DaVinci Resolve 20: A Fresh Take on Editing, Color, and Collaboration

DaVinci Resolve 20 arrives with an odd mix of futuristic AI perks and old-fashioned, practical refinements. It’s got smarts that auto-assemble footage based on transcripts, warp voices to match your talent’s tone, and give you total control over keyframes with minimal rummaging. At the same time, it hasn’t forgotten the fundamentals: simpler proxy workflows, less squinting to see tiny timeline details, and quicker ways to mix your audio. 

If your timeline has been testing your patience, this release could make the whole process a bit less combative.

Keyframe & UI Improvements

Resolve 20 made a few interface changes that save you extra clicking and head-scratching. There are fewer hidden toggles, less timeline chaos, and a smoother editing routine. We’re highlighting the changes we find most useful. Some other tweaks exist, but these three stand out: 

New Keyframe Editor

We used to comb through tabs just to adjust small timing details. It felt like rummaging in a cluttered drawer. Now, there’s one panel on the Edit page that shows all keyframes for transforms, opacity, and other animated elements. The visual chaos has eased, and you can handle complex moves without opening four menus at once.

Vertical Video Layout

This single switch reorients your viewer and timeline for vertical footage. No more wrestling with panel sizes to see your phone-friendly clip at a decent scale. With one click, everything lines up tall. It’s straightforward and spares your eyes from letterboxed previews.

Source Tape on Edit Page

In older versions, we relied on the Cut page if we wanted all our clips in one reel. Now, you can load multiple items into a linear tape on the Edit page. Scroll, skim, mark selects, and keep editing, all in one place. It speeds up searching for the exact shot you need, especially if you work with a hefty stack of footage.

Advanced AI Tools for Editing

Earlier Resolve versions dipped into AI-driven features, things such as the Magic Mask or voice isolation but version 20 pushes forward with even more. These latest tools reduce manual searching, lighten editing chores, and keep your timeline neat.

AI Multicam Smart Switching

We used to watch each angle, hoping to find the speaker quickly. Now, Resolve automatically selects the correct camera by analyzing audio in real time. It’s an especially nice feature for interviews, group discussions, or any multi-camera event. There’s no need to manually swap angles whenever someone new starts talking.

IntelliScript (Text-Based Editing)

Text scripts once sat entirely outside the editing process, forcing you to reference timestamps and pray everything lined up. IntelliScript scans your written script and arranges clips to match, then places alternate takes in parallel. It’s more organized, and you can finalize a rough cut without combing through hours of footage.

Voice Convert

Voice replacement typically required complicated ADR sessions or re-recordings with different equipment. Resolve 20 can train on someone’s voice and apply that model to fresh dialogue, preserving the original pitch and rhythm. It’s invaluable for recapturing a moment lost to poor audio or for adding dialogue after the actor has left the set.

Audio Upgrades & Automation

Resolve 20 also hands you clever audio options, so you’re not scrolling through layers of waveforms trying to make everything sound decent.

Audio Assistant

Let’s say your timeline includes a voice track, music, and random sound effects, each at mismatched levels. You used to spend ages inching sliders up or down in search of a halfway decent blend. 

Now, Audio Assistant analyzes the timeline and handles most of that balancing for you. It organizes audio tracks, evens out dialogue levels, and tells your music when to chill. The result is a professional mix that doesn’t bury voices under that epic orchestral track you found in a free library.

Improved Voiceover Recording

Recording narration once meant switching pages, naming files, fiddling with audio inputs, and crossing fingers. Now, you get a dedicated voiceover setup on both Edit and Cut pages, so you can record straight into the timeline without rummaging around. You get real-time monitoring, a quick countdown, and even an optional prompter script to help you keep pace. 

Dialogue Matcher

Dialogue Matcher takes the sonic profile of a reference clip (tone, reverb, levels) and applies it to another line of audio. Suddenly, you don’t have that weird jump between muffled living-room takes and crisp studio recordings. It keeps your characters sounding like they’re all in the same conversation, even if you captured half the lines in a crowded hallway.

AI-Enhanced Subtitles & Transcription

Subtitle creation gets a big overhaul in Resolve 20, thanks to AI improvements and a fresh library of animated templates. 

It starts with word-by-word animated subtitles: you generate a transcript, then watch the text light up in time with the audio; painful manual alignment not included. Language support also broadens, meaning more users can benefit from automatic transcriptions without resorting to external tools. 

Topping it off is a library of ready-made subtitle styles, complete with animated elements you can drag directly onto your timeline. You’ll see full-sentence captions, single-word callouts, or flashy transitions right out of the box. The end result? Subtitles that actually keep pace with your audio and look stylish doing it.

Streamlined Timeline Management

DaVinci Resolve 20 tightens up the workflow so you spend less time opening extra windows or wiping old files by hand. A few highlights stand out:

• Read-Only Timelines: Instead of opening multiple timelines and copying clips back and forth, you can now load a timeline as a “source.” That means you can review, skim, and grab selects from it without accidentally editing or messing up your main project.
  
• Proxy Workflow Enhancements: Automatic proxy creation comes standard. And if you need the full-resolution file for color grading or final delivery, a single click toggles between proxies and originals. It’s quick enough to fit even into remote or laptop-based workflows.
  
