Apparently, this has been a thing for a while, but I wasn’t aware of it until now.
We all hate subscription only software, right? So what are your thoughts on rental of software?
Blackmagic Design seem to think it’s a good idea as for a while now it has made DaVinci Resolve Studio edition available for rental for $60 / month per licence.
Individuals can create a Blackmagic Cloud account, go to ‘settings’, then ‘manage services’ and add ‘+1’ to the DaVinci Resolve Licenses.
You then download DaVinci Resolve Studio as normal and when opening the software it will ask you to either enter an activation key or login to the Blackmagic Cloud if you have a rental license.
It’s important to note that regarding backward compatibility, the rental license will only work for Resolve Studio 19 and beyond.
So why would you do this considering DaVinci Resolve is free?
The standard (free) DaVinci Resolve is a very extensive piece of software but the Studio version adds some features that more high-end productions might need including higher resolutions, multi-GPU acceleration, more sophisticated AI-based tools like Noise Reduction, more formats, and more.
If you are familiar with Resolve and just need those extra capabilities for a specific project, then this is an inexpensive way of doing it.
Alternatively of course, and this would be my route, you could buy the Resolve Speed Editor and get a freebie copy of DaVinci Resolve Studio thrown in. At AUD$635 that’s around 10 month’s worth of rental to be sure, but at this stage anyway, Resolve is a perpetual licence so there would be no need to upgrade later – and you get the full business in terms of functionality.
Where it is useful though is when you need to add a team member to a collaborative project for a short time.