Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not professional video editor by any degree, but a free time "creativists" (or whatever you wanna call it, I do animation, vfx, music production, video editing and more), and since something like 2010 I was using Adobe Premiere but since ~one year ago moved to DaVinci Resolve. Here are the reasons why Resolve beats Premiere today (in a hobbyist's view):

- Premiere sucks for handling 4K footage, even with a powerful CPU/GPU. Either you live with stutters in the editor, or use Proxy clips which requires "downsampling" tons of videos. If you got a semi-large project, most of the time will be spent on just converting clips. Contrast with Resolve which just handles 4K footage directly imported into the editor.

- UX of color grading in DaVinci is miles ahead of what Premiere does.

- OpenFX support!

- Use the free version or buy one version ($299) you'll get to keep forever, compared to forced subscription model of Premiere (~$20/month)

- Resolve beats Premiere in render speed, at least on a powerful desktop computer (i7-7700K @ 4.20 Ghz - RTX 2080Ti - 32GB RAM)

- Every workflow I'm used to is much faster to execute in DaVinci than in Premiere. Feels like the UX team over at DaVinci has a bit more thought behind their UX than Premiere, which just seems to put features wherever nowadays.

- Non-linear and procedural workflow with nodes (similar to how Houdini does it) saves so much time as well

Premiere is also ridiculously unstable (have gotten more so over the years seemingly). I've experienced this on different PCs, different videos, in many situations. It is up to a point where it is clear that it's just not about random bugs or messy plugins or underpowered computers - it is about bad quality of the software. And it is not getting any better. There are many reports of this on the internet. Resolve is much more stable.

I use Premiere for just occasional hobby purposes, really mostly just appending clips to each other which, yeah, Premiere is overpowered for but I happen to own it anyway. The point is, it is so prone to crashing even in such a simple use case. I have lost work multiple times to Premiere just collapsing because I clicked the timeline in the wrong way or something, so I've turned the autosave frequency way up which makes it unresponsive.

I guess I should try learning Resolve.

>Resolve beats Premiere in render speed, at least on a powerful desktop computer (i7-7700K @ 4.20 Ghz - RTX 2080Ti - 32GB RAM)

I think this is mostly down to your GPU - I have an I9/9900 32GB RAM setup with a GTX670, which I mostly use as a DAW, but do my YouTube editing on Premiere. With Resolve (which I far prefer in terms of UI), it's tragic how slow it is - about 2 minutes to render a 30 second HD clip that has stereo audio and nothing else on it. That's 15 seconds in Premiere. So I'm hoping that a future upgrade to a RTX30 series GPU will turn the tables and I'll be able to use Resolve seriously..

Yeah, Resolve is much better at taking advantage of the GPU for sure, not just for rendering but everywhere in the editor as well, making it more fluid to work with.

Dependence for GPU performance would be good indicator for well-made software.

I don’t have much experience with other video editing software, but when I had to make some walkthroughs of new product features DaVinci got the job done and the result was fantastic—even on the free version.

> - Non-linear and procedural workflow with nodes (similar to how Houdini does it) saves so much time as well

And nodes already implemented in the `master` branch of the Olive Video Editor.[0]

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive

I agree with you but PrPro has been around for a longer time and thus has a huge community for advices, tutorials and marketplace for panels and plugins

BMD has published an excellent series of introductory video tutorials and 5 training books (available for free in PDF form, along with media and project files to follow along). Going beyond just showing how to do X, I think they do a great job of communicating best practices, workflows, and things like keyboard shortcuts that might be useful. This is some of the best educational material for any such application that I have come across (paid or free), and I enthusiastically recommend checking it out.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/tra...

I agree that there are less Davinci Resolve tutorials than for Premiere Pro, probably because of the current marketshare. But at least in my bubble, the marketshare of Premiere in shrinking fast, in favour of Resolve. I'm myself not super concerned about having less tool-specific tutorials as I'm on the level where specific tools matter less, and I'm more focusing on the overall pictures (similar to software development where once you have many languages under your belt, many of the more similar ones blend together).

Regarding plugins, last time I checked, Premiere still doesn't support OpenFX (but might have changed). It's just a matter of time before the ecosystem for OpenFX is way bigger than anything Adobe could ever dream up.

Last I recall, OpenFX only allows images filters, not scripting and panels.

What's your industry ?

Yeah, I mean, OpenFX is a standard for visual effects plugins, not for general editor plugins...

I'm in the software industry. As mentioned in my initial comment, I'm not a professional video-anything, just presenting an hobbyist's view.

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