DaVinci Resolve for iPad Announced!

What is perhaps discouraging to me and my use of Resolve is that it sounds like the Cut page will be getting quite a bit more love in the future whereas for me, the Edit page is where I would like BMD to spend its development dollars (it has been neglected for years). I understand why they need to improve the Cut page considering the support now for an iPad, but for those of us who prefer the Edit page, it leaves us (and I'm only guessing here - assuming finite development $$$) wanting (at least for the foreseeable future).

Wondering out loud here... because the BMD announcement mentioned that the Fusion page code has not been rewritten yet, I presume that means that the titles available on the cut page will be missing Fusion titles, initially. Does that seem like a valid conclusion?

i remember people turning down feature requests like a working outer stroke for subtitles (for real) because it might take resources.

but let's stay positive!

If it does braw, I will print and eat this post.

CaptainHook from BMD confirmed in the Resolve Facebook group that the iPad version does support BRAW.
Time to warm up that printer.

I'm out of paper !!

If it does braw, I will print and eat this post.

CaptainHook from BMD confirmed in the Resolve Facebook group that the iPad version does support BRAW.
Time to warm up that printer.

I'm out of paper !!

lol - nice one

This initial version of Resolve and Studio looks like a product that will evolve over several years as iPads themselves will evolve to match the capabilities of laptops.

I never have used the Cut page on the desktop for a client project since the Edit/Colour/Fairlight pages suit my needs. Looks like I’m going to consider the enhanced Cut page sometime in the future though, but not yet.

I predict Braw will never be possible. So forget dailies if you use a braw workflow.
You will first need to copy all braw media to a desktop/laptop, create proxies and export to the Ipad

This didn't age well... lol

I think Resolve for iPad will definitely have its place on set, especially for smaller shoots. Super small package, can feed external HDR display, and offload from external drives/readers (red?), transcode many formats, built in fast wifi (and cellular) to upload to the cloud...

pair it with a cloud store for more proxying capability on the go in a very small and light package...

Is the monitor perfect for grading? no, but unless you have an HDR or a Sony or a high end OLED, it's better than what most people have, and that mix of features makes it very flexible for a selects/proxy/ingest workflow on set or in a hotel room/plane, etc... Seems like the focus on the cut page makes sense in that way as well.

now, does it support the Advanced Panel?

"The cut page has also been co-designed to work with a hardware panel such as the DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor, which is also supported on the DaVinci Resolve for iPad."

Nice.

for me this is perfect. Detach the SSD from the camera, attach the SSD to the iPP, do a rough cut with the help of the Speed Editor wheel and buttons. And use Resolve’s Colour Management and wide gamut for the Q0 4k files. Export to h264, and upload in the night.

The clue is that these devices do not need much power, so it’s ideal for field work and nature photography, when you are off the grid for a while.

Iy will run Braw.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=157059&start=500#p892461


Ricardo Marty

The 12.9” version of the iPad M2 with 1-2TB of storage and ProRes or BRAW is a capable portable device. The screen is even better than that costlier XDR version I have on the Mac Pro given it has over 2500 local dimming zones which is an embarrassing 5x as much as my 32” XDR monitor.

Although a single data connection is not ideal at least it’s USB4 and TB3 and DisplayPort so vastly better than my iPhone 14 Pro 1TB ProRes with ludicrous Lighting connector.

Am I right to assume that Fairlight will be on it too? As a studio user and a Podcaster, I use Fairlight pretty extensively. I guess my Speed Editor AND MAYBE my MIDI Nanokontrol2 would work as well... just really hoping!

Am I right to assume that Fairlight will be on it too? As a studio user and a Podcaster, I use Fairlight pretty extensively. I guess my Speed Editor AND MAYBE my MIDI Nanokontrol2 would work as well... just really hoping!

No Fairlight in the first release. Maybe in a future release.

I think you're misunderstanding the target market for this: it's not professional colorists or even professional editors. It's more likely youtube content creators who like to use Resolve; many of them probably don't even use reference monitors and are looking for ultraportable fast solutions.

