DaVinci Resolve 21 and Fairlight Live Redefine the Production Stack

April 15, 2026

Blackmagic Design at NAB 2026: DaVinci Resolve 21 and Fairlight Live Redefine the Production Stack

Blackmagic Design is arriving at NAB 2026 with two releases that together cover opposite ends of the production pipeline: DaVinci Resolve 21 extends the company’s post-production platform into still photography with a full node-based color workflow, while Fairlight Live introduces a software-defined live audio mixer capable of handling thousands of channels in broadcast-grade environments. Both are available immediately as free public betas, and both will be on the floor at booth #N2502.

Taken together, the announcements reflect a consistent Blackmagic strategy: collapse the price barrier on professional-grade tools, distribute them as software, and let hardware remain optional rather than mandatory. Whether that means a photographer running a node graph that previously required a DaVinci Micro Panel and a colorist’s rate, or a broadcast audio engineer replacing a six-figure mixing console with a laptop and a USB-C cable, the logic is the same.

DaVinci Resolve 21: The Color Room Opens to Photographers

The most significant addition in Resolve 21 is the Photo page — a dedicated environment for still image editing that integrates directly with the existing Color page infrastructure. This is not a stripped-down import filter or a basic raw developer. It exposes the full DaVinci color engine to still images, including primary correction, curves, qualifiers, power windows, and the node editor that has defined high-end color grading workflows for over a decade.

Node-Based Grading for Stills

The distinction between node-based and layer-based color correction matters more in practice than it might seem on paper. In a layer-based system — the model used by Lightroom, Capture One, and most dedicated photo editors — adjustments stack vertically and interact in a fixed order. In a node graph, corrections are discrete, connectable objects. You can run them in series for sequential processing, branch them in parallel to treat different parts of the image independently, or use shared nodes to propagate a single grade across hundreds of images simultaneously.

For photographers working on large editorial or commercial shoots, that last capability alone represents a meaningful workflow shift. A shared node carrying a base grade can be adjusted once and cascade instantly across an entire album. Targeted corrections — skin tone, sky, product color — can be isolated with qualifiers and power windows without affecting the rest of the image. The same tools that colorists use to match footage across a film’s entire run are now available for matching across a shoot’s entire take.

The Photo page introduces LightBox view, which displays an entire album with grades applied and refreshes in real time as edits are made to individual images. This is closer to the contact sheet workflow photographers are accustomed to than anything previously available inside Resolve, and it allows comparative evaluation of grades across a collection without leaving the grading environment.

Albums function as organizational containers that can be built around any criteria — shoot day, camera body, subject, location — and appear as timelines on the Color, Cut, and Edit pages. Raw setting adjustments can be applied in batch at the album level, and all metadata, tags, grades, and effects travel with the album through Blackmagic Cloud for real-time collaborative access from anywhere.

Crop and reframe operations work at full source resolution throughout, meaning compositional decisions are always reversible and never baked into a derivative file.

Camera Tethering

DaVinci Resolve 21 supports direct tethering for Sony and Canon cameras, with live view monitoring, ISO and exposure controls, white balance adjustment, and capture presets that lock in a consistent look before the shoot begins. Images capture directly into an album, keeping the capture-to-grade pipeline entirely within Resolve.

AI Tools

The AI suite available on the Photo page is extensive. Magic Mask delivers one-click selection of objects or people for isolated grading. UltraSharpen handles upscaling of lower-resolution source files. CineFocus synthesizes depth-of-field effects with adjustable aperture shape and bokeh, including keyframeable rack focus. Face Age Transformer ages or de-ages subjects. Face Reshaper adjusts eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, and overall face geometry on moving subjects. Blemish Removal addresses surface skin imperfections while preserving texture. IntelliSearch enables object, keyword, and face-based searching across the media pool.

All of these tools, along with Resolve FX, Open FX, LUT application and generation, and DCTLs, are accessible directly from the Photo page.

Beyond Photography: What Else Is New in Resolve 21

The Photo page leads the announcement, but Resolve 21 is a substantial release across the board.

Fusion gains the Krokodove library — a large collection of compositing tools ranging from productivity utilities to 2D and 3D graphic templates — along with an updated macro editor with inspector view, and an updated USD SDK 25.11 with Hydra 2.0 API for the Storm renderer, adding 3D matte objects, USD Texture Projector and Catcher, and global in/out controls for the USD loader.

Fairlight integration improves with folder tracks that collapse groups of audio tracks into a single composite view, and a new Fairlight Animator modifier that drives Fusion animation parameters — eyes, lips, and other elements — from audio analysis of timeline or media pool clips.

