The What: Blackmagic Design is issuing DaVinci Resolve 17.3, which adds support for a completely new processing engine that transforms the speed of DaVinci Resolve to work up to three times faster on Apple Mac models with the M1 chip. With this massive speed increase, customers can now play back, edit and grade 4K projects faster, and can even work on 8K projects on an Apple M1 notebook. The new processing engine uses tile-based rendering, which also gives customers up to 30 percent longer battery life on laptop computers when working in DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve 17.3 is available for download now from the Blackmagic Design website.
The What Else: DaVinci Resolve 17.3 also supports a new option on Mac computers with M1 for H.265 hardware encoding. Customers can choose to prioritize speed vs quality when rendering, further improving render times up to 65 percent. Plus, DaVinci Resolve will now decode AVC Intra files using the media engine built into the Apple M1 chip, making decoding and playback faster when working with these file formats.
New Resolve FX controls have been added, such as new grid shapes and greater control when using mosaic blur, allowing customers to more precisely adjust the amount and appearance of pixellation. Keyer garbage mattes now have rotation controls, making it easier to remove unwanted items from view while new saturation and gamma controls on the glow plug-in allow greater control and subtlety over lighting effects. Aperture diffraction in DaVinci Resolve Studio has new anamorphic aperture controls that allow a wider range of lenses to be emulated.
The Bottom Line: DaVinci Resolve 17 has over 300 new features and improvements including HDR grading tools, redesigned primary color controls, next generation Fairlight audio engine including Fairlight audio core and support for 2,000 real time audio tracks, plus dozens of other time saving tools for editors including a redesigned inspector, new bin sorting and metadata clip views.
