
In October 2009, Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty speculated in an interview that the price of Resolve could likely be reduced to below $100,000. In 2009, the Australian video processing and distribution technology company Blackmagic Design bought da Vinci Systems, retaining and expanding the engineering team for Resolve, but eliminating support-based contracts for the tool. This was initially implemented using proprietary hardware cards however, the 4K resolution Resolve R series (such as the R-100, introduced in 2008, and the stereoscopic 3D R-360-3D, introduced in 2009) replaced this proprietary hardware with CUDA-based NVIDIA GPUs. The systems leveraged parallel processing in an InfiniBand topology to support performance during color grading. These initial versions were integrated exclusively into dedicated hardware controllers. It began with three possible configurations: the Resolve DI digital intermediate color correction tool, the Resolve FX visual effects tool, and the Resolve RT 2K resolution processing tool.

The system was first announced in 2003 and released in 2004. The initial versions of DaVinci Resolve (known then as da Vinci Resolve) were resolution-independent software tools, developed by da Vinci Systems (based in Coral Springs, Florida), who had previously produced other color correction systems, such as da Vinci Classic (1985), da Vinci Renaissance (1990), and da Vinci 2K (1998).

When you export, by default Resolve uses the original clips so this won't impact your final render quality.

The simplest free solution to this problem is to use the "Generate Optimized Media" function in Resolve, which makes copies of your footage in a more editing/performance friendly codec so you'll get smooth playback. If you see close to 100% CPU usage, it's almost definitely what I've said here. To check that this is the case, verify that you're not using the Studio version of Resolve, then open up the Task Manager while playing your clips in Resolve. The free version of Resolve uses your CPU to decode h.264 and h.265 footage, which is much slower than the hardware accelerated decoders of the Studio version.ĭepending on your CPU and the bitrate of the footage, you may therefore encounter choppy playback. Choppy performance in Resolve is almost always the same couple things.
