll likely keep tweaking this—but the node setup means that not only can I easily adjust any step of the process, but it’s easy to tell at a glance what the node tree does.
In the node tree screenshot, you can also see a box with a small white dot underneath the first and last node. This is the viewer selection. Select the left most circle and a preview of the effect at that stage in the node tree will appear in the left preview window. Select the middle dot and it appears in the right-hand window. (In Resolve 20, the third dot is for a VR preview, for some reason.)
This foundation of an intuitive, useful interface supports a robust library of powerful effects tools like depth maps and excellent modifiers. It’s also incredibly easy to save and share node trees—just select and copy the nodes and you can either paste them directly in Resolve, or into a text document for sharing online. It’s a deep pool of tools worth exploring.
What do you think so far?
AI, but actually good this time
The final straw for me in making the switch from Adobe products to Resolve was when the two companies’ approaches to AI started to crystallize. Adobe touted the use of generative AI for extending the duration of video clips, or searching for clips by describing what’s in them. Not necessarily a bad toolset, but, to me at least, it felt like AI for the sake of it. And, frankly, I just don’t trust an artificially extended clip to look as natural as just shooting it right the first time.
Meanwhile, the latest version of Resolve introduced something much more useful to me: IntelliScript. This feature can take your video’s script and automatically assemble a rough cut from your footage. While it’s not perfect—and it particularly gets tripped up by improvisation or incomplete takes—I was able to build an initial rough cut of a nearly two hour video in less than an hour.
This tool is actually built out of a few other smaller tools, many of which are also AI-powered in a very targeted way. Resolve has had automatic video transcription for a few years now, and its text-based editing lets you select clips by simply highlighting the text being spoken. IntelliScript automates this process, and even selects multiple takes of the same line and layers them in multiple video tracks on top of each other. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a start.
A lot of Resolve’s AI-powered features are like this. Rather than starting with generative AI and forcing a way to make it a feature, Resolve’s AI features stem more from real-world use cases. The Relight tool, for example, uses machine learning models to relight a subject in post, without having to fiddle with complicated masks. It’s a surprisingly powerful tool that supports the editor’s goals, rather than trying to replace creative work directly.
In fairness, Adobe has added some similar features—Premiere Pro added text-based editing after Resolve did—and most of the AI-powered features in Resolve require the paid Studio edition. The fee is worth it though, in my opinion, as Resolve seems to be doing a better job of coming up with useful features (whether AI-powered or not) and implementing them first. And often better.
Picking a good video editing suite is always going to be a deeply personal choice, and the bigger your productions, the more complicated the logistics of switching. But after years with Premiere Pro, I can safely say Resolve has met all my needs, and the transition was far less bumpy than I expected.
Oh, and Resolve hasn’t crashed during a render once, in the entire time I’ve been using it. So there’s that.