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$295 one time permanent license with free upgrades and can be migrated between different computers?

I don't have a single reason to do any form of video editing, let alone professional video editing, but that kind of pricing model makes me want to buy a license just to make sure that companies like this stick around.

Or buy the ~$400 speed editor and get the license for free. That's what many people do.

I have to disagree. You are already many levels away from the actual pixels. This is what software is for. Drawing a line for you personally is dismissive of the rest of the user base. Just because there is a so called agent added to the mix doesn't remove the human. It includes far more humans and enables them to use the tool. This is design if done right. Also you seem to be critiqueing the concept not the implementation.

I don't mean to be harsh, only passionate.

> Variety affords us downtime

This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.

> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.

This I agree with, though.

This concept of, say, "productive downtime" was the topic of an article I encountered/skimmed not long ago: "There are no easy calls anymore" https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/agents-are-overl...

Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.

There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.

> Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice.

Ultimately, and this applies to so much of life, "to each, their own," right?

I've been thinking a lot about this across many different mediums, not just filmmaking, and I think it's one worth digging deeper on.*

What is lost when losing the (understandably annoying) process of the grind? By letting LLMs do the busy work, do you lose the opportunity to stumble into randomness? Do you lose the understanding of what is possible/interesting with the medium?

And do you end up in this derivative future where decisions are made by a system that was trained on all the previous uses of it?

Obviously that's fairly hyperbolic, but I have absolutely felt the pull of it all. When it decides to take a couple extra steps I didn't ask for creatively and I think "eh, that's fine."

*EDIT: I wrote this and looked back and this SOUNDS like an LLM wrote it. See what I mean??????

> Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work.

Thank. God.

I never want to rotoscope again.

And frankly I'm not fond of editing either.

Have you ever considered that you aren't the target audience for the cut page? It's supposed to be paired with a speed editor and is mostly intended for assembling rough cuts. You probably aren't cutting features or television or multicam so it's usefulness is probably out of your range of use.

The way I see it, it’s all about how you use it. Let people have tools; their output stands on its own legs.

As pro software, the UI has a learning curve. Many YouTube videos are out of date, or unnecessarily drawn out.

Additionally, as a hobbyist, project settings, color spaces, clipping, etc can be tricky to miss.

I’ve already been using Claude to (1) help me with UI, (2) QA my delivery, and (3) occasional fixes for audio repair; waveform sync (can’t afford time codes).

I make all creative decisions - including most menial ones - myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way; I enjoy the act of creating. I welcome this integration.

I’m sure some users are gonna agentically grade or whatnot. I don’t like it, but I’m also don’t believe in telling other people what they should do with their own work and creative process.

Because there has to be demand for it. There are hundreds of tasks that could be automated right now, and people still choose to do them by hand. Just because something is technically replaceable doesn’t mean it will be replaced and editing is a deeply personal part of the process for almost every director. It will change, but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI. Sure, for low effort marketing videos you’d outsource to Fiverr, it’ll happen sooner or later but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

> But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it.

Why not? Personally (although I'm not saying others have to see it this way too), I'd wait until I can see what AI can replace, before believing so, rather than the opposite.

So far, AI isn't able to "set direction" at all in any sensible way, especially for a creative project like TV or movies, the results are just too bad (today). Although it's excellent at "following directions", which is why these new APIs are great and exciting, it lets people who are good at setting direction to leverage these tools to have the direction concretely followed by something, without having to create a group of collaborators.

Until we've seen proven that AI can indeed "set directions" ("have taste"), I think it's fair to assume they're unable to do so in a way that it produces something that humans generally enjoy. And very far from the kind of masterpieces a human can create.

Yes people really need to take the AI’s feelings into account before they say things like that.

The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.

It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.

Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.

I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.

But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.

I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.

I understand what you're saying and I agree, ostensibly, but on the caveat that it's hinged on the "we don't know what we don't know" aspect of reality. If we restrict our domain to what's forseeable, it's still apparently the case. Astra's demos have me scratching my head, diminishing returns are kicking in harder and faster than anticipated. It seems we've entered a phase to where frontier companies have completely abandoned improving the substrate because they can't justify it. It seems like it's all just harnesses and reasoning orchestration at this point. Hell, everybody but Google seems to have given up even on projection layer improvements (and Gemini is unusably bad in other ways).

Watching this next generation closely, because there are just a shitload of red flags starting to crop up that don't seem to be going away.

Taste is subjective - that's why it can't be replaced.

I would gladly enjoy to collaborate with an agent if I can learn more about video editing. I edit my video only for passion and to learn something new though, so I guess that professionals may see this in a different way. But I don’t think that it’s much different from how Claude code revolutionised the software scene.

And to bring up a likely reason: my impression is that H.264 and AAC still have active patents that apply to the major implementations, and those are not licensed gratis for all uses, and that applies more heavily to the encoding side. Raspberry Pi used to (and might still, I don't know) offer add-on license keys to unlock certain video codec support for what I assume was a similar reason. A lot of individual Linux desktop users just do their small-scale FFmpeg runs under the radar, but commercial software delivery is different.

With proprietary operating systems, the commercial entity behind the OS can negotiate for licensing. Some commercially-associated Linux distributions have efforts in similar directions, like Fedora for instance has some special secondary-repo stuff around H.264 support, but that's at minimum much more fragmentary as a target for an application developer concerned with the legalities.

The problem with AV1 is it requires a massive amount of compute resources. This affects both recording (encoding) and playback (decoding) and certainly affects editing. My AMD RX 480 (8 GB) card doesn't even support AV1 encoding too.

