-
Panel discussion: Who loves their DaVinci panels?
Discussion on all these fora is dominated by “Wave v Avid?” “No! Buy Elements|JLCooper|xxxx!”. But what about the real thing?
We had CP200B/BK with Color, expensive and sweet, we’ve bought Euphonics, tried Wave, hear great things about Elements but really, what matters is feel, mapping and speed/control, and all the 3rd party panels feel a bit granular – like the infinite focus rings on digital camcorders – just imprecise and steppy.
Who’s out there using the real Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve control surface? What can you tell me about it? If price were no object, is it still the one?
-
4 Replies
-
Owning Resolve panel for about 1.5 year. Great panel, rock solid and heavy. Very impressive to clients -)
Knobs and rotary buttons feels solid and smooth, nice possibility of changing backlight color (any RGB value). One negative thing: the balls sometimes feels jamming, it seems like there is some trash inside, and there is no option to open the panel and clean it.Grading station: MacPro 12-core 2.4/24Gb RAM/Resolve control surface/RedRocket/GTX285/GTX570x2/DeckLink 3D+/Cubix/Penta PDP-32W Display
-
We have two sets of the panels hands down they rock.
I agree with Nikolai – when clients walk into the room they impress way more than say elements, wave etc.
Once you get muscle memory with them there isn’t a whole lot you touch a mouse for anymore. But the soft menu’s can be deep and take a little getting used too.
Construction is solid – power supply connections are very nice touch.
I would have liked old style resolve control panel with built in mouse but don’t need it much.
Robbie Carman
—————-
Colorist and Author
Check out my new Books:
Video Made on a Mac
Apple Pro Training Series DVDSP
From Still To Motion
An Editors Guide To Adobe Premiere Pro -
Thank you both, these are reassuring endorsements. I guess two is sufficient – I thought there might be more but i guess this space is occupied mostly by the searching, uncertain neophytes like myself – the true devotees are just happily grading away. Time for the laying on of hands!
Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…
-
I used the old Da Vinci panels and now have been using the newer ones for as long as they’ve been available.
Absolutely love them, tried to use a wave at one stage for a small job and I felt disabled by it somewhat!
Whole thing is really solid and really responsive for tiny little adjustments, if you can afford one you’ll never look back.
In regards to the ‘sticky/crunchy’ balls (yeah I know how that sounds!). I had a similar issue on the the last set I worked on. Its not dirt inside it, its actually the mechanism which is an analog style roller system. These can now be replaced with a much smoother optical bracket for the trackballs. Made a huge difference!!
Oh and you can remove the balls if you want to check for dirt, you just need to pry the ring off carefully to access it. Thats how the engineers swapped out the mechanism. Be careful if you do it yourself that the ribbon cables inside don’t get caught or disconnected.Danny Scotting – Senior Digital Colourist
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up