Blackmagic Cloud service is not free

from advertising messages i had understood that the new Blackmagic Cloud service was free. however, having signed up for it, if you want to use it all, it is minimum $5 / month. have i got this correct? it would appear that the only free part about the BM cloud is actually signing up - or am i missing something?
if i am right, then i think it is not fair or honest to say that the service is free, when it is clearly not.

Signing up for the account is free and allows other users to share their project libraries with you and you don't have to pay anything. Good for employees and freelance workers who uses project libraries that are maintained by someone else.

Creating and using your own project library in the cloud is where you have to pay the subscription fee.

roger - thanks for this for the clarification, albeit disappointing.

as we are the originators, it would be us paying for it. our budgets are tiny and we try to avoid recurring costs as they quickly get out of hand. we shall have to carry on developing our own heath robinson version of a project cloud server, made more complicated by the fact there is no Project Server for linux, nor ever will be it looks like. i dislike using windows for anything that needs to be a reliable and robust service, and we don't have any mac boxes. perhaps we are the only ones in this boat.

our budgets are tiny and we try to avoid recurring costs as they quickly get out of hand.

It's 5$/month/project. And the billing stops when you end/close the project. I think 5$ is quickly saved if you avoid any kind of out of office stuff with it. It's a price of a bus ticket.

So you pay 5$/month and your collaborators pay nothing. If I was in need of collaboration tool with externals that would be a bargain price for it indeed.

we have lots of small projects that often last a long time. if we keep switching things off and on, it will become confusing and unmanageable. imo, it would have been much better to keep the cloud service free while encouraging lots more people to get the Resolve software.

You are free to do what you want however the cost of time, people and hardware/software to create your own version will far exceed $5.00, or even $25.00 per month.

Nothing in life is free, everything has a cost. This product is one of, if not the best, cloud services out there. Especially for video servers.

it would have been much better to keep the cloud service free while encouraging lots more people to get the Resolve software.

The free Resolve software? Doesn't sound like a very profitable business plan. Free cloud and free software.

It's 5$/month/project.

I thought it was per Library, which can hold any number of projects.

No?

I agree that if you have a great many long-term projects on the go that $5/month can certainly add up. Knowing this is how the pricing goes, it would be better to adapt your workflow to minimize your costs. Not sure if this is possible but hopefully you aren't actually working on all of them at the same time and you can always download and archive your projects to local storage. It would be very convenient if BMD allowed you a pricing model where you could have many projects in the cloud but only pay for 'active' projects per month. I guess you would have to manage this aspect yourself using the download / archive of projects you weren't actively working on. Tools from BMD to help with this process would be welcome.

yeah it's per library/database

It's 5$/month/project.

I thought it was per Library, which can hold any number of projects.

No?

You might be right, Jim - it's been so long since I read about this feature (and I have never used it) that I was accepting at face value the statement that it was project-based. Can someone who actually uses this feature confirm (assuming by your wording that you don't use this, Jim - my apologies if I'm mistaken).

yeah it's per library/database

Thanks Rick. Well, then this is a very reasonably priced service, isn't it?

made more complicated by the fact there is no Project Server for linux, nor ever will be it looks like

Isn't Project Server just Postgres with a bit of fancy chrome stuck on?

[Peter Chamberlain]

It's US$5 per project library per month, max 10 users per library. You can keep adding projects.

I doubt you can purchase and deprecate the cost of a computer better than $5 per month.

we have lots of small projects that often last a long time. if we keep switching things off and on, it will become confusing and unmanageable. imo, it would have been much better to keep the cloud service free while encouraging lots more people to get the Resolve software.

There is a simple obvious solution: work for less money or for free. Someone has to accommodate the loss, so why not you?

Another way to look at it is that if you don’t get even 5$ worth of value out of it per month, don’t use the service, because for you it is useless.

It's 5$/month/project.

I thought it was per Library, which can hold any number of projects.

No?

Yes, my mistake. Anyway that makes it even more no brainer for most situations.

And then, please be aware that you'll need another service to move your clips around, like DropBox or Google Drive. They are only free for a pretty limited size and may cost you considerably more.

BM Cloud is only taking care of your projects and for a fair amount, IMHO.

Frame.io is the best,but BM did the favor of removing this option (of course), cheaper and offers more, the same $15 from BMC (500mb, 01 project) at Frame.io $15 is 2tb, of course it was in davinci resolve, now not anymore. but I thought BM would offer something better to its customers and not just take away our options

Huh? Try the User Prefs:

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You want the service for free ?

Nothing in life is truly free, those who believe that Tech Firms give stuff away for free are not understanding what the product is.

You are the product if you think otherwise then you are wrong.

Facebook, Google, YouTube etc do not spend billions on infrastructure and give it away free, they have just successfully convinced everyone that they do.

And those who say Resolve is free are also mising the point. Yes it is free but it is also a hook to get you into the ecosystem as BMD are a Hardware company first and Software second.

I started with the free version to stop paying Adobe, it was great and I love Resolve and will never go back to Premier but then I wanted to do more so I purchased a Speed Editor that came with Studio, then a Micro Panel for colour grading, then because of no ProRes RAW support I upgraded my Fuji X-T4 to X-H2s and X-H2 so I could output Blackmagic BRAW to the VideoAssists that replaced my Atomos Ninjas.

So what was free for BMD has had the desired effect.

I did this all through choice becuase I could see the workflow benefits. Now with BlackMagic cloud I pay $18 month for 500GB and effectively unlimited projects in my single Project Library.

Lets think about it, $18 month is a drop in the ocean in the terms of video production if you have a workflow that can benefit from it you will get it back 10 fold in opportunity cost. $18 a month is not even a coffee a week.

I now record a 6 camera live event and by the time I get home the proxies and originals have been synced to BMD Cloud and downloaded to my edit system. That is worth $18 a month alone in time saved copying and backing up hundreds of GB of Data.

So inconclusion BMD Cloud is one of the best value workflow enhancing system out there.