DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve is a professional video editing and color grading software developed by Blackmagic Design, and it happens to have a free version that is wildly popular because it is a great piece of cross-platform software (I have tried it on Mac, Linux and the iPad with quite nice results).

I am not really crazy about it as a video editor, but it has some pretty amazing scriptability and motion graphics capabilities with a nodal editor, so I am toying with it mostly for that. It is also a great color grading tool, and I have used it for that purpose on a few occasions.

There is a flatpak available, but I’ve been playing with the “normal” installer, which unpacks itself into /opt/resolve and creates a desktop entry. My setup is quite unconventional as I am running it via RDP from a Fedora 42 VM that has access to an NVIDIA 3060 via PCI pass-through, so these notes are definitely not for general consumption.

# make it ignore package checks, because this isn't Ubuntu
SKIP_PACKAGE_CHECK=1 ./DaVinci_Resolve_20.2_Linux.run
cd /opt/resolve/libs
# move offending libraries out of the way
sudo mkdir disabled
sudo mv libgio* libgmodule* libglib* disabled/

To get it to run and use my NVIDIA GPU, I had to tweak the .desktop file it creates in /usr/share/applications/ to enable PRIME offloading:

# cat /usr/share/applications/com.blackmagicdesign.resolve.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=DaVinci Resolve
GenericName=DaVinci Resolve
Comment=Revolutionary new tools for editing, visual effects, color correction and professional audio post production, all in a single application!
Path=/opt/resolve/
Exec=env __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia /opt/resolve/bin/resolve %u
Terminal=false
MimeType=application/x-resolveproj;
Icon=/opt/resolve/graphics/DV_Resolve.png
StartupNotify=true
Name[en_US]=DaVinci Resolve

• I can’t get it to run with window decorations on Fedora 42 (GNOME). Full screen is OK(ish), since I am streaming it via a GPU-accelerated RDP session to a wide-screen monitor, but I can’t resize the window or move it around.
• Due to licensing issues, it doesn’t include H.264 support on Linux, so the sanest option is to use ProRes and convert your footage with ffmpeg.
• I also can’t get it to access GVFS shares, so I have to mount my remote drives directly instead of using the file manager to open them (which is something Blender can do without any issue).

• Surprisingly, the iPad version is quite good, and puts Final Cut Pro to shame. It does have a few important limitations like lack of audio recording ability, but is much more usable than I expected.
• It supports chapter markers when uploading to YouTube, which is a big plus for me.
• Also (at least for now) hitting Option-Command-K lets you customize the Show Page bindings to get at the extra pages that are hidden on the iPad (even if they don’t fully work)

• The Arch Linux Wiki has a bunch of similar notes on installing and running DaVinci Resolve on Linux.
• This repository has some (arguably better) ffmpeg invocations to handle intermediary formats, from which I highligth the following:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -qscale:v 9 -acodec pcm_s16le output.mov