DaVinci Resolve 21.1: AI Assistants, Fujifilm on the Photo Page, and What Actually Matters

When DaVinci Resolve 21 went stable in early June 2026, it already felt like a turning point. It brought eight neural tools and a dedicated Photo page that put a node-based Hollywood color engine right in Lightroom's backyard.

On 8 September 2026, on the opening eve of IBC in Amsterdam, Blackmagic Design shipped DaVinci Resolve 21.1.

In Blackmagic fashion, what other software vendors call a "point release" is packed like a major upgrade. There is no subscription, no upgrade fee, and the build is available immediately for both the free version and Studio licence holders.

The release contains over a hundred changes. I am not going to regurgitate the entire changelog. I want the three that actually change the day: giving AI assistants a real seat on your timeline, opening the Photo page to Fujifilm shooters, and the editing refinements that save hours of clicking.

Blackmagic just gave Claude and ChatGPT a seat on your timeline

This is the headline change, and if you have followed my work over the last few months, you know why it matters to me.

Back in July, I wrote about how six months of plugin work turned into two AI workers for DaVinci Resolve, followed by 10 plugin ideas you can build without coding. The idea was simple. The most exhausting parts of editing are programmatic grunt work: organizing incoming media, restructuring bins, renaming deliverables, parsing markers, batch exporting stills. None of that asks for creative intuition, it asks for consistency.

With DaVinci Resolve 21.1, Blackmagic built that bridge into the application. Resolve now talks to AI assistants through a native Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and scripting bridge, with Claude, Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex named explicitly in the announcement.

In practice, instead of digging through bins and menus by hand, you prompt the assistant in plain English:

• "Scan the media pool, organize today's clips by scene and camera angle, and flag anything with clipped audio."
• "Build a rough highlight reel from the primary interview using the timeline transcript."
• "Remove unselected takes from bin 03 and create proxy render jobs for the remaining B-roll."
• "Queue delivery exports for YouTube 4K, vertical 9:16, and an SDR review copy."

Grant Petty put the emphasis on mechanical friction in the announcement rather than on the editor's taste: the part of the job that burns your attention before you have laid down a single cut.

If you already use The Forge, this matters. The Forge gives Claude Code the things it cannot infer on its own: Resolve's API quirks, the OFX specifications, the packaging pipelines. 21.1 adds 20 new scripting APIs with interactive console support, which is that much more surface for those agents to inspect and manipulate. The two do not compete, they compound.

The Photo page welcomes Fujifilm (and tactile grading panels)

When Resolve 21 introduced the Photo page, I liked the concept immediately: drop Lightroom's rigid sliders in favor of the node-based color engine I already use for video. Version 21.0 had an obvious blind spot for my setup.

I shoot almost all my photography on Fujifilm, alternating between my Fujifilm X-E5 with the 23mm pancake, my X-T30 II and an older X-E1. In 21.0, Fujifilm RAW support was patchy, so I fell back on SOOC JPEGs or manual conversions.

Resolve 21.1 fixes that. The Photo page now decodes Fujifilm GFX and X series RAW natively, alongside the Leica SL and Sony A7R VI.

You can also drive Photo page parameters from the Inspector with DaVinci Resolve color panels, including the DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel.

If you have ever graded with trackballs and weighted aluminum dials instead of dragging a tiny slider with a mouse, you know your eye settles on a tonal balance faster that way. Lift, gamma, gain and color balance under your hands, on a still portrait, is the one habit from video post that photography never had.

For my hybrid stills and video workflow, this brings everything under one roof. I can shoot a travel story on my X-E5, import both 4K footage and RAW stills into a single project, grade the stills on the Photo page with my existing node structure, and finish them in Halation Lab or Whiteborder Lab before publishing.

Multicam, trimming, and editing quality-of-life

The Edit and Cut pages pick up several updates that remove everyday annoyances:

• A new button on the timeline viewer shows the current clip in the source viewer, so you can switch camera angles without leaving the timeline. Preview other assets in the media pool and the source viewer returns to multicam mode the moment you come back.
• When generating multicam clips, Resolve can split them automatically at timecode interruptions, which speeds up sync on multi-camera documentary and event shoots.
• Keyboard shortcuts now reach 25 multicam angles and 32 audio or video tracks.
• Audio waveforms scale with track height, so a quiet dialogue clip stays readable without boosting the level just to see it.
• The trim editor accepts direct drag adjustments inside the viewer for frame-accurate cuts.
• Inspector presets can be saved and recalled for video, audio, transitions and transforms. If you apply the same scaling, reframe or audio EQ to one kind of asset, that is the end of copy-pasting attributes.
• Marker lists export as a formatted .pdf report straight from the index. That was tool #2 on my list of 10 plugin ideas you can build without coding, so Blackmagic evidently agreed it was missing.

