After DaVinci Resolve finally released on the iPad (after a lot of public pressure), I started to use it more and more.

At this point, I’ve used it for a few months now, and I think that’s enough to come up with a judgement as to whether it’s good or not, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Long story short, it’s really good. Honestly, it may be the best iPad editing app (except Final Cut… but I can’t make a judgement about Final Cut because I haven’t used it).

Features

First up, I want to talk about the main features I used on the iPad version of Resolve, and the features I missed from the PC/Mac versions.

The iPad version of Resolve doesn’t have an “Edit” page, first of all. For those unaware, the “Edit” page is effectively the main page on which most of the editing happens in the Mac and PC versions of Resolve. Most people who have experience with the Mac or PC versions of Resolve will be fairly well-versed with the “Edit” page. Unfortunately, the iPad app doesn’t have an “Edit” page. All of the editing happens on the “Cut” page, which is quite difficult to get used to. I can’t really say yet whether the “Cut” page is less featureful than the “Edit” page, though. So far, I’ve not run into any such limitation.

Next up, Fusion. While Fusion effects are present on the iPad version of Resolve, the dedicated Fusion page for creating your own VFX is painfully absent. This means that you have to use the stock effects built into Resolve, which limits creativity immensely.

Lastly, Fairlight. I think Fairlight (the audio editing application within Resolve) was one of the strongest parts of Resolve, and it’s quite sad that it’s not present (by default, at least).

The thing is, though, you can actually enable these pages if you assign (and use) a keyboard shortcut to do so. I didn’t do this, though, primarily because it feels a little bit hacky and I wanted to evaluate the stock Resolve app without using workarounds, even if you could argue that this is part of the stock app.

What is present (and still amazing) is the Colour page. Resolve is known for being an incredibly powerful program for colour grading, and that carries over to the iPad. The Colour page is basically fully featured and is almost the same as the Mac and PC versions. It’s pretty incredible.

Something I love is the simplicity of editing on Resolve for iPad. It’s really easy to just get a rough cut of something out in like half an hour, especially after you’ve gotten past the (rather steep) learning curve. I love that you’re not forced into making something complex, which is something that I felt with the PC and Mac versions of Resolve.

I’m a little less enthused about the Media page/window on Resolve. To be fair, I never loved the Media window on the PC/Mac versions of Resolve either, and that carries over here. It does it’s job, but it’s nothing really groundbreaking, honestly. It’s fine. Not great, but not bad either. I will (and I do) use it.

Performance

I think the performance and optimisation side of Resolve for iPad is what has made it so incredibly compelling, especially for people (like me!) who don’t have incredibly fast computers already.

For context, my computer isn’t really built to run video editing applications very well. I don’t have a dedicated graphics card (only the integrated Radeon graphics on my Ryzen 5 5600G), and I also have less-than-ideal amounts of RAM (16 GB). On the other hand, my iPad is a 2-generation-old, A12Z-powered iPad Pro (which, for context, has a Geekbench multicore score that’s half of the current-gen M2 iPad Pro).

Ever since I installed Resolve 18 on my computer, I’ve dealt with insane performance issues. Playing back 1080p video (even without any effects) at quarter resolution still leads to frequent crashes. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve stopped using Resolve on my computer.

While older versions of Resolve would run, they would also crash if you tried to play back any fusion transitions/titles. It was quite limiting, to say the least.

On the other hand, performance on my iPad is quite good.

While playback isn’t the smoothest in the world (there is quite a lot of jitter and lag), and you’re limited to 1080p video (on my iPad), optimisation is incredibly good. This means that Resolve has basically never crashed for me, and I’ve been able to use Fusion transitions/titles in my timelines without completely bricking my machine.

Export times are also quite good! Most of the time, export happens quicker than real-time (with average speeds for a 1080p video being around 85-90 FPS). Whenever a fusion clip is being exported, though (like a title or a transition), exporting speed slows significantly (to maybe 5-10 FPS) for that duration.

This implies that, at least on my iPad, you won’t really be able to make really complex custom Fusion clips. You probably still need a PC/Mac with a beefy GPU for that.

Interface

The main concern I had with Resolve for iPad is how the interface would transition over to a touch-first device.

Firstly, I want to talk about keyboard and mouse support on Resolve for iPad. As expected, it is really quite good; there are even special settings for keyboard shortcuts that let you enable other pages (like the edit page, for example) on Resolve for iPad.

The touch and Pencil workflows are a little bit more of a mixed bag. While editing using touch/Apple Pencil works most of the time, there are some slight quirks.

Firstly, the buttons are still a little bit small and difficult to hit (especially with stubby fingers). This does get annoying quite often, especially when you’re trying to set in- and out-points for certain clips.

Secondly, there are a lot of “swipe” gestures that are location specific (that is, they only work if you swipe on a very small part of the screen), like gestures for adjusting the part of the clip that’s being played. This is pretty unreliable, especially without the pencil.

Thirdly, there is no gesture for “right-click”. You just have to long press. This is pretty infuriating (especially because the time to activate the secondary click menu is extremely long). It should, in my opinion, just open up the context menu if you touch a clip with two fingers at the same time (like right-clicking on a trackpad).

To conclude, even though I’ve had my issues with Resolve’s interface decisions and intuitiveness, it’s probably the most featureful and most reliable video editing application for iPadOS right now. On top of that, it’s available for a lot more iPad versions than Final Cut is!

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading!

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