Glad you've jumped over to the color grading world - welcome! You're right, some of the features are only available for the Studio version, but over the years the free/paid versions have come so close to being identical they're *almost* the same.

Once you start generating revenue with coloring, it will be easy to invest in your career with a thousand bucks. The noise reduction alone is so good it's worth paying for - I use it literally in every single job and it improves the image quality a great deal. Certainly the paid Resolve is one of the cheaper purchases you can make, especially considering getting a control surface, monitoring, graphics cards, etc. Good luck! If you have any more questions please don't hesitate to reach out via social media.

There are an insane amount of features in this (and past) versions. They roll improvements out FAST and often.

Biggest thing I'm seeing is that it requires OS X 10.9.5.

Another quick update this morning from the Black Magic folks. Resolve 12 also has:

- Support for Intel Iris and Iris Pro GPUs, opening up more systems and laptops.
- DaVinci Resolve 12 can now create optimized media proxies with custom settings for both the codec and resolution for even faster editorial performance.
- New Smooth Cut transition uses proprietary DaVinci optical flow algorithms to create a seamless transition between different parts of an interview so you don’t have to cover jump cuts with b-roll
- "Resolve Studio" is what the $995 version is called now.