If you have been in the field, it is impossible to have not heard of the Australian company Blackmagic Design’s software DaVinci Resolve. It is, and has been for years, the industry standard software for Color Correction.

What you might not know is that not only has Resolve gotten more powerful over the years, but it can now edit, dub, sound mix, do (minor) VFX and output to almost all codecs. And in case you didn’t know, it is free!

Yes! The exact same software used by multimillion dollar blockbuster movies like Wonder Woman, The Mummy etc, can be used in your low budget movie shot on a mobile phone in your bedroom.

Times Like None Other

Thirty years ago you had to spend a lot of money to make your movie on film. Then to edit it you had develop it, make copies, rent out an editing machine, physically cut the film (or make VHS cuts like Robert Rodrigues did in El Mariachi), stitch together film strips if you cut out an additional frame, develop negative, the positive, copies after copies. Man! Just imagining it is giving me a headache.

Do we live in times like none other, or not!

Paid Version of DaVinci Resolve

They do have a studio version that lets multiple people work on the project simultaneously, with some additional feature like noise removal and so on. I do not believe you will find use of those right now.

Noise removal was the only additional piece that we needed during the postproduction of Munnariv. For that we brought a plugin called Neat Video and did it.

Costs for Nerds

  • DaVinci Resolve: Free
  • DaVinci Resolve Studio version: ₹22,000, one time purchase
  • Neat Video plugin: ₹5,000 to ₹8,000 depending on which software you want to plug into
  • Adobe’s standalone Premiere Pro: ₹1,420 per month, that is ₹17,000 per year
  • Whole Adobe suite: ₹43,000 per year

Then there is of course the all evil cracked and pirated softwares. It is for most people where they start out. But now you know you have other options. Options that are not fiddley-medley. But solid industry grade softwares, for free.

Get your free copy of DaVinci Resolve, go through the infinite tutorials on YouTube, and go make your film.

Hey Aspiring Filmmaker,

I debuted my film career making a feature film for ₹5 lakhs ($7,000) on an iPhone. I’d like to help you do the same. So I wrote everything I learned into a book. It is now available on Amazon, called The Indian Indie Film (or Make Your Film for rest of the world). Enjoy!