DaVinci Remote Monitor 4+

This app is so insanely good that I bought Resolve and a micro panel. Ok that’s a stretch but not really. If you don’t understand how much time and/or money this remote viewer can save you… I don’t know what to tell you. Hdr color monitoring device in your pocket. I don’t have a decent monitor or even a motherboard with enough open slots to use the necessary blackmagic hardware. It’s all on my list. To be able to blow 850 on a micro panel and fudge my way through grading on my phone vs buying an 800 dollar monitor plus a 200 dollar pci card… let alone owning a micro itx motherboard… and not have a micro panel….. ok yea that’s a ton of value. I ditched video like 20 years ago because everything about it was just horrendous. Premier was the standard prosumer software and dropping timecode was a minor inconvenience compared to it’s analog predecessor. It was around the time of the release of the RED and I told myself maybe id come back one day when everything sucked less. Everything is so much more amazing than I could have imagined and I’m using a dinosaur black magic camera. From a value perspective; this company is the gold standard across all industries. No this review was not paid for by blackmagic. They just really deserve this review for saving me at least $1000…. For now.

For reference, I am a freelance colorist working in the commercial. I film the world grading on a MacBook Pro via a manually calibrated LG C2 OLED monitor WITHOUT a video io pass-through like the Black Magic UltraStudio 4K Mini.

PROs:

- Because of my current setup, I can have an iPad or iPhone to get a color-accurate image of my grade, as it would be viewed on a mobile device without needing a video io passthrough box.

- This has been a tremendous FREE solution to live grading sessions with clients. I no longer have to worry that clients are viewing an inaccurate feed through Zoom or Skype.

- This also allows me the ability to quickly and accurately check my grade on mobile devices until I have the chance to upgrade to a more professional color-accurate monitor.

- The fact that this is free cannot be stated enough!

CONs:

- Having clients create a Black Magic Cloud account shouldn’t be necessary. Like Zoom or Skype, I should be able to send out a link that non-users can access.

- There should be more UI/UX features within the monitoring app, like video metadata, including input-output color space, TC, timeline resolution and aspect ratio, customizable monitor guides with a toggle, and the ability to draw and zoom in on the screen.

- There are latency issues, so getting any form of playback is near impossible without severe frame drops. Note that this could be due to my own Wi-Fi.

With all that being said, I believe the app is still in beta, so I look forward to seeing where this app can go!

Works OK for one user viewing a session. No chance in heck you’re going to get good playback but you can see scrubbing and color adjustments being made to the still frame. Tried to use it with multiple viewers on different phones for a color session with clients and it immediately froze up or showed a black screen. App clearly needs work before it’s usable in a professional setting. And it would benefit from having some sort of UI on the viewer end. Feels like you’re stranded with no option other than to leave the session.