Blackmagic Design has made two price drops, one permanent and one temporary, that might be of interest to those of you who use DaVinci Resolve Studio to bring your video projects to reality.
I love DaVinci Resolve Studio. I know this because, while teaching a recent course on post-production and reaching the section of the course on color grading in Resolve, one of my students apparently noticed a certain unconscious glimmer in my eye as I discussed all the possibilities. We were half-joking, of course, but the product has truly become an indispensable part of my filmmaking workflow. So much so that, while you can access the vast majority of mission-critical tools with the free version of DaVinci Resolve, I’ve always suggested to anyone who will listen that investing the one-time fee of $295 to upgrade to the full paid version, DaVinci Resolve Studio, is essentially a no-brainer for anyone looking to take their color workflow to the next level. Not only is the platform enormously more capable from a color standpoint than most competing platforms, but, as the “careful spender” (re: cheapskate) that I am, I think I may most appreciate the fact that the software is a one-time purchase as opposed to all the forced subscription plans used by other services that make me pay month after month and year after year, regardless of whether the updates are of benefit to me or not. With DaVinci Resolve Studio, you pay for the license just one time, then receive free product updates for the rest of eternity—or, well, I guess for as long as you and the product are around.
Geez, I guess I am a Resolve fanboy. Well, at any rate, I didn’t start writing today to try and sell you on the program. Rather, I just dropped in to mention that, if you were inclined to invest in the full program, Blackmagic Design is offering the full DaVinci Resolve Studio for a limited time for $235! I’m not 100% sure how long this is supposed to last, so for those filmmakers as frugal as I am, it might be a good time to check it out here.
Adding to that, the company has also reduced the price of their Blackmagic Cloud service. This is a cloud storage platform that, in essence, allows you to automatically sync footage shot with its latest cameras, like the Cinema Camera 6K, PYXIS, URSA Cine, and URSA Broadcast G2, to cloud storage immediately over the internet. So, for example, if you are shooting remotely in New York, but your editor is in Mumbai, and your colorist is in Paris, all relevant stakeholders will have access to proxy files to work with immediately as they are created. Those stakeholders, working from a communal DaVinci Resolve project on the Blackmagic Cloud, will have the footage instantly live-synced to all DaVinci Resolve workstations connected to the same project. All the cinematographer has to do is connect to the project via the user interface. Even better, as the remote colorist can now access the footage in real time, your on-set DIT will also be able to see the colorist's adjustments via the cloud as well. So, you can see the real downstream outcomes of the potential grade before you’ve even left the set.
This feature is useful to those whose production team is spread out across the globe. It is also useful for those working in more time-sensitive environments like news gathering, where editors need to access the footage shot in real time in order to meet the demands of the newsroom.
The product itself has been around for a while. But the news for today is that Blackmagic Design is cutting the price of the product in half. The Blackmagic Cloud service, previously $30/month per TB, has been cut down to $15/month per TB, effective immediately. Existing users will receive the price cut as well as new users.
I don’t often write about price changes of products, but, in this case, I made an exception as the end result is helping people potentially save money. And who doesn’t want that?
