Blackmagic Design announced a number of new products at NAB 2025 in Las Vegas. One major piece of news was the release of the public beta of Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 20. The latest version of Blackmagic Design’s video editing, FX, and color grading software adds more than 100 new features and AI tools.
AI tools
DaVinci Resolve 20 adds a range of powerful AI tools to help you with all stages of your workflow. These include AI IntelliScript, which can create timelines based on a text script, and AI Animated Subtitles, which animates words as they are spoken. There’s also AI Multicam SmartSwitch that assembles a timeline with camera angles based on speaker detection.
Plus, the AI Audio Assistant analyzes the timeline audio and intelligently creates a professional audio mix. AI Magic Mask has been updated for even more accurate tracking as well.
AI audio tools
DaVinci Resolve 20 includes the revolutionary AI Voice Convert tool. This applies a pre-generated voice model to an existing voice recording, retaining its inflections, pitch variation and emotion. This means you can improve someone’s voice recorded in a noisy environment, or create ADR using the original actor’s own voice.
There’s also the AI Dialogue Matcher that automatically matches the tone, level and room environment of dialogue. In addition, you can use the AI Detect Music Beats function to analyze audio clips with music and automatically place markers to indicate beats.
Cut and Edit pages
When you open a vertical format timeline on the Cut, Edit and Color pages, the page layouts automatically rearrange to optimize working with a vertical viewer. The Cut and Edit pages also now have a voiceover palette so you can record a voiceover track during timeline playback.
Additionally, both pages now have a dedicated keyframe editor so you can fine-tune your animations. A full audio mixer with professional loudness metering has been added to the cut page as well.
Other new features
On the Color page, the new chroma warp feature lets you adjust color and saturation with a single motion in the viewer. Fusion also now offers deep image compositing tools, so you can access the depth data found in deep image EXR files. Clip EQ now features six bands on the cut, edit and Fairlight pages. This allows for more tonal control at the clip level, and matches the track EQ in the mixer.
Fairlight has two new clip processing options as well. This means you can adjust a target clip’s audio to match a reference clip’s level or tonal spectrum
What we think
There are so many new features in Davinci Resolve 20 that we have only been able to list a fraction of them in this post. It feels like Blackmagic Design is really taking Resolve to the next level with this release. Even better, the company is continuing with its powerful free version of the software. Also, Blackmagic Design has said that the upgrade to the paid-for Resolve Studio 20 will continue to be free for existing owners of any previous version software.
However, CEO Grant Petty has said that the company may start charging an upgrade fee for future releases. Even if that comes to pass, Davinci Resolve Studio is amazing value for money for a one-off payment of $295.
Availability
DaVinci Resolve 20 public beta is available now for download from the Blackmagic Design website. As this is a beta, please be aware that there will still be bugs to be ironed out, so you may prefer to continue using Resolve 19 for important projects for the time being.