I think this is very much the intention. However, after looking at the pricing of an M2 Ipad Pro with keyboard and pen with 512GB, I don't see the value when you can get a MBP for less.

If it's all about weight and power consumption, it could make sense.

come on bm - what about resolve studio (with fusion) on my pixel pro

Wonder if Speed Editor works ? After all BM and Apple are hardware companies. Maybe the in app upgrade to Studio version allows Speed Editor to work too. Also could I use it as a HDR monitor to my Studio Max. At the moment my Studio Max shares monitor, keyboard, trackball with all my PC's. Could I edit on the Studio Max or PC then take the iPad Pro to my living room with project and source files on a portable SSD and check or grade on my Sony HDR TV etc.

The Speed Editor works as well. You can read more in the Press Release.

...Interesting that Resolve beat FCPX to the iOS punch...this is massive news.

It is massive for other historical reasons. There has long been "big talk" about porting high-end desktop applications to tablet devices. With the release of Windows 8 in 2012, Microsoft initially said there would be no further development of Win32 desktop APIs (hence desktop apps) because all future development would use the tiled "Metro" UI. This was intended to unify desktop and mobile development. It obviously did not work and most of the managers responsible for that were fired, demoted or resigned.

No company (inc'l Microsoft or Apple) has outlined a development path for moving full-featured desktop apps to a mobile device. To my knowledge there are no academic white papers discussing how this would be done. There is a fundamental paradigm conflict between the dense keyboard/mouse display with the associated UI constructs and the touch-oriented mobile display and its UI constructs. Beneath the UI layer there are issues with threading, concurrency management, cross-process IPC, plugins, etc.

EVEN IF the initial Resolve iPadOS version "only" supports cut page and color page, it is still a major achievement in the history of software development. Apple and Microsoft have gigantic R&D departments and have been working for years on porting major desktop apps to mobile UIs. If tiny little Blackmagic manages to be the first, it begs the question of what special secret their small development team has.

In 1981 a non-fiction book about a computer company won the Pulitzer Prize -- Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I worked for that company. My hope is eventually a similar inside story will be known about how Blackmagic's software division has accomplished such high productivity.

…
In 1981 a non-fiction book about a computer company won the Pulitzer Prize -- Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I worked for that company. My hope is eventually a similar inside story will be known about how Blackmagic's software division has accomplished such high productivity.

Of course there’s a lot more to the BMD story than that aspect, but I’ve also thought that they deserved some more attention documenting the company from a historical perspective than simply being recognized as a successful manufacturer of video gear and related software. Possibly the biggest hurdle would be getting an authorized account as Grant Petty may not want to support such an endeavor.

What are you waiting for?

I think this is the end of FCPX for the iPad. Can’t see Apple dedicating a lot of time and resources to make a LESS capable editor than what’s already out there.

I think this is the end of FCPX for the iPad. Can’t see Apple dedicating a lot of time and resources to make a LESS capable editor than what’s already out there.

I would not be so sure of that. There is little difference between last year's and this year's iPad Pros but one big difference is in the media engine, which now has hardware-accelerated ProRes and ProRes RAW. The ability to decode ProRes RAW would be a big thing which comes naturally to FCPX.

It can't be hugely resource-intensive to port the code to iPad given the chip is the same and the ongoing convergence between apps that run on macOS and the mobile systems. FCPX is a more intuitive and easy to use editor than the Resolve Cut Page and the grading tools in FCPX are more than adequate for many tasks, especially for what one might attempt on an iPad. Ease of use will be a more important factor on iPad than on a desktop system when choosing between apps. I'm guessing we will see FCPX for iPad Pro at some point before too long

...It can't be hugely resource-intensive to port the code to iPad given the chip is the same and the ongoing convergence between apps that run on macOS and the mobile systems....

Good points about ProRes and ProRes RAW accelerators on M2 (previously that was only on M1 Pro, Max & Ultra).

However it's very difficult to port a full-featured high-end desktop app to a mobile device, in fact nobody has ever done it -- not Microsoft, not Apple, not Adobe. You can "port" a greatly watered-down simplified version to mobile, or port full-featured apps between similar desktop systems. Resolve is a good example, which I believe uses the cross-platform Qt framework for that.

