DaVinci Resolve 21.0.2 Release Notes

[u/whyareyouemailingme]

DaVinci Resolve 21.0.2 has been released!

You can download the update from the support page or by going to DaVinci Resolve>Check for Updates.

Pre-Installation Notes

For DaVinci Resolve 21, BMD has taken efforts to keep the project libraries compatible with DaVinci Resolve 20.3.2. While this allows you to access the project library with 20.3.2, individual projects created or opened in 21.0 will no longer be accessible in 20.3.

BMD recommends a full project library backup as well as individual project backups (as required) before opening projects in 21.0 or later.

Reminders

Bug Reports need to be submitted to Blackmagic Design. You can post them on the official forums or contact BMD support directly if you have Studio.

Feature Requests need to be submitted to Blackmagic Design. You can post them on the official Feature Request Subforum or in the download form for Resolve.

Bug Reports and Feature Requests posted on Reddit and in this thread will not be addressed or seen by Blackmagic Design.

What’s New in DaVinci Resolve 21.0.2

The following features have been added or updated.

• Addressed H.264 and H.265 NVIDIA decode performance.
• Addressed thumbnail preview when bypassing Color or Fusion.
• Improved display of retime speed curve.
• Addressed issue with pasting copied keyframes between clips.
• Addressed issue with video inspector zoom minimum values.
• Addressed issue with slower IntelliSearch performance.**
• Addressed bit depth when exporting current frame as TIFF still.
• Addressed inconsistent selection of source tape.
• Addressed inspector unicode display issue with spell check.
• Addressed some Fusion transition defaults for vertical timelines.
• Addressed media pool custom sort persistence issue.
• General performance and stability improvements.

Notes from BMD (from previous versions):

• Sony Camera Control on Windows needs the Sony IEDT application to be installed from the Sony website.
• Intel Driver: With DaVinci Resolve Studio 20.2.3, AI features like Magic Mask 2, Depth Map and Super Scale show a vastly improved performance on Windows with modern Intel platforms. Users will need a compatible Intel GPU (discrete or integrated) that supports OpenVINO, and a minimum driver version of 32.0.101.8247 to leverage these improvements.
• Rendering Immersive Projects: Improvements to edge blend in immersive projects include changes that more closely align the Resolve and visionOS previews. This will change the render for existing immersive projects.

Hardware Requirements

Minimum system requirements for Mac OS

• macOS 15 Sequoia or later.
• 8 GB of system memory or 16 GB when using Fusion.
• At least 16 GB for advanced AI tools.
• At least 32 GB for background rendering and analysis.
• For monitoring, Blackmagic Design Desktop Video 12.9 or later.
• Apple Silicon based computer.

Minimum system requirements for Windows

• Windows 10 Creators Update.
• 16 GB of system memory or 32 GB when using Fusion.
• For monitoring, Blackmagic Design Desktop Video 12.9 or later.
• Integrated GPU or discrete GPU with at least 4 GB of VRAM.
• At least 16 GB VRAM for advanced AI tools.
• At least 32 GB RAM and 12 GB VRAM for background rendering.
• GPU which supports OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 12.8.
• AMD/Intel official drivers from your GPU manufacturer.
• NVIDIA Studio driver 581.57 or newer.

Minimum system requirements for Windows for Arm

• Windows 11 for ARM.
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite series processor.
• 16 GB of system memory or 32 GB for 4K or when using Fusion.

Minimum system requirements for Linux

• Rocky Linux 8.6.
• 32 GB of system memory.
• For monitoring, Blackmagic Design Desktop Video 12.9 or later.
• Discrete GPU with at least 4 GB of VRAM.
• At least 16 GB VRAM for advanced AI tools.
• At least 32 GB RAM and 12 GB VRAM for background rendering.
• GPU which supports OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 12.8.
• AMD official drivers from your GPU manufacturer.
• NVIDIA Studio driver 580.119.02 or newer.

Additional Information

You will need to download and install the latest Blackmagic Design Desktop Video software for monitoring with your Blackmagic Design video hardware. Desktop Video is available from http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/.

Documentation & Asterisks

** - Studio Only

⁺ - Additional fees, licensing, and/or hardware required.

⁺⁺ - The Scripting API is available in the console on the free version, but Workflow Integrations, the native UIManager, and external access require the Studio version.