If you work on structured edits, pairing these updates with Creator Pro or my guide on how to organize a DaVinci Resolve project keeps your timeline clean from day one.

Multi-master HDR trims and color science

On the Color page, Blackmagic went after one of the biggest headaches in high-end delivery: Multi-Master Trim Passes.

Resolve 21.1 introduces independent trim passes for Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HDR Vivid. Colorists juggling several HDR deliverable tiers used to accept a shared compromise trim. Now each format gets graded on its own, without touching the others.

Destination scaling can be set per trim pass, which matters when you deliver 16:9 and vertical from the same grade, and timeline caching is handled individually per trim, so switching passes does not trigger a cache rebuild.

Color management also expands with native support for GoPro Log, Leica L-Log, DJI D-Gamut2 and D-Log2, Vivo Wide Gamut and Log, plus additional camera conversion LUTs and updated ACES color space options.

All of that work goes into getting color right. Wanting it wrong on purpose is a different toolset: VHS Nostalgia emulates the NTSC or PAL signal line by line, with the color bleeding, composite noise, tracking errors and head-switching of a real deck. It ships as an OpenFX bundle, so Resolve loads it as a native effect and none of 21.1's scripting changes reach it.

Fusion gets 25+ Krokodove tools and DRFX macros

Fusion takes in more than 25 new Krokodove tools, which is a serious amount of procedural machinery for a point release:

• Connect 3D: Generates procedural connections and meshes between vertices.
• Heightfield Create 3D: Creates depth-based distortions using image displacement maps.
• Tube Create 3D: Generates paths and geometric extrusions along spline trajectories.
• 3D Region: Restricts volumetric effects to defined boundaries within the 3D scene.
• sPrimitive: Instant procedural shapes including crosses, polygons, stars, and rectangles, paired with advanced contour operators.

The macro editor has been overhauled as well. It auto-detects and loads macros directly from .drfx template bundles, saves to specific Edit or Cut page categories, and updates macros on the fly from selected tools while preserving layout customizations. If you use custom titles or motion packs, check out my breakdown of the best DaVinci Resolve templates.

Performance and hardware acceleration

Under the hood, 21.1 takes advantage of newer silicon:

• On Apple Silicon, HEIC image decoding is hardware-accelerated, which makes browsing photos on a Mac noticeably faster.
• HTJ2K decoding runs on the GPU through Kakadu, for faster playback and rendering.
• Windows adds support for NVIDIA RTX Spark systems.
• Blackmagic Cloud Presentations gain subtitle rendering, annotation sharing and threaded comment replies for client review.

What it costs and where to get it

As always with Blackmagic Design, the update costs nothing. If you already own a DaVinci Resolve Studio licence (dongle or activation code), 21.1 is a free download. The free version is available immediately as well, with no time limit and no watermark, up to Ultra HD 4K at 60 fps.

You can download the installer directly from Blackmagic Design's official support page, or read their official press announcement.

The verdict

DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is not a maintenance release. By opening a native channel to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT, Blackmagic has put its own weight behind the workflow shift I have been building toward in The Forge.

Add Fujifilm RAW on the Photo page, color panels driving still images, and independent HDR trim passes, and a single point release lands on photographers, colorists and editors in the same afternoon.

One thing to check before you update

There is a part of 21.1 that this review has to flag on its own, because it does not reach everyone equally. On the free edition, Blackmagic removed Python scripting. .py files no longer appear in Workspace > Scripts at all, and nothing on screen explains why: no dialog, no error, no console line. If you run third-party scripts or automation plugins on DaVinci Resolve Free, the update looks exactly like a broken installation.

I spent a day measuring what survives that change, including what a Lua script can still reach on Free 21.1 and the irreversible Project Library upgrade that makes rolling back to 21.0.4 harder than it sounds. The measurements are here: DaVinci Resolve 21.1 silently removed Python from the free edition.