What’s New in DaVinci Resolve 21: AI Upgrades, Photo Editing, and Faster Workflows

DaVinci Resolve 21 was supposed to be a quiet, bug-fix-focused release. Instead, it’s turned into one of the most feature-packed updates Blackmagic has shipped, with heavy emphasis on AI, a brand-new photo editing page, smarter color tools, and big workflow improvements like background rendering.

If you edit video, shoot photos, or do client work, there’s a lot here that can actually change how you work day to day.

AI Tools That Actually Help You Edit

Resolve 21 leans hard into AI, but most of the new tools are aimed at solving real editing problems instead of just being flashy demos.

AI IntelliSearch for Smarter Media Organization

AI IntelliSearch lets Resolve analyze your footage and automatically tag what it sees. It can recognize faces, objects, colors, and more, then make those clips searchable.

Examples of what you can search for:

• Find all clips with a specific person’s face
• Search for shots with a dog, car, or other object
• Filter by visual elements like certain colors

On small projects this is nice to have. On big jobs—like weddings, events, or documentaries with hundreds of clips—it can save a ton of time hunting for the right shot. If you want to go deeper into these AI helpers, check out our guide on using the new DaVinci Resolve 21 AI tools for faster, smarter editing.

AI Speech Generator and Voice Cloning

Resolve 21 now includes an AI speech generator. You type text, Resolve generates an audio file of that text being spoken.

You can:

• Use built-in synthetic voices
• Create a custom AI voice from an existing recording (as little as ~10 seconds of someone talking)

Previous versions already had a more complex voice cloning workflow that required several minutes of audio and matching cadence. Now, you just type what you want said and Resolve speaks it in the cloned voice. It’s powerful—and something to use carefully, especially for client approvals and ethical use.

AI CineFocus: Add Depth of Field in Post

AI CineFocus brings a “cinematic mode” style effect into Resolve. It uses AI to simulate shallow depth of field on footage that was shot with everything in focus—like a phone clip or a small-sensor camera.

What it can do:

• Let you click on a person or object to keep in focus
• Blur the background automatically
• Adjust bokeh shape and intensity to control the look

What it can’t do is fix bad shallow depth of field. If you shot with a super blurry background and missed focus, AI CineFocus can’t magically recover detail. But for flat-looking footage that you wish had more separation, it’s a very interesting tool.

AI Face Age Transformer and Face Reshaper

Resolve 21 adds two wild face-focused tools:

• AI Face Age Transformer: You tell Resolve the subject’s age, then push them older or younger. It tracks the face and adjusts features—wrinkles, skin, and overall age appearance.
• AI Face Reshaper: Lets you subtly (or dramatically) change facial proportions—wider, narrower, more exaggerated features, etc.

Blackmagic pitches these for creative work: comedy, stylized content, or even animating still portraits in documentaries. Used gently, they could also help with small cosmetic tweaks clients ask for—but they also raise the usual realism and ethics questions around AI-altered faces.

AI Blemish Removal

There’s now an AI blemish removal tool aimed at cleaning up skin issues quickly. Instead of manual retouching or heavy beauty filters, Resolve can intelligently minimize acne, marks, or bruises while keeping the overall look natural.

For talking-head YouTube videos, interviews, and client work where people are self-conscious on camera, this could become a go-to tool.

AI Slate Detection and Metadata

For larger productions using clapper boards, Resolve 21 can now detect when a slate appears in the shot, automatically:

• Adding markers at the slate
• Reading the slate text
• Filling that information into clip metadata

That means less manual logging and cleaner organization for multi-take, multi-day shoots.

AI Ultra-Sharpen and Motion Deblur

Two more AI-powered rescue tools aim to save borderline footage:

• Ultra-Sharpen: Designed to make soft or slightly blurry footage clearer without the usual crunchy sharpening artifacts. Blackmagic claims it can even salvage clips you’d normally consider unusable.
• AI Motion Deblur: Targets motion blur from low shutter speeds or shaky camera moves. It analyzes the footage and reduces motion blur to make the action easier to see.

These are the kinds of tools you hope you never need—but when you do, they can save a shot, a scene, or even an entire project.

New Photo Editing Page: Resolve Takes on Lightroom

One of the biggest surprises in Resolve 21 is a full photo editing page, clearly aimed at photographers and hybrid shooters who currently live in apps like Lightroom or Capture One.