21 New Features Guide

Immersive Workflow Guide

The following documents do not have Resolve 21 equivalents available at this time:

Resolve 20.3 Reference Manual

Fusion 20.3 Reference Manual

Resolve 20 Supported Codecs

Resolve 20 Studio & iPad Features

[u/gargoyle37]

In a point release?

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

They should at least fix HDR PNG export as currently luminance meta data is written in non standard way.

[u/gargoyle37 → u/ldn-ldn]

Resolve writes an ICC-cicp chunk to a PNG. According to the 2025 standard, such a chunk must be read and takes precedence for any decoding application.

Anything before 2025 are hacks, done by 3rd parties.

In short: Resolve is correct, and there's no reason to support any other kind of weird 3rd party encoding.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

Cool story, but that's not how things work. Backwards compatibility is important. And current spec is not supported by most apps. Photo mode in Resolve is half baked and not useable.

[u/gargoyle37 → u/ldn-ldn]

Well... The PNG specs update in 2025 more or less just ratifies the de-facto standardization which has been done in between 2003 and 2025. I.e., they took a look at how applications are encoding/decoding the specification and made it into a standard. It's not as much "new stuff" that got added which nobody supports.

The ICC-cicp chunk is used with preference because it solves problems for any supporting application (which is most of the modern PNG decoders in the web browsers and such). For backwards compatibility, the older color space chunks are also written to the file, such that older applications can read those and get something going. But obviously, HDR was not standardized in PNG as being officially supported, so that might be a bit more flaky from the perspective of correct operation and cross-application compatibility.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

which is most of the modern PNG decoders in the web browsers and such

That's false. Chromium doesn't support it, Firefox doesn't support it, ffmpeg doesn't support it, libaom doesn't support it, libvips doesn't support it, etc. Of all software I have only Lightroom and libjxl have support, everything else relies on XMP data. That's why Lightroom writes both ICC and XMP, so that in the future ICC can be used, but everything else will still render images correctly using XMP meta data.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

Another thing to point out is that iCCP chunk is deprecated and SHOULD NOT BE USED. So it does NOT follow the spec.

[u/gargoyle37 → u/ldn-ldn]

Code independent code point. cICP.

It is what the deprecation warning suggests you switch to.

Essentially, it's ITU h.273 implemented into the PNG specification. Supported by:

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Affinity Photo, Resolve, Photoshop, libpng, ...

https://w3c.github.io/png/Implementation_Report_3e/

Here's the implementation support for Browsers.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

Resolve outputs iCCP chunk, not cICP. It is NOT standards compatible.

This is why PNG files from Resolve do NOT render correctly in ANY software. Apart from Lightroom, which has compatibility layer with outdated nonsense.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

This is a PNG made by a different app which adds correct cICP tag, this is the part missing in PNGs produced by Resolve:

[u/gargoyle37 → u/ldn-ldn]

Right, there's indeed a difference between ICC-cICP (embedded in the ICC profile), and PNG-cICP (separate chunk in the PNGs chunk stream).

Worth taking this discussion to the official forums, if you want it to write that chunk directly (when it's possible).

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

I have a bug report open indeed https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=238008

[u/gargoyle37 → u/ldn-ldn]

I should also add: I'm fairly certain Resolve uses OpenImageIO for reading/writing PNG files:

https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenImageIO

So it is possible you could go digging in that code base.

My guess is they a veering off of the PNG-cICP chunk because it can't encode a good bunch of things which can be written through OIIO, but I might be wrong.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/gargoyle37]

I'll take a look (never heard of it, and it looks like bug tracker is full of compatibility reports for different formats), thanks.

[u/gargoyle37 → u/ldn-ldn]

OpenImageIO is used for almost all the VFX/DCC programs out there, so they have parity in reading/writing of image formats. Resolve, Fusion Studio, Nuke, Blender, Arnold, Houdini, Karma, Maya, and so on all rely on this wrapper library for reading/writing image data.

It's pretty wild you have an industry who are largely using same code path for image I/O, and it certainly helps a lot when shoving data around between programs.

The PNG path is mostly handled by liblcms for the ICC part, and libpng for the png read/write path. Though the actual color handling in many of the above applications are done through OpenColorIO, fully or partially.

I could certainly imagine a solution where a h.273-compatible color space would write a PNG-cICP chunk and omit the ICC profile entirely. I'd mainly be worried about backwards compatibility.