From Loyalist to Final Cut Pro to Da Vinci Resolve Convert: The Features that Tipped the Scales for Me

After spending thousands of minutes editing in Final Cut Pro, which I’d sworn by for years, daunting software shows up demanding to become an integral part of your creative process When Final Cut Pro came out in 1999, I was there to test it. It had an easy-to-use interface and a quick learning curve with no compromises compared to its rival systems. I edited almost every project I worked on in that software for years because its simple, user-friendly interface worked seamlessly with my existing workflow. It fit. Being part of an Apple world, a universe with a simple, intuitive design, Final Cut just made sense to me. But then a difficult project that required more of a cinematic flair put me to the test.

THE STRUGGLE WITH LOG FOOTAGE IN FINAL CUT PRO

Hitting a Roadblock

My mission was lofty, requiring not only a more expressive, organic cinematic look than I was used to getting out of Final Cut Pro but also a solution for working with Log footage. On-camera, Log footage can look flat and desaturated, but it retains a higher dynamic range, offering more latitude for colour-grading in post. But it seemed like, no matter what I did in Final Cut Pro, I couldn’t unleash that potential. I began asking on various message boards, but the standard answers weren’t giving me what I was looking for.

A Pivot to DaVinci Resolve

Breakthrough arrived when a fellow editor suggested that we switch to DaVinci Resolve. I was reluctant, having encountered earlier difficulties with this software, DaVinci Resolve. I had heard that it came with a steep learning curve, and I had run away from the programme several years earlier for that reason. The limitations of Final Cut Pro forced my hand.

EMBRACING DaVinci Resolve'S PRO-LEVEL CAPABILITIES

Superior Color Grading

DaVinci Resolve changed everything. The thing that struck me first was the incredible colour grading toolset. Within minutes I was able to transform my Log footage into something gorgeous – something that I’d never been able to achieve in Final Cut Pro in hours of painful fiddling. Using Nodes for colour correction and effects makes it way, way more fine-grained and flexible than what you get in Final Cut Pro. The addition of HDR colouring, the built-in support for Dolby Vision and a number of other major features have made Resolve the go-to tool for top-level colour grading.

Streamlined Storage Management

Another big thing was storage, and DaVinci manages storage in a way that Final Cut Pro’s Library doesn’t. FCP’s Library system is great, but when you start accumulating hours of footage, and associated media, you can quickly end up with monster libraries. My biggest – a 459GB one – took forever to store and process. I spent weeks trying to balance storage space in order to make sure I didn’t fill up my drives. DaVinci Resolve makes this much easier – and much less stress on hardware.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

The fact that working across operating systems is even possible was again a benefit of DaVinci Resolve. While Final Cut Pro is available only on MacOS, DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux and Windows machines (with certain caveats for Linux distributions) – once again extending its reach to more creators.

THE JOURNEY FORWARD WITH DaVinci Resolve

The new chapter begins now with DaVinci Resolve and I’m confident to say that such advanced software with its numerous features is not an easy thing to master but I’m ready to embrace this challenge. The hope that I’ll manage to achieve the best-possible colouring (for fewer efforts) with an ability to store every single project directly to the storage device, have a cross-platform software release – DaVinci Resolve is the best solution for my future projects.

About DaVinci Resolve for Pros

For graduates of iMovie or Vegas software, and others contemplating the jump into video editing, DaVinci Resolve looks like a great deal. Its free version is fully functional and offers the basics of what an beginner needs to cut together a video; upgrading the first time (to the $395 full version) adds tools for working with better output, such as timecode. At that price, DaVinci Resolve is a serious competitor to Final Cut Pro. For pros, it offers the studio-grade tools at a price that won’t sound like a mortgage. And newbies get the same tools, so you can graduate along with the technology, without the need or hunt for upgrades. DaVinci Resolve is the tool of choice for creating beautiful images for your videos.