The dongle will use up one more of your USB ports. We will usually have Activation Keys available for collection from our London office, or next day delivery, if ordered by mid afternoon. This is to protect the buyer and avoid concerns about the tug of war situation above. BlackMagic don’t sell direct and their distributors and resellers aren’t allowed to open the packaging.

Although, if you both know the code, this could just result in a registration tug of war. In theory, if you mislay your Activation key packaging, someone else could find it and register the key onto further devices. That said, it is also possible to lose the Activation key, if you don’t make a note of the code and lose the pack it arrived in. One of the obvious drawbacks to the dongle is how easily something so small can be lost and although they are robust, it is possible to damage them. Deactivated machines will be unable to use Resolve Studio when they next connect to the internet. You can register the Activation Key to a third device – doing this simply deactivates the license from the two previous machines, then one can be reactivated. without needing to register the additional machine each time. You can have the key registered to two machines, allowing you to chop and change between a laptop and an edit suite etc. BlackMagic have thought about this with the Activation key though. The dongle could be the most convenient, if you will need to work on multiple machines, as you can simply take it with you wherever you go and plug it into any number of machines with Resolve Studio installed. The Activation Key can still be suitable in such an environment, which I cover in next section.

Updating to new versions of resolve will still require a temporary connection to the internet or for the software to be transferred from a portable hard drive. The dongle gives you the ability to move your license around multiple machines, provided they have Davinci Resolve Studio installed. The dongle version can be the only option for many high profile productions which are likely to have security measures requiring an ‘air gap’ to be maintained, at all times, between footage and any connection to the internet.

– Flip between two devices without needing to take a dongle with you.

Davinci resolve buy key