Unbound: Resolve’s Panels Get Their Own Place

For those who don’t know the tool: Unbound, developed by Wolfgang Woehl, turns supported DaVinci Resolve panels into independent, movable and resizable windows. It runs on Windows and macOS, remembers layouts between sessions and lets users distribute their workspace across displays.

Let the panels roam

Resolve can grade a feature, mix its soundtrack and composite things that never existed. Asking it to put a particular panel exactly where you want it has sometimes felt like the more ambitious production. There is something deeply irritating about owning several square metres of screen and still negotiating with a small rectangle that has signed a very long lease.

Unbound addresses that annoyance directly. Put the Inspector where it is convenient, move a viewer onto another display and arrange grading controls around the actual work. We are thoroughly in favour. The panels have been grounded long enough.

This is appealing for scopes, curves and other displays where we spend our time examining small differences. Giving them more screen space makes the information easier to inspect, especially for old farts like ourselves, whose enthusiasm for colour precision has outlasted our enthusiasm for tiny labels. A larger waveform does not improve the signal, but it can improve our chances of seeing what we are doing. There is scope for improvement here, and for once we mean the window dimensions.

Unbound adds a small button to supported panel headers. Click to undock or dock; drag the header or button to move a floating panel. Release 0.6.0 also adds drag-to-undock, per-panel Always on top and further improvements to layout transitions and Dual Screen handling. Closing a floating window docks its content again. Resolve’s native minimum panel sizes still apply, so the newly liberated Inspector cannot immediately pursue its dream of becoming a postage stamp.

A fairly substantial evacuation

On the Edit page, Unbound supports Media Pool, Effects, Sound Library, Keyframe Editor, Edit Index, Inspector, Metadata and Mixer, plus independent Program and Source viewers. When no visible viewer remains docked, the timeline expands into the vacated viewer area. Source restoration waits until Resolve makes that viewer available; Unbound does not force Single or Dual Viewer mode.

Color support covers Nodes, Gallery, LUTs, Media Pool, Effects, Timeline, Clips and Viewer. The lower controls include Camera Raw, Color Match, Color Wheels, HDR, RGB Mixer, Motion Effects, Curves, ColorSlice, Color Warper, Qualifier, Window, Tracker, Magic Mask, Blur, Key, Sizing, 3D, Keyframes, Scopes and Info.

Release 0.6.0 advertises all Color controls as undockable, live and usable simultaneously. Having Curves, Wheels and other controls available together is an attractive proposition for anyone tired of making one useful thing disappear to summon another. The interface gets some breathing room; we get fewer opportunities to forget which panel we were looking for.

Fairlight support includes Media Pool, Effects, Index, Groups, Sound Library, ADR, Mixer, Metadata and Inspector. Meters are explicitly excluded. The documented support covers Edit, Color and Fairlight, rather than every panel throughout Resolve.

Snapping without snapping

Main and floating windows snap to one another’s edges, including alignment across gaps. Hold Alt on Windows or Option on macOS to bypass snapping. Hold Shift to switch movement and resizing to a display-wide grid with 24-logical-pixel spacing. Red outlines show the last working window positions from other Resolve pages, helping keep recurring controls in consistent locations. Here, snapping is something the windows do before the operator has to.

The plumbing beneath the furniture

Unbound loads through Resolve’s per-user Lua startup hook. A private loader validates the host and schedules attachment on Resolve’s Qt GUI thread. The documented architecture reuses Resolve’s existing Qt runtime, without a replacement Qt distribution, external injection service or persistent Lua loop. On Windows, UnboundLuaLoader.dll loads the adjacent Unbound.dll.

Floating Scopes uses Resolve’s independent native scope window and retains its single, dual and quad views, settings and renderer registration. That is particularly welcome when the waveform needs to be large enough to read without leaning towards the monitor like a suspicious heron. Enlarging the display is useful; keeping it live while another tool is selected is essential.

Key, Sizing and Tracker need a different accommodation. Their original tool containers stay in the expected native slots while their contents move, because Resolve’s internal lookups depend on those containers. This is careful integration work. It also explains why “just let us undock it” can conceal several evenings of distinctly unrelaxed programming.

Layouts that survive closing time

Settings belong to the user and apply across projects. Windows stores them at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Unbound\Unbound.json; macOS uses ~/Library/Application Support/Unbound/Unbound.json. The UNBOUND_SETTINGS_FILE environment variable overrides the location.

Close Resolve before editing that JSON manually, because the application’s in-memory state and autosaving can overwrite external changes. Otherwise, your painstaking arrangement may become a short work of speculative fiction.

Installation uses the downloadable installer with Resolve closed. Unbound starts automatically when Resolve next opens. Run the installer again to update or uninstall; uninstalling preserves settings and layouts.

For anyone building it themselves, the Windows requirements include Visual Studio 2022 C++ tools, Windows SDK, CMake, PowerShell, Python 3 and Qt 5.15.2 development files. macOS builds use Xcode command-line tools, CMake, Git, pinned Qt headers and Resolve’s Qt, LuaJIT and Cocoa libraries. These are development requirements; ordinary installation does not require an afternoon assembling a compiler collection.

Will the next update move the walls?

This is the question behind our enthusiasm. Unbound depends on Resolve’s internal interface structures. Avoiding fixed memory addresses is sensible, but widget names, ancestry, native containers and layout behaviour can still change. Using public Qt calls does not make those Resolve internals a stable Blackmagic extension API.

Our assessment is that a Resolve update changing those structures could require corresponding Unbound changes. Whether Woehl can always keep pace remains open. We cannot promise that it will keep working indefinitely, and we have no basis for announcing its inevitable collapse either. The windows are floating; the conclusion should remain grounded.

We like this idea enormously. More space for scopes, less panel switching and a workspace arranged around the person using it address an irritation that has been itching like crazy for years. Woehl even describes native adoption by Blackmagic as an ideal outcome. Becoming unnecessary would be a rather distinguished retirement for Unbound, and the rest of us could get back to squinting at the pictures rather than the interface.

Test each Resolve/Unbound combination on representative projects and the actual display configuration before deploying it into an active suite.

https://github.com/wolfgangw/unbound#