Final Cut Pro vs. Davinci Resolve

General Discussion
1

Has anybody done a comparison of Final Cut Pro vs. Davinci Resolve? I have been using Davinci for the past few months and it seems to work awesome but a little slow at rendering, especially when applying lens distortion correction via effects->warp->lens distortion. It can take over 6 hours to render a 10 minute clip with color correction and lens corrections. I think if I pay the licensing fee, there are other lens correction options that will run faster.

I downloaded a free trial version of Final Cut Pro X and found that it has much of the same functionality for color and lens corrections and renders a bit faster. The output options are limited, will render directly to FB, youtube etc. but when rendering directly to a file at 4k the resulting file is HUGE! I took in a 1.16 Gb 4k video made in Davinci and ran it through the lens distortion correction model in Final Cut and the 4k output file was 53 Gb! Playing around with some of the options on the file got it down to 5 Gb @4k which is still larger than the original. I tried rendering to an apple device @4k but after waiting an hour, I couldn’t find where it put the file. Plus I don’t like how it pulls everything into a library, I prefer to keep my files and projects in separate locations.

Does anybody have any other experiences on comparing these two pieces of software they can share?

2

I do not have FCP experience at all.

But the Studio version of Resolve does more than give you faster lens correction. If you have the right GPU, you will offload a lot of processing onto the chip rather than software emulation. That made a huge difference for me.

I still have slow rendering with some projects that have a lot of FX processing going on, but I don’t think that another application is the solution. You need a faster computer, or a faster video card (with a chip that has advanced hvec processing), or a video card with a lot more memory (6-8GB at least), or all of the above. FCP will be using the same hardware – I’m not sure how much faster it would be.

Also – though this works for editing / scrubbing and not so much for final rendering – you might want to look into proxy editing, to speed up your workflow and test rendering (saving final rendering for when you’re satisfied with the test render).

Chris

3

Final Cut pro is better :slight_smile: