Resolve 16 vs FCPX

[Brad Hurley]

It’s funny, with Resolve 16 I’m actually thinking of switching to Final Cut. It’s partly because BMD rushes to release new versions packed with new features every year at the expense of QC and stability, but also because Resolve gets more demanding of my computer with each new release. Final Cut is performing more reliably on my 2013 Mac Pro; no bugs that I’ve encountered whereas Resolve seems to be full of them.

Resolve and Final Cut are so vastly different from each other until you get past the first assembly and start editing in the timeline. At that point the differences become more stark. I’ve been using Resolve almost exclusively for about 2 years now, and I find that I avoid making some edits simply because I don’t want to have to go through the effort of looking down through all my tracks and figuring out which auto-select buttons to turn off and which ones to leave on based on the kind of insert or replace edit I might be making and its impact on tracks below it. I wonder if I’d be a bolder editor if I were using Final Cut.

On the other hand, all my footage looks better in Resolve, and audio is easier for me to manage in Resolve (e.g., built-in loudness meter, ability to connect directly to external editors like Izotope RX, etc.).

I’m working on two versions of my current project, one in Final Cut and one in Resolve, to see which side of the fence I end up on. I could of course edit in Final Cut and export XML to Resolve to do everything else but I like the convenience of staying within one NLE.

[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] “Weird. I’m generally found FCPX and Compressor to be much faster renderers. “

Same here, and I have the latest versions of Premiere, FCPX and Resolve Studio installed on the same iMac Pro. Quite recently Premiere on Mac has gotten slightly faster than FCPX for certain narrow export parameters, but in general it’s still quite slow.

Premiere has historically been very slow at playback decoding and export decoding of 4k H264, esp. on Mac hardware. Part of this was due to not supporting QuickSync until fairly recently. Initially the support was for encoding not playback. Supposedly in the very latest version they use it for playback but it still feels slow on both my 2017 iMac and 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro.

The iMac Pro doesn’t have Quick Sync but Premiere manages to use either the T2 or AMD’s VCE (Video Coding Engine) for 10-bit HEVC, since that is much faster than FCPX on an iMac Pro. This implies they should be able to use hardware acceleration for H.264 playback, but Premiere is very sluggish on 4k H.264.

So there is a lot more to performance than export/encode. Having just finished a job where I was simultaneously running FCPX 10.4.7, Premiere 14.0.0 and Resolve Studio 16.1.1.005, the overall responsiveness is FCPX is fastest with lowest lag, Resolve is a close 2nd, and Premiere is a distant 3rd.

Last month I used a high-speed camera to measure the viewer update rate of those NLEs when playing back UHD 4k/29.97 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 all-intra material from a GH5 at 4x playback speed. This was on a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro running Mojave 10.14.6. FCPX viewer was set to best quality, and Premiere set to 1/4 resolution and Metal playback.

Premiere was especially sluggish at JKL command input when going from 4x fast forward to reverse. Viewer/Program Monitor update rate:

Resolve Studio 16.1.0.055: 28 frames/sec
FCPX 10.4.7: 20 frames/sec
FCPX 10.4.6: 14 frames/sec (but uneven)
Premiere 13.1.5: 2 frames/sec

[Hendrik Martz]

I’ve been editing on numerous Apps over the last 8 years. I wouldn’t consider myself a professional editor, since I taught myself everything I know and I am not working for big post-houses.

I mostly do workshops with actors, where we shoot scenes for them. This has the following requirements for workflow:

We almost always have to collaborate, since I share the work with my cameraman. I do the editing and he grades all the scenes. We used the following Applications:

Premiere Pro (2019)
Resolve 16.x
Fcpx 10.4.6

Since we shoot guerilla style (on the streets, no preproduction), we deal with the following issues a lot: Bad sound, changing ambient light, low light and so on. Why am I telling all this: Because we need an app, which has a lot of sound repair features and good color grading options available.

