Marc Wielage wrote:Baselight is a terrific alternative to Resolve in terms of color. And it starts at only $80,000.
yes -- baselight is indeed the solution, which i still very interested as well, but its free
student edition is unfortunately only available on mac os. but i'm rather sure, it's even worth to test drive such a kind of extremely limited training version to learn a lot and afterwards see the other solutions with different eyes.
mistika insight is a very similar case. this feature limted training edition is also only available on mac os and windows, but licenses for strict non-commercial use of mistika for linux are negotiable on a case by case base. it's a really impressive software, which isn't always the most intuitive or easy to grasp solution, but on the other hand you'll find unique approaches and perfomance, which you'll later miss in any other software.
autodesk flame is another professional choice on linux, which is at least freely available, if you are student or working at an educational institution.
perhaps the closest alternative -- especially, if you are unhappy with the actual state of fusion -- may be seen in
nuke non-commercial. as the naming of this edition already signifies, it's much more restricted in its license terms than the free version of resolve, but nevertheless it's rather usable concerning its actual feature set. it's a much more composition oriented solution, but a very impressive and mature one.
the free
natron tries to mimic some of the compositing parts of nuke rather close, but it's still missing important features and works much slower. nevertheless it has some other very important advantages over all this other mentioned commercial alternatives -- e.g. you can use nearly any ffmpeg supported file format in any arbitrary resolution, and it works really reliable using state of the art image processing, which nearly no other open source software provides.
although any of this alternatives has its strong sides, i wouldn't see them as convincing alternatives or replacements for resolve. they are just other tools, which often complement each other at best. resolve maybe the easiest to use and undeniable provides a very efficient base for editorial work and color grading [especially on linux, where we do not have much other satisfaying NLE-like choices] -- and for sure, it's also the most affordable commercial product --, but for compositing and audio-mixing i personally still prefer nuke and
ardour much more. they are not so much better by objective measures, but i somehow also like to stay independent and enjoy the quality of more specialized tools. open exchange and compatibility between different applications is therefore a criteria, which i often appreciate more than a boundless growth of features.