PlayPause for DaVinci Resolve: Color & Edit Review Made Simple

DaVinci Resolve teams move between edit, color, and finishing, and each stage has its own review needs. An editor wants notes on the cut. A colorist wants eyes on the grade. A finishing artist wants a clean QC pass before delivery. PlayPause makes every one of those rounds precise — frame-accurate comments and true side-by-side compare so "warmer here" turns into a note you can actually act on.

The Resolve team this is for

This is for the colorist, editor, or finishing artist who cuts and grades in Resolve and has to get sign-off from a director, client, or DP who reads color by feel. You deliver graded commercials, music videos, short films, branded content. Your feedback is about skin tone, contrast, a window that is too hot, a shot that does not match its neighbor. That kind of note is worthless without a frame to attach it to.

Built for color and edit review

Side-by-side compare is the reason Resolve teams use this. You stack two versions and scrub them frame by frame next to each other — grade v1 against grade v2, or the ungraded plate against the graded shot. You can finally settle whether the new pass actually fixed the skin tone or just shifted the problem to the next shot. Every comment pins to the exact frame, so "this shot is too warm" lands on the shot, not somewhere in a 90-second reel.

For edit review the same precision applies. A note on the cut pins to its frame and the version stacks, so the editor knows exactly which shot and which version a change belongs to. Color, edit, and finishing all run through one place instead of three different threads.

Why side-by-side matters for grading

Color is comparative. You cannot judge a grade in isolation — you judge it against the last version and against the shot beside it. Re-watching two full reels to spot a difference wastes a colorist's most expensive hours. Scrubbing v1 and v2 frame-locked next to each other shows the change in a second. The director sees what moved between passes instead of taking your word for it. The old way was render the reel, email it, get back "the warm shots feel off," and re-grade blind. Here it is frame-pinned notes per shot, side-by-side compare of the passes, and one clean grading round.

A real grading round

A director is reviewing a music-video grade. On pass v1 they scrub to the chorus, pin frame 1420, and write "her skin goes too magenta when the lights change." That note sits on frame 1420. I pull the magenta back on that shot, render v2, and the director opens compare. They scrub v1 against v2 across the chorus, see the skin hold true now, and approve. Then I export the change list for finishing. One round, one record, no decoding.

The features that matter for finishing and QC

• Frame-accurate color and edit notes pinned to the exact shot
• Side-by-side compare to scrub two grades frame by frame
• Version stacks across edit, color and finishing
• Approval locks before delivery with a timestamped record and change list
• Secure links with password, expiry, domain-lock and watermark
• Slack, Teams and Zapier alerts when a note or approval lands

Finishing is where confidentiality bites hardest. Final grades on unreleased films and ads should not sit on open links. Password the link, set an expiry, lock it to the client's domain, and watermark every frame with the viewer's name. Your final color goes out controlled, and a locked approval closes the QC milestone with a record you can defend.

Start free at zero to try it on one reel. Solo colorists usually run on Starter at three dollars a month; add a director or client plus the security controls and Creator at five covers it. From the first edit note to the final QC sign-off, every round stays precise, and the record travels with the grade all the way to delivery.