Being able to edit without lag is really important, also keeping your CPU load reasonably low when recording is important to avoid dropped frames, or your recording streams becoming out of sync (ie. a webcam video with audio recorded from another input device while you record your desktop).

I noticed on Linux, if I do anything CPU or disk intensive while recording (even with an SSD), I often see these things get out of sync at the point of load. It's an easy fix usually by just cutting the video where it starts to get out of sync and shifting the audio track over ~200-300ms, but it's something that could happen many times so it becomes an issue in the end. I recorded thousands of videos on Windows and never had this problem but it happens every few videos on Linux just doing casual screenshare videos.

AAC vs Opus is similar, except audio related.

In general when recording videos I usually use x264 as mkv which is CPU bound because it produces a much better looking video vs using h264. That's using a bit rate and other settings that tries to balance quality with low disk space.

So? File size matters for delivery formats. But not for intermediate formats straight out of camera. For editing, bitrate and decode performance are often way more important.

Hardware decode support for AV1 and H265 is still pretty bad. If you use those formats, a lot of computers will stutter when you move the play head around while editing. On my mirrorless cameras, I much prefer filming in medium to high bitrate h264. I fill up my storage cards faster, but my camera batteries last longer recording like that and the footage is much easier to work with. I have a 4090, which supports h265 decode. But it only works for 4:2:0 footage. If I film in h265 422, my computer falls back to a software decoder. It's easier to just use h264, then I don't have to think about it.

If you want to ship high quality deliverables, you don't want resolve to do the final encode anyway. Resolve tries to use NVENC for encode, which is a much worse encoder than x264 and friends in ffmpeg. From resolve, output prores or something. Then use ffmpeg to do the final encode. I think there might also be ffmpeg encoding plugins.

tldr; Codec matters, but there's a lot more nuance to getting a good image than just picking the newest video codecs.

I would not be surprised if engineers who laid the groundwork for this back then would be happy with this workflow.

I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.

The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.

Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073

>Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."

However it can lead to AI "doing the creative for them" and them out of a job in the near future.

I'm not complaining either, I wouldn't call myself a video editor, but I do end up spending some of my time in Resolve, and anything to remove the dreadful monotonous tasks of editing interviews is welcome. Although Resolve already makes it pretty easy, with the "edit by moving the transcript around" feature which is amazing. Anyway, I'm happy about being able to sick Codex at Resolve now :)

If we can get the environmental impact of this stuff ameliorated (a big if), this is the real benefit of this kind of AI assistance imo- it transforms everyone into a director and frees them from being a surrogate for a director.

See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.

Yeah, exactly. I cannot wait to use this to take care of the boring stuff.

That's why there are no assistant editor jobs anymore.

Pretty soon there will be no need for recording and editing .

IIRC House MD was one of the first shows to use digital (5D mkII).

Soon there will be AI generated shows. Perhaps entirely personalized.

Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.

Resolve has had de-aging filters, and TTS voice synthesis for awhile.

If the chat-bot/spy-ware aren't integrated, than I don't see a problem with LLM plug-in opt-in support. =3

I can imagine the conversation with Studio lawyers about contaminating IP with uncopyrightable generative content liabilities. =3

So let them? A product that focuses on chasing the competition is effectively useless, because the competition will always be ahead.

It’s because those codecs require SDK’s that are expensive to license. That’s not a Linux specific issue - it’s always been that way for the non-studio version of Resolve (with some exceptions on MacOS since the ProRes codecs are already part of the OS).

Is it surprising that they’d rather make features that cater to a large portion of their user base instead of a tiny fraction of it?

Someone was posting recently how it cost him tens of dollars of LLM Agent time to reverse engineer Linux Davinci and add codec he wanted back in.

Haha yeah was about to post this very comment. I'm glad to see they have their priorities in order instead of checks notes supporting MP4 on Linux, the most common type of goddamn encoding. GoPro footage literally does not work with Resolve outside Windows.

No, I'm Chris :) But if you know Yosh well, would be happy to connect and compare notes!

did they remove it based on policy? seems.. less convenient.

Yes, correct, there’s a feature for that. Unfortunately one of the audio channels from the camera footage on the motorcycle is never good enough for this feature to work for me.

I'd be happy to buy if it they add proper linux support. I have an AMD card and I don't feel like fighting with the install process.

Integrated graphics use the main system ram so they basically all have access to more memory than the average GPU.

I think there's a really interesting tension between what you're saying and what the parent post is saying, and it's something that's been discussed for a long time but LLMs are throwing a new wrench into it: a given user probably only uses 5-10% of the features of a piece of software, but across the whole body of users you get close to full coverage.

I use DaVinci Resolve for editing GoPro, Canon DSLR, iPhone, and Drone FPV footage. I import clips, use the razor to cut them and rearrange them, occasionally crop and zoom, and then encode them down to h264 or whatever. There are a bazillion features that I sort of know exist but haven't ever had any need to use. Could I make a tool using an LLM that covers my DaVinci workflow? Almost certainly, and I don't think it would take anywhere near 200 prompts. I've made significantly more complex bespoke data analysis pipelines for drone flight telemetry in like... a dozen prompts. But I have no illusions that what I would make as my "DaVinci Clone" would have anywhere near the functionality of DaVinci, just the tiny piece of that functionality that I use.

regardless of whether it’s possible, there is enormous value in the community, ecosystem, and learning materials centred around Reaolve as it is right now. the workflow has been refined over years. no one shot slop effort will have that network effect behind it, and if the workflow isn’t a drop-in replacement it’s dead in the water anyway.