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Why Digital Sprockets edits video with DaVinci Resolve instead of FCP X

Allan Tépper
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Why Digital Sprockets edits video with DaVinci Resolve instead of FCP X 1

Benjamín Fernández is the director of Digital Sprockets in México City, where since 1994 he has offered post-production, telecine (film-to-tape) and film restoration services. While I’m in México City doing seminars, I visited Digital Sprockets and heard all 6 interesting reasons why Benjamín prefers editing video with DaVinci Resolve than with Final Cut Pro X.

For those unfamiliar, DaVinci Resolve is a program traditionally known for its grading capabilities. Only recently did DaVinci Resolve began to offer editing capabilities too. The following is my interpretation of what Benjamín explained to me in Castilian. He has approved my interpretation before publication:

  1. Unlike FCP X, DaVinci Resolve fortunately does not immediately attempt to adjust and “enhance” the raw assets Benjamín brings in. Benjamín is aware that these functions can be shut off or reversed in FCP X, but in his experience, some of the “enhancements” are both damaging and irreversible, as explained in point 2 below.
  2. Benjamín says that when he brings in native telecine footage at exactly 24 frames per second with an accompanying 48 kHz audio track of the exact same duration, FCP X somehow manipulates the audio so the audio duration does not match that of the video. (I have not replicated this myself, and Benjamín has only observed this problem specifically when the footage and project are both set to 24p exact and 48 kHz. He has not yet tried this with other framerates.) On the other hand, when using DaVinci Resolve, the audio duration (with the same assets that give him the problem in FCP X) remains the same and therefore the video matches the audio perfectly.
  3. With DaVinci Resolve, the Blackmagic hardware is controllable and adjustable directly from the program. On the other hand (see Why does FCP X still deal with pro i/o interfaces haphazardly? from February 20, 2013), as of publication time, to control the Blackmagic (or other) hardware with FCP X, one must do so from the Blackmagic (or other) control panel and then Quit and relaunch FCP X (unlike prior versions of FCP), FCP X still does not control the hardware directly. Such hardware is used with either of these programs to do proper external video monitoring of the final product and in some cases to capture, as covered in more detail in point 4 ahead.
  4. With DaVinci Resolve, it is still possible to capture directly from videotape via hardware and control the deck. At publication time of this article, FCP X can only capture from tape from Firewire-based formats (like consumer DV25, JVC’s ProDV, Panasonic’s DVCPRO25, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO HD, Sony’s DVCAM, and HDV from both JVC and Sony), not from those formats which need to connect via SDI, HD-SDI, etc. connected via a card or Thunderbolt device.
  5. Since Benjamín plans to grade anyway, he sees no reason to complicate things by using two independent programs when DaVinci Resolve does everything he needs with one tool: capture, edit, and grade.
  6. DaVinci Resolve Lite is free, while FCP X costs US$299.

 

 

For more information about Digital Sprockets in México City, visit its website.

Stand by for my upcoming DaVinci Resolve articles

Soon I’ll be publishing:

How to read DaVinci Resolve’s unusual waveform monitor

and

How to handle dual mono with DaVinci Resolve.

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o en tu librería preferida al solicitar el ISBN–10: 1492783390 ó el ISBN–13: 978–1492783398.

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