• Automatic Render Cache Clearing: DaVinci can delete older cache files on a schedule you choose. No more rummaging through folders, wondering why your disk space is draining. Once files pass a set age, they vanish, leaving your storage tidy.

Audio Checkerboard & AI Separation

Audio management used to mean splitting out tracks one speaker at a time, then juggling multiple plug-ins for each. What are we getting in DaVinci Resolve 20? 

Checkerboard to New Tracks

When multiple people share a single audio file, like a group podcast or a chaotic interview, sorting each speaker onto separate tracks used to be a pain. In Resolve, with a one-click checkerboard, each person lands on their own track, making it simpler to apply custom EQ or separate volume settings. No more manual splits every time someone else pipes in.

Track-Level AI Effects

Noise reduction and automatic ducking now scale to entire tracks, so you’re not applying the same effect clip by clip. Whether you’re scrubbing out background hum or balancing voiceovers and music, the AI engine handles bulk tasks fast. You pick an effect, assign it to the track, and let Resolve handle the heavy lifting without rummaging through endless parameters.

AI Music Editor

Music tracks sometimes run too short or too long for your final timeline. This feature analyzes your song, pinpoints beats, and stitches segments together to match the exact length you need. You can drag the edges of the audio clip to instantly extend or reduce the duration, and Resolve retimes the track in the background.

Fusion Page Upgrades

Fusion still requires elbow grease, especially for advanced composites, but Resolve 20 adds a few changes that lighten the load:

• Full Text Box Wrapping: Define a bounding area and Fusion adjusts each line automatically, saving you the hassle of manually hitting return five times. That means fewer tedious line breaks and a faster way to build lower thirds or overlays.
  
• Enhanced Warper Tools: A puppet-like distortion system lets you reshape objects with fewer steps. It’s still manual work, but there’s less fiddling with multiple layers.
  
• Deep Compositing: The Fusion pipeline now accepts deep EXRs and multi-layer image files, letting you blend or tweak them in a single step. Fewer layered node stacks means more time for the parts of compositing you actually enjoy.
  

Faster Depth, Smarter Mask

Resolve 20 improves two of its most popular color tools, giving you faster, more accurate ways to focus and stylize your shots.

Depth Map V2

Older editions got the job done but sometimes tripped over crowds or busy scenes. V2 updates the engine with a sharper sense of depth, so you can blur out a random aunt in the back row without losing crisp focus on your main subject. Go ahead, toss a dense street shot at it; the system separates foreground and background with fewer oddball mishaps.

Magic Mask V2

Magic Mask used to track your characters decently well, but it might bail if the lighting changed or a prop swung in front of them. Now, it clings on more stubbornly. If you want to recolor a shirt, remove a hat, or brighten someone’s face while ignoring everything else, V2 keeps that selection locked. No redoing the same stroke on frame 150 after your subject moves behind a palm tree. It just works, and it does so consistently enough that you’ll think twice before going back to hand-keying masks.

Edit Page

Version 20 sharpens the Edit page with two updates that make jump cuts less jarring and upscaling less of a compromise. 

Speed Warp for Smooth Cut checks neighboring frames to keep transitions fluid, letting you hide a mid-sentence pause or splice two takes without a jolt. It’s frame interpolation done thoroughly, so you won’t see glitchy half-frames pop up.

AI Super Scale in 3x and 4x, meanwhile, boosts HD or 4K footage to a higher resolution without turning everything into a fuzzy smear. The algorithm cranks out extra detail so older B-roll doesn’t clash with your newer, sharper footage. If you deal with a grab bag of resolutions, you’ll appreciate how this feels like a legitimate upgrade instead of a quick patch.

Improved Collaboration

Teams already shared project libraries, but this release smooths out a few rough edges so group edits run more cohesively. It’s not a cosmic leap in collaboration, but these features keep everyone on the same page with fewer issues along the way:

• Cloud Library Upgrades let you store and access project files in one place so that nobody’s stuck rooting around for the correct folder.
  
• Presentation Mode generates a link for reviewers to watch your current cut, drop feedback at specific frames, and chat about changes.
  
• Selective Sync means you can decide which clips need to be full resolution and which can live as proxies, keeping uploads lean while preserving the high quality for your key footage.
  

Quality-of-Life Updates

DaVinci Resolve 20 also delivers a handful of smaller adjustments that spare you daily aggravations.

First, there’s the Scrolling Viewer Zoom. Instead of zooming in from the dead center every time, the viewer now respects where you’ve placed your pointer, so you’re not constantly dragging back to the spot you wanted to see up close. Second, the Cut page benefits from direct voice-over and audio controls. You can nudge levels, pan tracks, or add a quick fade without flipping over to Fairlight. It’s not a total overhaul, but these tweaks keep you in the creative zone rather than hopping between pages for simple changes.

There are plenty of other additions — some tiny, some larger — but rattling through them all would turn this post into a full-blown encyclopedia. The gist is that DaVinci Resolve 20 continues to sand down the rough edges, add meaningful new tools, and update existing features so the editing, color grading, and mixing experience feels smoother overall. If the features listed above don’t cover your personal wishlist, odds are there’s still a small enhancement tucked away in this release that addresses it.