However FCP is written in Objective-C and written to the Cocoa framework, and AppKit for the UI. While you can write an iPadOS app in Objective-C it's unlikely Apple would port the existing FCP Objective-C codebase to iPadOS and alter it for the iOS UIKit framework. It's more likely they would re-write it in Swift. That might be what is taking so long.

Even though the initial version of Resolve on iPadOS just includes the Cut and Color pages, those are not watered-down and simplified. It is a tremendous achievement. Depending on the metrics used, it might be the most sophisticated app ever put on a mobile device. It would be interesting to know how Blackmagic accomplished this before the other companies who have vastly more financial and human assets. There is a mobile version of Qt but it is generally thought to be not suitable for something this complex.

will ipad pro 11 M1 be supported?
I only see HDR on 12.9 M1 would be possible.
all this DR on ipad and rumors of MacOs on ipad M2 make me to think about returning unopened ipad pro 11 M1 that I just bought before the M2 announcement.

Why does Blackmagic hate the edit page so much?

It's not just the lack of it on the iPad, it's the neglect it has suffered for the last two years as more and more development goes to the cut page. Disappointing.

I don't think they hate it. They probably have been working hard on the Ipad version which is basically resolved working like the cut version. It will give them more market traction. Who knows what surprises lurk in NY? maybe a resolve using speed edit?


Ricardo Marty

However it's very difficult to port a full-featured high-end desktop app to a mobile device, in fact nobody has ever done it -- not Microsoft, not Apple, not Adobe. You can "port" a greatly watered-down simplified version to mobile, or port full-featured apps between similar desktop systems. Resolve is a good example, which I believe uses the cross-platform Qt framework for that.

However FCP is written in Objective-C and written to the Cocoa framework, and AppKit for the UI. While you can write an iPadOS app in Objective-C it's unlikely Apple would port the existing FCP Objective-C codebase to iPadOS and alter it for the iOS UIKit framework. It's more likely they would re-write it in Swift. That might be what is taking so long.

Great info thanks.

I'm waiting for Resolve to work on my Apple Watch, then I'm in.

Am I right in assuming, that one would need to copy source footage to the iPad prior to do any cut? Ext. ssd or sd cards won't work for cutting straight from there, right?

Andre.

Am I right in assuming, that one would need to copy source footage to the iPad prior to do any cut? Ext. ssd or sd cards won't work for cutting straight from there, right?

Andre.

ext SSD should work.

I have a lot of long-term optimism about this development. Not because of iPad (I wouldn't really edit on iPad), but for the long, long, long-needed optimization of Fusion. Fusion is a mess as far as resources are concerned with Apple Silicon.

As I see it on system monitors, even with my fully loaded M1 Ultra studio, Fusion is a huge bottleneck because it's not optimized (or even rewritten maybe) for Apple silicon. Even after spending over $4000 for a high-end Mac Studio, fusion runs worse than it did on an intel Mac. But BMD did an astonishing job on the edit and color pages on Apple Silicon. They never claimed to have optimized Fusion for Apple Silicon.

But I really think this is start of something great here. The code for M series chips is essentially the same, regardless of the actual device it's written on. They've said they're going to rewrite Fusion to make it work on iPad.... this can only be a good thing for the desktop version as well. While this certainly won't happen overnight, I have great optimism that Fusion is about to get WAY better on apple products.

I predict Braw will never be possible. So forget dailies if you use a braw workflow.
You will first need to copy all braw media to a desktop/laptop, create proxies and export to the Ipad

This didn't age well... lol

Indeed...

But I spent a couple of hours looking how I could do real multicam sutff (concert video's, with several takes, so first an edit for corrections, then multicam edit) on the cut page. It just is not possible.

That makes the Ipad version impossible to work with (or even prepare work) in my case, more so because there seems to be no sync between the sync bin and synced multicam in the edit page.

That seems like a big omission ? Or is it there in V18 ?

You can read the description of the changes in Resolve 18.x in the sticky notes. Likely would be a good idea to be on 18.