A couple of years back, our production company decided to bite the bullet and make the switch to DaVinci Resolve and Windows. If you are also considering this move, here’s a primer on why it could benefit your filmmaking business as well as what we’ve learned based on our experience.
Some background
We are a French production company that primarily works in advertising and corporate, but we also do short films and documentaries.
In 2014, we bought a 2013 Mac Pro with 8 core Xeon processor, 64 GB of RAM, dual D700 GPU, 1 TB of internal M2 SSD, combined with a Promise Pegasus in RAID 5, an Ultrastudio Thunderbolt 2 from Blackmagic and an Eizo monitor for monitoring and color grading. The Mac Pro was of course protected with Apple Care.
It was a high-performance setup and a very expensive one, too. Altogether, it cost us more than 15 000 € at the time (nearly $17K US), and the Mac Pro alone cost more than 9 000 €. It was extremely useful to us as it allowed us to edit 4K ProRes files smoothly.
Our workflow is simple, we either directly shoot in ProRes or we transcode our files to ProRes prior to the edit.
The transition to DaVinci Resolve and Windows
In late 2016, our machine started to show some early signs of its “old age”. It wasn’t working as smoothly as it did in the beginning. This machine was only 2 years old.
At the time, Apple hadn’t announced a new Mac Pro or even an update to the 2013 version. We were very concerned about this issue. Indeed, we would have to change almost everything in our setup, including the computer itself but also some of the other peripherals.
So why did we make the switch to DaVinci Resolve?
We were already using DaVinci as our color grading software, but the edit was done in Premiere or Avid. As we wanted to move on Windows, we needed software that would be perfectly stable on that OS.
At the time, DaVinci was getting better on the editing side and some collaboration tools were announced to be introduced so we decided to give it a try for editing.
To our great surprise, it worked very well.
At this point, we decided to completely jump ship and use Resolve as our main post-production tool so we started to get serious about finding the right Windows PC for our team in February 2017.
Ultimately, we made a custom-built Windows PC with a 4 core i7 processor, a GTX 1070 GPU, 64 GB of RAM, some internal SSD and of course, a Decklink in order to have a proper monitoring output for editing and for color grading.
(You NEED a monitoring card in order to have a proper frame accuracy output and, of course, a proper color output. It’s literally day and night.)
Our PC was nearly three times faster than our 2-½ years “old” Apple Mac Pro. Of course, afterward, Apple announced the iMac Pro, which was not for us.
With a PC, we can change any individual part of it, if we need to, we can pick any part from any manufacturer we want, like an NVIDIA GPU for instance
Our PC looks like this:
Thanks to this build, we can now work with ARRIRAW files in real-time without any problems which was not the case with our 2013 Mac Pro that ran hot as hell simply contemplating this kind of work.
Today, you can even get better gear. Blackmagic Design makes it even easier by giving you a pretty detailed ideal configuration in their hardware and selection guide. This guide is for Version 15 of the software, but can still be used as a reference until they make a new one for Version 16.
If you had to make a new Windows-based configuration right now, here’s how it would probably look:
Without monitors and without the decklink, this system can be built for around $4,600. If you do it through a custom builder and with a proper support plan, let’s say $5,000.
Of course, you can also build a system based on AMD CPU. According to Blackmagic, it would go something like this:
+ Gigabyte X399 Motherboard
+ AMD Threadripper 1950 X 16 Cores
+ All the other components kept the same
This system can be built for about $3,600. If you do it through a custom builder and with a proper support plan, round it up to about $4,000.
Keep in mind that these two lists are based on hardware that is beginning to be outdated as both Intel and AMD are releasing new CPUs but they are still on sale and they are still relevant for use. As you can see, they are both quite affordable and give you the freedom to update each component as you need.
The Pros and Cons of using DaVinci Resolve
After almost three years of using DaVinci Resolve, here are the things we love and things we don’t like so much.
Pros
It’s VERY stable
In almost three years, we’ve had no crashes. As I said, we have a simple workflow, files are either in 4K Prores or DnX now that we are on PC, or they are in a certain format of raw like ARRIRAW. Sound files are always in WAV. We rarely work with any other flavors of raw for the moment and, of course, we never work with h264 files or mp3 files.
It’s on ALL platforms
Mac, Windows, or Linux, it means that you are completely free to work on the system you want and because it uses the GPU, you don’t need a $10,000 computer to make it sing even on complex files.
No subscription model, no internet needed
You pay once to own the software and Blackmagic Design will even give you access to future versions of the software. Plus, there is no need to be connected to the Internet, which is always better for security reasons.
It includes strong collaboration tools
Projects are simply done faster in DaVinci Resolve because of the built-in collaboration tools. An editor can work on a timeline at the same time as color graders and VFX artists. It also means that we don’t have to lose time sending temp files between departments.
Bonus: You don’t even need a proper server to run the collaboration tools. If you are on a very tight budget, one of your computers can act as the “server”. Depending on the files you edit with, it can do the trick.
It’s very capable
I won’t speak to Fairlight, DaVinci’s audio editing component, as I’m not as qualified as our sound mixers, but regarding the editing, VFX, and Color Grading, Resolve is on par with other software.
Cons
There are some learning curves
Like any new software you add to your workflow, it takes some getting used to. For instance, if you are used to making motion graphics in After Effects, you will have a certain learning curve in order to assimilate how Fusion works.
At the end of the day, you’ve got to use the tools that work the best for you and your business. For us, DaVinci Resolve - coupled with a powerful custom-built PC - is that tool because it's more powerful and less expensive than many of the professional alternatives.
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Note From Tongal: “Ready to Make the Switch to DaVinci Resolve on PC? Read This." is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
