DaVinci Resolve for iPad has a FATAL FLAW!
If you are a Da Vinci Resolve user like me, the iPad version likely excited you! Why? Cause it is quite awesome how much they of Da Vinci they packed into the iPad version. There is still more to come (particularly audio), but so far they created a highly usable professional app! Unfortunately, all this excitement comes to halt when you realize you can’t use this professionally at all. It has been almost a year since its release and the list of bugs go on with seemingly no new features. Now, you might be saying, “But Brian, it is new app, you gotta give it some time! Bugs are normal.” And you’d be right. Bugs are normal for a new app. However, Da Vinci Resolve for iPad has bugs that makes it competely unusable.
To learn Da Vinci, I spent hours editing a video on it. Initially I was very impressed with it. I was quite giggly and was so excited for it. It was buggy here and there but nothing to complain about. Well, except one. Despite having an M2 iPad, my 4K timeline with just one layer of footage was very laggy. It was like the old Premiere Pro days where you pressed the space bar and 5 seconds later it would respond. Or not respond at all. The videos were choppy despite it being an action cam footage and playing perfectly fine in other apps. But still, no biggy! That is until it became big. Da Vinci crashed and my project was no longer able to open. I tried several things to make it work but to no avail. I was completely speechless! If this was a real project and I spent hours on it, I’d be in real trouble. I looked through the forums but this is a new software so most of the results were related to the desktop version and not the iPad one. I decided to call it a night and try again in the morning with a fresh mind. The next morning, I restarted my iPad for good measure and opened up Da Vinci. To my horror, the project file itself was gone! I looked everywhere for it including the Files app but it disappeared entirely. I was genuinely horrified. In one of the troubleshooting attempts, I have made a duplicate copy so I tried to restore from there. Every time I opened it, it crashed the app. So now I have a project file I cannot open. Again, internet search turned up no results. I copied all the files to the desktop and it works on Da Vinci Resolve desktop version. I had to relink all the media manually but it worked fine on desktop.
Look, an app could be professional all it wants but to lose an entire project is unacceptable. After a few update iterations, I decided to give it a try again. Hoping it would be more stable. Well this time, everything worked right up until exporting. It just said, “Failed.” It refused to render. I tried everything I could think of but it didn’t really give me any info to go off of.
So Da Vinci became totally useless cause only after I finish or nearly finish a project, it won’t let me do anything. Again, unacceptable for a pro app. And remember that the performance was also an issue which I was willing to overlook.
So far, iPad M2 has been a disappointment. Laptop replacement? Not even close. Da Vinci has a free version and a paid version. I will wait long before I even consider paying for this. Hope they resolve the reliability issue soon.