Key capabilities include:

• Support for RAW photo files
• Familiar sliders for exposure, contrast, color, etc.
• Albums and a lightbox-style browsing mode
• Cropping and reframing tools
• Tethered shooting support—connect your camera and have images import directly into Resolve as you shoot
• Multi-user support so multiple editors can work on photos at the same time

The twist is that you also get Resolve’s powerful color tools on stills. You can color photos using nodes, just like you would with video, opening up very advanced grading workflows for photography.

For creators who already live in Resolve for video, this could be a compelling reason to keep both photo and video workflows in one application instead of paying for a full Adobe suite.

Editing, Graphics, and Color Workflow Upgrades

Beyond AI and photos, Resolve 21 adds a lot of quality-of-life improvements for everyday editing and color work.

Edit & Cut Page Improvements

Notable updates on the edit and cut pages include:

• HTML and Lottie graphics support: Import HTML-based animations and Lottie files and use them as native animated graphics, which is a big time-saver for motion designers and template users.
• Spell checker in the text tool: Resolve can now catch typos in your on-screen text, which is huge for social content, titles, and lower thirds.
• Emoji support: You can finally drop emojis directly into text elements without workarounds or external PNGs.

Color Page: Multi-Master Trim Manager and More

The color page gets some smart workflow features:

• Multi-Master Trim Manager: Lets you maintain one main timeline but manage multiple color versions—like SDR and HDR—without duplicating timelines. This keeps complex delivery requirements much more manageable.
• Magic Mask render in place: You can now cache Magic Mask results, making playback and further grading smoother when using this powerful but heavy tool.
• Layers view for nodes: If you find node graphs intimidating, you can now view and work with them more like layers. It’s the same underlying system, just presented in a way that feels more familiar to users coming from layer-based tools.

Fusion, Fairlight, and Live Audio

Resolve’s motion graphics and audio tools also get meaningful updates, even if they’re not as flashy as the AI announcements.

Fusion: Presets and Audio-Driven Animation

Blackmagic recently acquired Crocodove, a company known for its Fusion tools and presets. Those are now integrated into Resolve 21, giving Fusion users a richer library of ready-made effects and building blocks.

There’s also Audio Driven Fusion Animation, which lets you drive animations directly from an audio file. Think elements pulsing or moving in sync with music or dialogue without having to manually keyframe every beat.

Fairlight Updates and Fairlight Live

On the Fairlight page inside Resolve, the updates are smaller but still useful:

• Audio tracks can now be grouped into folders for cleaner timelines
• A six-band clip EQ and EQ level matching
• Improved effects chaining

The real audio headline is Fairlight Live, a separate, completely free application designed for live production audio.

Fairlight Live lets you:

• Manage dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of audio inputs
• Mix and process audio in real time using the familiar Fairlight toolset
• Integrate with Blackmagic ATEM switchers (including ATEM Mini models) via a forthcoming software update

For anyone running live streams, events, or broadcast-style setups, this is a serious upgrade to the Blackmagic ecosystem.

Background Rendering, Proxies, and Transcripts

One of the most practical changes in Resolve 21 is something many editors have wanted for years: true background processing.

Resolve 21 can now:

• Background render your timelines when you’re idle, making playback smoother without you having to manually trigger renders.
• Generate proxies in the background, instead of locking you out of the UI or requiring the separate Proxy Generator app.
• Create AI transcripts in the background, so you don’t have to wait around for transcription to finish before continuing to edit.

These changes don’t just make Resolve feel faster—they make it easier to stay in the creative flow while the heavy lifting happens behind the scenes. If you’re interested in combining these features with other AI video workflows, you might also like our guide on bulk-creating stylized videos with free AI tools.

Pricing and Availability

Despite how big this release is, Blackmagic is keeping its usual pricing model:

• DaVinci Resolve (free): Still free, now with many of the new tools included.
• DaVinci Resolve Studio: A one-time purchase, and if you already own it, Resolve 21 is a free upgrade.

Blackmagic has hinted they could charge for updates of this size in the future, but for now, the Resolve 21 beta is available to download and test today.

Between the AI tools, the new photo page, and the workflow upgrades, Resolve 21 isn’t just a minor polish release—it’s a serious push to be the all-in-one hub for video, photo, audio, and motion work.