AI voice + keyframes (FINALLY): Everything new in DaVinci Resolve 20

There are so many new tools to look at in DaVinci Resolve 20, but as I’m predominantly a video editor who does a little motion graphics work as well as color grading, we’re going to focus on the best parts of this update for the Edit and Color pages.

We won’t be looking at Fusion (where you do all of your visual effects, motion graphics, animations, etc.), but it looks like there are a ton of Fusion updates, so go check those out, too!

Here are the updates we’ll be looking at today:

If you’re looking to jump into the public beta for version 20, ensure you’ve backed up your project database correctly and exported your project files for any edits you have in the works. In fact, if they’re super important, maybe wait until they’re completed before upgrading. Word of warning!

Let’s start with the big ticket item for me, which is the new keyframe editor on the Edit page. This has been my number one gripe with Resolve as a daily driver for the past five years—the absolutely terrible user experience in trying to do even the most basic keyframe animation on the edit page. But they’ve fixed it! They’ve finally fixed it.

Nine times out of ten, what I’m trying to do with basic keyframe animation is either make some text move or make an asset like an image or a graphic file move, just to add a little something something to my edits without going full tilt into motion graphics. And that used to be like pulling teeth in DaVinci Resolve. With the new editor, it’s a breeze.

Watch the video version of this post if you’d like to see me demonstrate exactly how keyframes and bezier curves work now—I’ll make this title animate in and out as an example:

Sticking with the text animation angle, there’s now a new text tool called MultiText, which allows you to create detailed, multi-line text-based graphics within a single timeline clip. So if you want different fonts, colors, or sizes for each line, you no longer need to stack a whole bunch of text effects on top of each other. You can now do that all in one clip, keeping your timeline nice and tidy.

However, if you want to animate that text with the keyframe editor, it needs to be in separate clips—otherwise you’re just animating this MultiText clip as one block, instead of as individual lines.

You can add keyframes to the center of different lines within the MultiText clip, but those don’t appear anywhere in the keyframe editor, so I’ve no idea how you’re supposed to manipulate those. It might get updated in the full release, but for now, no dice.

Now let’s look at some of the biggest AI features in this DaVinci Resolve update.

Among the new AI features in DaVinci Resolve 20, the standout is AI IntelliScript. This lets you upload a bunch of rushes along with your script, and the AI will deliver a rough cut based on that script. It will pick the best takes and give you a timeline of alternative takes to choose from. I haven’t yet had the time to put this through its paces properly, but this is a pretty incredible update if it works as demonstrated.

When creating videos for the Envato Video channel, I usually write a script and then record my piece to camera via a teleprompter, and then I screen record whatever program I’m teaching to capture the functions that I’m demonstrating. So feasibly, I should be able to upload my script, the camera rushes, the audio from my external recording, and the screen recording of say DaVinci Resolve, slap it into this IntelliScript function, and get a rough cut in minutes vs. hours. Which is wild.

Another AI video editing tool that I think I’m going to use a whole bunch is the AI music editor. This will extend or shorten the duration of a music track to your desired length by finding natural edit points within the track and looping sections to create track lengths that fit your edit. Honestly, I already do this, but I do it manually, so it’ll be nice to speed up that workflow.

This is also something that has been available for Premiere Pro for some time, so it’s nice to see it in DaVinci Resolve 20. You can also turn on snappable beat indicators, so you can easily see where the beats are in your track and cut to them (check out the vertical lines on the audio track below).

Again, these are just simple everyday editing techniques, but anything that speeds up that workflow is a gift, in my opinion!

In terms of audio mixing, the AI audio assistant will analyze all of your audio tracks and do a pretty professional audio mix on them, saving you time and making your videos sound top-notch.

In this day and age, editors are expected to be involved in everything from motion graphics to color grading to audio mixing. So, if you don’t have access to a professional audio post-production house with engineers with decades of experience, this is going to be a tool you’ll definitely want to use! I haven’t put it through its paces yet, but the demo looks promising.

If you’re interested in sound design for video and sometimes work in Premiere Pro, be sure to check out the Basics of Sound Design in Premiere video we recently put out. It’s a banger!

Yet another AI audio tool that is interesting (but could be controversial) is the AI Voice Convert tool. It takes a pre-generated voice model and then converts audio on your timeline into spoken dialogue in that voice model. You can also generate your own voice models from your dialog recording on your machine.

So let’s say I’m working on a video, and there’s one line we need to get from our video host that they may have flubbed on the day or we just forgot to get.

Now, you can see where controversy might arise here. In my scenario, of course, I’m reaching out to the talent, letting them know that I’m going to get an additional voice line from them using these tools and so on…. but there maybe cases where it could be used in other, less professional ways. So the jury is out on the ethical side of things, but technically this is a great tool!

And let’s be honest, we already have access to AI voice generation tools like these in many places, including with a subscription to Envato, where you can jump on to VoiceGen and select one of a bunch of voice models and convert text to realistic speech to use in your projects. So, having a version of that in a professional editing setting with the option of generating a voice to match the ones in your edit is incredibly handy.

Another new AI tool in DaVinci Resolve 20 is the dialog matcher, which allows you to take an audio profile of one dialog clip and match it to another, even when they’re recorded in completely different locations. For instance, the demonstration video features one person in a large room with strong echoes and one in a more contained studio, and the tool can somewhat match the two-tone profiles so that they don’t stick out too badly in the edit.

Finally, let’s talk about some of the color page improvements in DaVinci Resolve 20.

In the color warper, there’s a new chroma warper that allows you to create more natural looks more intuitively by shifting the hue of different details within your image.

Gone are the days of shifting a hue, e.g., the color of someone’s clothes, and then having it warp everything else in the background, meaning you’d have to create a bunch of masks and all that fun stuff. Now, you can intuitively move a slider and get fine, natural control over your image.

The other big update in DaVinci Resolve 20 is the improvement to the magic mask. It’s the same tool you know and love, but now boosted to a much higher performance in terms of the selection and the track’s accuracy.

There’s so much in this DaVinci Resolve update that I’m excited to play with. I need to get stuck into some projects and see what I’m using, what’s coming in handy, and what I would still like to see in the program. Some of the other new features which I haven’t detailed in this video but I’m buzzed about include:

The list goes on!

What are you most excited about in this update? What’s got you itching to jump into DaVinci Resolve 20 to try it out? Let us know in the comments of our accompanying YouTube video!