Blackmagic Forum

Hello everyone my name is David and I am new to the world of videomakers. I would like to invest in DaVinci resolve studio 17 and I would like to understand is I can use it with an Intel i5 I had different kind of answers either negative or positive about. I am starting this adventure with the goal of making my little son a future video maker. Thank you for the help

Resolve is running fine for me on an iMac 2017 with i5, I deliberately choose that over i7 for thermal reasons.
My six core i7 Mac mini is only slightly faster.
It's much more important to know the GPU your intended machine has.

I use an i5-2500K without issue.

That said, I would prefer a newer i9.

Davmaz73 wrote:Hello everyone my name is David and I am new to the world of videomakers. I would like to invest in DaVinci resolve studio 17 and I would like to understand is I can use it with an Intel i5 I had different kind of answers either negative or positive about. I am starting this adventure with the goal of making my little son a future video maker. Thank you for the help

You can start with Resolve 17 free. It gives you everything that you and your son would need for quite some time. Unlike other programs, the free version isn't crippleware, where you can only do lesser things until you pay up. You could create feature-length, high-res films with the free version. Especially if you're starting out, the Studio version isn't necessary.

Give it a try on your i5. Put it through the paces. Figure out if your GPU can keep up -- Resolve requires a reasonable GPU. If you continue to pursue using it, you might then upgrade to Studio if there are features you need. I used free for months before deciding that I wanted a couple of Studio-only features. (And also I got a free Speed Editor thrown in, so now was a good time to do it.)

It's really not a limitation in terms of learning, and you'll know if your machine is up to the task for free. (In fact, Studio-only features require a more robust machine, so if the free version isn't performant on your machine, Studio features will be even less performant.)

It depends Wayne. If they use H.264/265 on a PC and have a decent GPU, they'll need Studio.
You are on a Mac, where the free version is also doing hardware decoding.

Uli Plank wrote:It depends Wayne. If they use H.264/265 on a PC and have a decent GPU, they'll need Studio.
You are on a Mac, where the free version is also doing hardware decoding.

Good call, thanks for correcting!

(And H.264 v H.265 encoding/decoding can differ in the real world based on how old your machine is. I compress everything to H.265, while another person using Premiere on a Windows machine does H.264. I convinced them to try H.265, but the render time was 3x what H.264 is. I'm guessing that hardware assist for H.264 and H.265 are similar but not so similar that an older machine can do both equally.)

Thank you for your help guy I didn’t thought about it and definitely I will try it with free version and see how it would run on my laptop

Yes, there are quite few 'flavours' of H.264/265 and which one is hardware accelerated depends on your specific GPU.