Blackmagic Forum

I've searched around but can't find the system requirements for DaVinci Resolve 16 on Windows. I saw a thread that had Mac minimum requirements only. So, should I assume 16 min is same as 15?

Speaking of, I'm guessing Blackmagic wants to be as agnostic as possible, given the seriously high-level and noncommittal "Guidelines for selecting your OS and system hardware" section, but I'd love to have you offer specific recommendations on a base, typical, and power system. Of course it depends on what formats, resolution, etc I'm working with, but I'd guess there's a bell curve there where most users fit in the middle. You could use that to offer some guidelines on putting together an optimized system that we can expect to work for the current and maybe next version or two.

Just a suggestion/request.

Mahalo!

Without knowing your workflow, this question is hard to answer.
To give you an educated answer the following things (among others) are important: Codecs(camera and delivery), capture resolution, delivery resolution, simultanious streams, vfx, project size, etc...

See: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=90190#13

I’d just like to add, minimum specs as accurate for Resolve to run. But please consider if you plan 4K or 8k at 50 or 60p, or you plan on a lot of Resolve FX, you are likely to need much more.

Yes, thanks everyone for the input! I'm just looking for general guidelines. I tried editing some 4K 60fps and that drove me cray cause my machine was so slow and stuttery. So if I'm going to upgrade my 3 year old machine and want to edit (and color) 4K GoPro footage, how should I spec out a reasonable machine? Should I splurge on the processor? Nvidia or AMD graphics card? How much Ram? Should I run everything off of SSDs?

I know everything is a tradeoff, but where's my bang for my buck? Not looking for bare minimums but a good optimal middle where I can edit reasonably fast without spending money on components that don't really matter.

Or, how about Blackmagic just start selling optimized computers? That would save me some time.

I have a 3-year-old gaming desktop and I was able to edit 4K30 GoPro footage OK even back before I upgraded from 16GB to 32GB of RAM. (more details in my sig) Reasonable response time taking a single set of footage, cropping-zooming-panning and rendering to 1080P and then taking the 1080P renders to a Multicam edit.

Jason Rushin wrote:Or, how about Blackmagic just start selling optimized computers? That would save me some time.

I have been told that BMD does not want to be in the systems integration business, so this is something they won't do. There are professional companies that will construct a purpose-built Resolve System from scratch, optimized specifically for that purpose:

https://www.adkvideoediting.com
https://bizon-tech.com/
https://www.colorscene.com/pages/turn-key-systems
http://www.devilanddemon.com/
https://www.itcreations.com/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/
http://www.vfxtechnologies.com/
https://zworkstations.com

ColorScene specializes (mostly) in Resolve systems, so that'd be one possibility. Puget Systems is also very highly recommended and has several pages on their website detailing their approach to Resolve-specific systems. Most of what these companies sell are Linux or Windows machines, which may or may not work with what you want. And all of these have "Mercedes to Rolls-Royce" price-tags.

I can tell you we're in the process of starting to budget for a new Mac to replace our aging 2013 12-core 64GB Mac Pro at the office, and that cost about $12,000 back in 2013 (though I paid only around $9000 for it a couple of years ago from Apple). Our initial estimate is that we won't be able to avoid less than about $15K for a new 2019 Mac Pro, maybe even a little bit more. But color and post is all we do: maybe this is overkill for average people just using Resolve on the side. Still, I know of quite a few LA companies using $100,000 Resolve systems with 8 GPUs, so the sky's the limit on this stuff.

The Resolve 16 Recommended Config guide has not yet been posted, but perhaps it will answer some of your questions. Bear in mind a lot of this is kind of a "how much is a boat?" question, where a great deal depends on your budget and your expectations. There is a minimum cost of entry to using Resolve, and I think the BMD Config specs go into this in quite a bit of detail.

I got mine from ALT-System in LA... work like a mule...

Jason Rushin wrote: So if I'm going to upgrade my 3 year old machine and want to edit (and color) 4K GoPro footage, how should I spec out a reasonable machine? Should I splurge on the processor? Nvidia or AMD graphics card? How much Ram? Should I run everything off of SSDs?

Is GoPro footage still all 8bit 4:2:0? If so then you will get the best bang for your buck by purchasing a studio licence, so you get hardware accelerated decoding and encoding.

To help spec a machine we would need more information.

• Are you only editing footage from one camera, or are you doing multi cam work with several?
• How much footage do you typically have in a project?

I have been happily running 15.3 but can't upgrade to 16 on my Linux machine due to Resolve crashing looking for control surfaces.
Has the hardware requirements listed in https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=90190#13 changed for Resolve 16?

Jason Rushin wrote:Yes, thanks everyone for the input! I'm just looking for general guidelines. I tried editing some 4K 60fps and that drove me cray cause my machine was so slow and stuttery. So if I'm going to upgrade my 3 year old machine and want to edit (and color) 4K GoPro footage, how should I spec out a reasonable machine? Should I splurge on the processor? Nvidia or AMD graphics card? How much Ram? Should I run everything off of SSDs?

I know everything is a tradeoff, but where's my bang for my buck? Not looking for bare minimums but a good optimal middle where I can edit reasonably fast without spending money on components that don't really matter.

Or, how about Blackmagic just start selling optimized computers? That would save me some time.

Is that cineform GoPro or h264 GoPro or h265 GoPro or etc...

When you can give a better indication or the resolutions, codecs, color sampling and frame rates you use, you can get a pretty good answer on this forum.

8k.R3D 5:1 24 fps needs way more compute power than 8k.R3D 22:1 60fps.
h264/265 420 can be accelerated by the GPU, 422 can't.
The devil is in the details.

When you provide better/more detailed info about your workflow and what you want to achieve, you can get a better answer.