DaVinci Resolve 19 adds AI text editing and motion tracking

DaVinci Resolve has long been the favorite escape hatch for video editors fed up with Adobe's endless monthly Creative Cloud subscriptions.

Now, Blackmagic Design is giving creators even fewer reasons to look back. At NAB 2024, the company officially unveiled DaVinci Resolve 19 in open beta, packing a massive lineup of AI-powered workflows across editing, color grading, visual effects, and audio post-production.

Editing by text and pinpointing colors

The headline feature in the Edit module is text-based video editing. Resolve 19 transcribes your audio, detects distinct speakers, and displays the transcript. If you want to trim an interview or hunt down a soundbite, you can literally search and delete text in the window, and your timeline trims automatically.

Colorists get Color Slice, a vector grading tool dividing colors into six vectors alongside a dedicated skin tone slider. It lets you tweak exact hues without breaking a sweat over complex qualifier selections.

Blackmagic also packed in Film Look Creator with over 60 cinematic parameters, Defocus Background to realistically mimic shallow depth of field, and Face Refinement to track and polish skin textures in seconds.

Smarter tracking and hardware muscle

Behind the scenes, Blackmagic's neural engine powers IntelliTrack, a new AI point tracker that locks onto subjects for stabilization, motion graphics, and even automated Fairlight audio panning.

For grainy footage, the update rolls out UltraNR, an AI spatial noise reduction tool that wipes clean digital noise without manual tweaking. According to NVIDIA benchmarks, UltraNR runs 3x faster on an RTX 4090 compared to Apple's M2 Ultra chip, with TensorRT accelerating AI effects up to 2x.

Fairlight audio also adds Dialogue Separator FX to quickly pull voices out of messy background ambiences. The standard version remains completely free, while the Studio version costs the same classic one-time fee of $295.

Why it matters

We think DaVinci Resolve 19 lands a massive blow against the SaaS subscription model that dominates creative software today.

While rivals gatekeep generative AI features behind recurring cloud tiers, Blackmagic gives editors local, high-performance neural workflows powered by modern GPUs for a single flat fee. For indie filmmakers, YouTubers, and production houses, text-based editing combined with one-click noise reduction and trackballs cuts hours of mind-numbing labor every week.

By leveraging on-device horsepower from both RTX cards and Apple silicon, Blackmagic proves that pro-grade creative AI belongs inside native timelines rather than sluggish cloud pipelines.