My experience with Baselight is you get better results faster. When Resolve lets you think of keying or Log-grading something (to correct it), you'll get nice results instantly with Baselights Video-Grade (or Film-Grade). This was already there before the full implementation of the Color Management into Baselight. It is the same with Sratch and Lustre. Both have very nice behavior of the "plain" Video-Grade tool.
In other words I find Resolve is often somehow rough. One gets quickly an impressing result, yes. But you have to work further (with additional tools / nodes) to refine it.
Node-Tree vs. Layer:
With Resolve the node-tree is great because I have visible clarity. But due to strict order of the tools in which there are processed, I need more nodes than I would like to have. In Baselight you can change the order of the tools in the cascade for every layer. So you can first desaturate with video-grade, then tint with Film-Grade, then log-ish grade with curve crade, put a color-mixer into the row and then shift the blues to cyan in just one layer!
Tools:
Resolve evolves well over the time. Yes. The tools not really! While the new tint/temp sliders will for sure attract new users, it's easy to find out that they are simple the gain ball in the directions of blue/yellow/magenta/green. Baselights new Basegrade e.g. is a true new developed tool where developers thought about how to face the actual needs in colorgrading.
And a tool like "Technical Grade" is a very good example that an old(?) (log-Tool) can be used to achieve very nice looks with incredible speed.
What I want to point out is, that it is a unpolite product policy of BM to change tools and to let the old version dissapear while color graders work based on that tools. Like it happened with the keyers when clean blacks and clean whites were introduced (which are not really better treatments).
"Color Match" tool. I find this tool is a good example for the missing seriousness in the product development of the real core of Resolve: Color! I would not recommend using Color Match, which does not result in a Video-Grade or Log-Grade at the beginning of a dailies chain. It results in a black-box (LUTs/keys) with doubtful results.
Usability:
The reason to give a great compliment to BM is usability. I think it is (beside the price) one key factor of the success story of Resolve. I wish this hard work of making a product more smooth to work while giving the operator every feasible option, will be further done for Baselight. Filmlight did a great job with the "color journey view" and hints like "this codec expect full range" in the render dialog.
Hi Margus, good to hear that you can confirm. I'm pretty sure that once you have tested BaseGrade you'll find it very useful and fast too. Scratch is also a very good grading software!