Keyframing sees meaningful updates: new ease animations with loop, pingpong, and relative modes, simultaneous adjustment across multiple clips, a normalized zoom mode in the curves editor, four-point Bezier easing for video retiming, and the ability to adjust Fusion effects directly from the Cut and Edit page keyframe editors.

Color adds MultiMaster trim passes, allowing a single timeline to generate multiple simultaneous HDR and SDR deliverables through additional node graph layers per output standard. Magic Mask gains a render-in-place option that caches tracked masks as traveling matte nodes. The node graph can now be viewed as a layer list.

Editing additions include native OGraf HTML and Lottie animation support, multi-language spell check, font browser preview, emoji support, character-level styling within a single text box, smart bins in the Cut page, IntelliScript support for Final Draft and plain text screenplay formats, a Picture in Picture Resolve FX, and new star rating and tagging metadata columns.

Immersive workflows gain foveated rendering for Apple Immersive, delivery presets for Meta Quest and YouTube VR, spherical Panomap rotation, and ILPD retargeting data support in the Fusion page.

Fairlight Live: A Broadcast Mixer Without the Console

Fairlight Live is a fully software-based live audio mixer for macOS and Windows, targeting a range of use cases from podcast production to large-scale broadcast. The core proposition is that there is no inherent channel ceiling — performance scales with available compute rather than with fixed hardware DSP.

Architecture and Routing

Every element of a Fairlight Live show is dynamically reconfigurable. Inputs, busses, routing paths, and signal formats can all be added, removed, or rearranged at any point during production. A four-host panel show can be restructured as a remote guest setup mid-broadcast. A stereo input can be routed to an ambisonics bus in seconds. This is a meaningful departure from the snapshot-based reconfiguration that hardware consoles typically require.

Format-based panning supports 1D, 2D, 3D, and spherical modes for ambisonics and spatial audio. The supported formats span mono, stereo, LCR, 5.1 surround, immersive, and ASAF. Up/down bus conversion for cross-format compatibility is handled automatically.

Factory templates cover common production configurations, with additional layouts matched to specific ATEM models. Custom shows are built in the new show dialog and saved as complete files including mixer layout, routing, processing, cue player content, snapshots, virtual soundcheck recordings, and system settings.

Per-Channel Processing

Each input and bus carries a built-in 6-band EQ, expander/gate, compressor, limiter, and panner. Four effects slots per channel can host native or third-party VST and AU plugins, and ChainFX expands each slot to six plugins — giving a maximum of 24 plugins per channel. The native plugin library includes 30 effects covering de-essers, reverb, delay, and more.

Broadcast Feature Set

Fairlight Live is built around the specific reliability and control requirements of live broadcast. Four talkback groups, cue/conference mode for talent communication, mix-minus for clean feeds to remote guests, on-air mode locking critical controls, remote mic preamp gain, input delay for timing alignment, dual inputs for redundancy, and audio follows video camera selection for up to 100 cameras are all included.

VCA support extends to 128 groups with nested VCA capability — a single master can control all commentator microphones while nested groups allow independent control of subsets within that hierarchy.

The output matrix delivers up to eight simultaneous independent mixes, allowing separate feeds to a livestream, a broadcast truck, remote production teams, stage monitors, and translation feeds without touching the main program mix.

Cue Player and Virtual Soundcheck

The built-in cue player handles 16 audio cues — jingles, carts, stingers — and 16 MIDI cues for controlling external hardware such as lighting rigs and practical effects. Each cue is triggerable via user-defined keyboard shortcut, a Fairlight Live console button, or third-party MIDI control.

Virtual soundcheck records the live mix and plays it back for rehearsal, allowing audio engineers to calibrate levels, EQ, dynamics, and cues without requiring talent and crew to be physically present.

Snapshots save and recall the complete mixer state. Sequences of snapshots can be stepped through across broadcast segments — commentary, halftime performances, musical acts — with transition controls creating smooth fades between states. Individual parameters can be excluded from recall for flexibility where needed.

Connectivity

Fairlight Live connects to ATEM live production switchers via USB-C with bidirectional microphone gain control and full on-air status integration. SMPTE 2110 support includes primary I/O for IP-based broadcast networks, stream extraction, and PTP clock synchronization with sample-level delay compensation for audio/video alignment. On Mac, Core Audio provides low-latency performance; on Windows, System Audio and ASIO drivers are supported. USB and Thunderbolt connections cover a wide range of third-party interfaces.

Three Fairlight Live Audio Panel models are available as hardware companions, each with a large touchscreen per group of ten faders displaying channel strip information, levels, EQ, dynamics, and plugin interfaces. iOS and Android tablet controllers are also supported for remote operation.

DaVinci Resolve 21 and Fairlight Live are both available now as free public betas from the Blackmagic Design website. NAB 2026 demonstrations are at booth #N2502.