The last big job, we had 13 scenes, which we edited, graded and finished in about 7 days. Thats 40 minutes of dialogue, feature editing. We used Premiere, which is very unstable, after the projects gets bigger. I use a plugin called Izotope RX 6 Elements. It completey bogs down Premiere (and Resolve also). We barely got the project out of Premiere and delivered. We had constant crashes.
Sound repair in Premiere and especially Audition is very good though.

The 2nd project we used Resolve and FCPX. My Cameraman shot on my GH5s and BM Pocket (old one). We used FCPX for editing (Had to conform the GH5s to proxies, cause NO NLE plays that stuff without Hickups) and graded in Resolve. No probs at all. FCPX is ultrastable. I never had a crash with it, and once you got some shortcuts figured out, its also very good for dialogue editing.

Last Project, we used Resolve, cause we shot on BRAW and FCPX can’t read BRAW. That’s a big caveat and a dealbreaker for FCPX. Resolve is not stable. I really like the editing (almost like the avid trim mode) and all, but you use plugins (Izotope and others), it really gets unstable. Its not ready yet in my opinion.

So this is a report from guys in germany, who run and shoot and have to deliver fast, and need a good built-in toolkit in the NLE.

For me the best is FCPX. I always come back to it. But w/o BRAW , we have to render out proxies from resolve, that takes time and is not good..

My 2 cents..

[Andrew Kimery]

Thanks for sharing you experiences, Hendrik!

[Hendrik Martz] “I use a plugin called Izotope RX 6 Elements”

FWIW I had similar issues with Izotope and PPro a couple of years ago and when I contacted Izotope support they told me I was using the plugins incorrectly. Their supported workflow is to apply the plugin to the audio clip, export that audio clip, then import the new audio clip and cut it back into the timeline (or use Render and Replace in PPro).

[Michael Gissing]

[Hendrik Martz] “Resolve is not stable. I really like the editing (almost like the avid trim mode) and all, but you use plugins (Izotope and others), it really gets unstable. Its not ready yet in my opinion.”

I use Resolve Studio on PC and lots of VST plugins including iZotope. I do not have stability issues. A crash is rare. It’s important for people to realise that combinations of software, OS & hardware might cause totally different behaviours.

[Hendrik Martz]

[Michael Gissing] “I use Resolve Studio on PC and lots of VST plugins including iZotope. I do not have stability issues. A crash is rare. It’s important for people to realise that combinations of software, OS & hardware might cause totally different behaviours.”

Not with me. I use it on macOs (Mojave) and on WIN 10. Right now, as I am writing it crashed while nesting sequences. On my machines it is very unstable.
resolve 16 Studio here.

[James Culbertson]

[Hendrik Martz] “On my machines it is very unstable.”

Same here. Premiere and After Effects crash often (2018, but also 2019 in my tests). Fortunately, I don’t need After Effects as much as I used to, and I primarily use FCP 10 which is rock solid. I’m going to wipe my Mac Pro and do a clean install of OS and applications over the holidays to see if that stabilizes things.

[Brad Hurley]

Actually the most effective way to use Izotope RX with Resolve is to use the standalone version of RX as an external audio editor in Resolve and don’t bother with the plugins. The plugins don’t have the full functionality of the standalone version, and Resolve makes it a piece of cake to roundtrip the edits you make in RX. All you have to do is set up RX as an external audio editor in Resolve’s preferences, and then if you go to the Fairlight page and right-click on an audio clip, you’ll see an option for External Audio Process in the contextual menu, with a submenu that allows you to choose RX or any other app you’ve set up as an external audio editor. Once you choose the external editor, it creates a copy of the clip with a new name in the Capture folder. When you save your edits/enhancements in Izotope RX, it overwrites this copy. Your original audio files are untouched; the edits are made to the copy.

See https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=79216 for more details.

[Michael Gissing]

There is also a good case for live automatable processing of VST plugins in Fairlight, something not possible in a render round trip. I have my dialog bus with the Vocal de-noiser sitting just after compressor limiter & de-essers. That way i can automate levels of noise reduction in real time as Fairlight can automate real time adjustments of VST plugins. Very handy.