I tolerate Resolve, essentially it’s just inertia. It is hard to imagine software could be commercial and so poorly made.
My favorite glitch that has persisted for many versions is how if you background it while it is launching, the GUI becomes frozen and the only way to use it is to kill the process and then launch it again making sure to not switch to any other apps while it loads. The worst one that comes to mind, because it happens all the time when I am using it, is when you hit undo once it could undo multiple recent changes (never know how many exactly, just have to guess), and if you then redo in panic it would only redo one of them, so you have to manually do it (fun when it involves fine color adjustments). For my own sanity will not try remembering all the other ones. In addition, a lot of counter-intuitive design choices, messy color management, etc.
Proprietary cross-platform software for multimedia production tends to be polished but Resolve genuinely feels worse than an Electron app, with subtle delays and micro-freezes in many interactions.
To be fair now with all those “AI” features they could probably say it is optimized for “agents” or something…
I have been using resolve since they added editing functionality (it used to only be for color correction) and I have never had any of those issues. I have the paid studio version and have used it for commercial and private work. It is also a lot less crash happy than premiere which I ditched for resolve and never looked back.
Unlikely. This has been the case on 3 different laptops and multiple macOS versions and Resolve versions.
I use it pretty infrequently nowadays and I admit I didn’t see the startup freeze in a couple months (either I am lucky or they finally fixed it in a recent update), the undo glitch is alive as ever though.
Some other things off the top of my head:
• UI freezes for a second or two when you switch to Fusion tab.
• If you adjust speed in a Fusion node, timeline clip remains the same length, so if you slow it down 2x you can only see the first half. To say Fusion in general is half-baked is to be very, very generous.
• Export location gets reset every launch.
• Can’t copy-paste a node or its settings, in case you want to test between two different configurations.
Even the aforementioned RawTherapee (which is made using Qt I think and which is far from a shining example of usability) is more pleasant to use for me.
Performance, clipboard behaviour, and file browser persistence seem like fairly typical OS-specific issues. Obviously not great if they're not properly testing macOS, but I don't think it's an "even bigger red flag" for those to be OS-specific.
Grouping close-together changes of the same control for undo sounds probably intentional to me, like how Ctrl+Z in a textbox doesn't go one character at a time, and if I move something with arrow keys I'd expect that to be one "movement" once I stop rather than one per key repeat. Whether it's grouping too aggressively to the point of being recognized as an issue is probably down to personal preference, though I would lean towards agreeing that less grouping would be better.
> Grouping close-together changes of the same control for undo sounds probably intentional to me
I explained how it happens. Intentional or not, it just takes us between buggy software and poorly designed software and even then losing changes (not all of what is undone is redone and you are left in an inconsistent state) remains a bug.
> Ctrl+Z in a textbox doesn't go one character at a time
Retyping text is not comparable to readjusting different fine color controls on different pages of the UI across different nodes.
By comparison, the aforementioned RawTherapee (despite being powered by Qt and looking pretty barren) in fact works more reliably with no such issues, and it’s also cross-platform software that is free to boot.
> The aforementioned RawTherapee has no such issues
I don't mean to claim that the mentioned issues are unavoidable or that some piece of software is more likely than not to have these issues, just that when there are OS-specific issues it's this kind of thing I expect. Clipboard handling is pretty much an entirely different implementation on each platform unless you're using something like Electron that already handles it for you, for instance.
There’s no use case for system clipboard, given it’s a monolithic piece of software that doesn’t allow multiple projects to be simultaneously open in different instances. There’s nowhere else to paste except the same window.
Meanwhile, open-source, non-Electron, multi-platform software that handles copy-paste via system clipboard exists just fine (VCV Rack comes to mind).
There are many things it makes sense to copy/drag-drop between applications. There are cases where you might not need to, but using the system clipboard is still common.
> Meanwhile, open-source, non-Electron, multi-platform software that handles copy-paste via system clipboard exists just fine (VCV Rack comes to mind)
VCV Rack seems to just use GLFW to handle it, but again I'm not claiming these issues are unavoidable or more likely than not to occur. For any given issue with some software, 99% of other software will not have that same issue.
This starts to look like a waste of time and not a useful discussion. There are frameworks and libraries that handle 100% of clipboard OS specifics, and the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place. In my experience the app is buggy and a pain to use relative to other software, that’s the entirety of my point.
> There are frameworks and libraries that handle 100% of clipboard OS specifics
They're sufficient in many cases, but you'll still sometimes need the control of working with COM/etc. directly, and those libraries don't fully save you from platform-specific bugs (e.g: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/issues/2644).
> the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place
What do you expect to happen when you copy some text from an external editor into a text field?
That’s a terrible analogy because you’re describing bugs and not usage patterns.
• UI freezes for a second or two when you switch to Fusion.
- that’s weird
• If you adjust speed in a Fusion node, timeline clip remains the same length, so if you slow it down 2x you can only see the first half. To say Fusion in general is half-baked is to be very, very generous.
- Again never had this issue
• Export location gets reset every launch.
- It remembers my last export settings per project
• Can’t copy-paste a node or its settings, in case you want to test between two different configurations.
- I have copy pasted many fusion and color nodes without issues
Have you reported these issues to Black Magic?
I have used a lot of editing software like old school Final Cut Pro, premiere, Sony Vegas (yuck!) and even movie maker. Resolve in my opinion has the least amount of friction to use. What do you use to edit?
What I do now can be done using a mix of free software (ffmpeg, etc.) and if I were to go pro and have less time for tinkering then it’d be FCP for me.
Mmm I have a different experience. For me other NLE tools were more crashy than Resolve. Resolve also has an incredible feature set and with a one-time payment is a terrific deal. But years ago, it was very much bug-ridden for sure.
I mean, I just used it last month whatever the latest version was. It didn’t freeze at startup but all the other issues were still there.
I can’t see myself paying for that. What I do now can be done using a mix of free software (ffmpeg, etc.) and if I were to go pro and have less time for tinkering then it’d be FCP for me…
My favorite glitch that has persisted for many versions is how if you background it while it is launching, the GUI becomes frozen and the only way to use it is to kill the process and then launch it again making sure to not switch to any other apps while it loads. The worst one that comes to mind, because it happens all the time when I am using it, is when you hit undo once it could undo multiple recent changes (never know how many exactly, just have to guess), and if you then redo in panic it would only redo one of them, so you have to manually do it (fun when it involves fine color adjustments). For my own sanity will not try remembering all the other ones. In addition, a lot of counter-intuitive design choices, messy color management, etc.
Proprietary cross-platform software for multimedia production tends to be polished but Resolve genuinely feels worse than an Electron app, with subtle delays and micro-freezes in many interactions.
To be fair now with all those “AI” features they could probably say it is optimized for “agents” or something…