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I've seen quite the opposite. A good percentage of people coming from Premiere or After Effects feel burnt for all the years they spent in the Adobe suite. Just in stability alone is Resolve leagues better. The "batteries included" feature set is not only comprehensive in all parts of the video production pipeline, it is world class in many of the specific categories it competes in.

Hell if you arrange the toolbars and the camera and squint your eyes right, then wack yourself with a brick, even Blender can be used as an NLE

Aside from the non-linear animation (NLA) tools, which are pretty mature, Blender's video editing is pretty close to an actual feature since 3.2.0's Video Sequencer quality-of-life improvements.[1]

Video Sequencer docs: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.3/video_editing/introdu...

Compositor docs: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.3/compositing/index.htm...

It's still clearly built to help animators tie together renders, with most of the actual "editing" happening in the NLA tools. But it's also not the hack/kludge experience that it was in the 2.x series.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfJNbXYnt9Q

I bebop back and forth between Blender and Resolve and, yes, Blender has made some great improvements but I STILL have sound sync issues on 3.3. Otherwise, Blender is pretty good - but I prefer Resolve overall.

One thing that Blender has over Resolve on Linux is the ability to import ANY mp4 source video. Stupid licensing issues prevent Resolve (and even the paid Studio version) from doing that.

I feel seen. :/

> you're still in a node-graph-based grading suite, just with NLE bells and whistles. A lot of what you'd do to your clips or layers, you still do in the "color" view in Resolve.

The Edit Page isn't node-graph-based, it's a timeline with tracks and clips. What NLE functionality don't you have in the Edit Page?

AFAIAC "nodes" are a feature of Resolve, not a bug.

In their place for sure, but I'm not sure how a node-based NLE would work.

As you mentioned, the nodes are used in Fusion and the Color page, where they belong, not in either timeline editor (Cut Page & Edit Page).

The integration with Fusion is pretty clumsy at the moment. It's not clear what timeline event you're working on when you're on the Fusion page, especially when you have several video tracks stacked at the playhead's location. It disregards the user-selected event (if one has been selected) and instead shows (IIRC) the topmost one instead.

Can you provide some context as to why it's not a NLE? Everywhere i've seen it talked about it's described as an NLE

Of course it's a non-linear editor roughly on par with Avid, Final Cut, or Premiere. With all due respect, this person has no idea what they're talking about.

The Cut page (as opposed to the Edit page) is what's apparently to be included on iPad, but it's 100% as legit a NLE as any other. I wouldn't call After Effects a NLE per se, but the node-based corollary to AE in Resolve is called Fusion and doesn't appear to be (initially) included on iPad.

Moved this response as an edit to the main comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33277308 instead, but keeping this comment rather than deleting it, because the replies to it have value to the discussion.

(You edited your comment to oblivion, but because it was so embarassingly wrong, I don't blame you.)

My original response:

"close enough to a NLE"?? What the--

DaVinci Resolve has included a standalone non-linear editor since 2014. Today it has every major feature one would expect from a NLE-- with the noted exception of a lack of some codecs in the Linux version due to licensing issues, AAC being conspicuously one of them. So ffmpeg is often needed for transcoding media. I have a fair amount of familiarity with Avid, Final Cut Pro (7, not X), and to a lesser degree Adobe Premiere, and some experience with other NLEs from OpenShot to iMovie to Lightworks to Blender's NLE. Not only is DVR a feature-packed NLE- it ALSO includes a ProTools-like audio editing component called Fairlight, a node-based 2d/3d After Effects-like component (which integrates neatly with Blender) called Fusion, and a best-in-class color grading tool, for which Resolve is probably best known, which has roots going back to the DaVinci color correction systems of the 1980s.

DaVinci Resolve has not one NLE interface, but TWO-- the traditional Avid-like Edit page, and a new "Cut Page" (the one that appears in the iPad demo videos), which I think first showed up in DaVinci Resolve 17 (18 is current) and that is meant as a faster UI for doing a rough assembly that heavily integrates with the "Speed Editor" specialized hardware. For a while, there were deals where the Speed Editor came free with a ($300) Studio License. Now, I think it's $400 maybe (?) The paid Studio version includes extra features like more plugins (many of which use neural networks to, say, infer depth or separate objects from backgrounds), headless python scripting, 3d audio, 8k export, and pro stuff like that.

I'm presuming the iPad version will also work with the Speed Editor (it can connect via bluetooth or USB).

And since you mentioned it, the Fusion-style node system is considered superior by many pros to the older layers-based system used by After Effects, which is why it has been adopted by newer software from Unreal to Blender to nuke, etc. Also, you can drop effects "on" clips and layers-- this can be done in the Edit page as per tradition, and works as expected.

Since DaVinci Resolve is meant to run in CentOS, I've helped collaborate on a method for running it in a Linux container as well for anyone who might be interested:

https://github.com/fat-tire/resolve

The "Cut Page" has been a godsend for me. I'm going through about 1500 hours of footage right now and that editing mode is the only thing that has made my task even remotely possible for me to pull off.

You need a Speed Editor.

I don't know if you ever played FPSes in the early days of Quake, Doom, etc. but remember how you used to just play with a keyboard and it was okay, but then you switched to mouselook and it was just a whole 'nother world?

That's what the Speed Editor does.

That's what I use -- the Speed Editor with the "Cut Page."

Played FPSes in those early days, so familiar with that. Also use Resolve a lot and have the Speed Editor. But I never got used to the Cut page and just kept using the Edit pane with keyboard shortcuts. The hardware feels really nice but just didn’t surpass the keyboard for my use - I even watched some Cut videos to see what I was missing. I think the way I assemble videos is just too different to the norm?

> Since DaVinci Resolve is meant to run in CentOS, I've helped collaborate on a method for running it in a Linux container as well for anyone who might be interested:

Soooooooooo interested, but sadly it seems NVidia-only.

If Blackmagic would put some of their port-to-iOS muscle on a make-it-work-with-AMD team, it'd be useful to me. Alas, I have a knack for picking losers.

Only for lack of hardware to test it on. There is an open issue if you want to try your hand at getting it to work on non-NVidia, though it will run best on some kind of dedicated GPU due to the heavy graphics operations it does.

See https://github.com/fat-tire/resolve/issues/8

> in any normal NLE, you put your effects on your clips, or your layers. You don't do that in Resolve, because it's grading software

You can add effects onto clips in the Resolve NLE. If you just want to use Resolve as an NLE (ie. you don't want to colour-grade your work or do complex VFX in Fusion), you don't need to go near a node graph.

Perhaps there is some pedantry to be done about whether it is an NLE or has an NLE. No dispute that it used to be colour grading software and the NLE was bolted on later (like a decade ago).

DaVinci Resolve is professionally regarded as an NLE and has been for several versions. In some ways, it is a better NLE than Premiere.

While it was primarily grading software, Black Magic has stated its intent for it to be used as a general purpose video editing solution.

I genuinely think you've never used an NLE, or Resolve.

Odd thing to just go and declare without any actual evidence to guide your thinking process, so: you are genuinely about as wrong as can be.

Okay, then why do you think that Resolve is not an NLE? Have you ever used it?

What do you think the Cut page is? What do you think the Edit page is?

It's not just "an" NLE, it has two slightly different kinds of NLE.

What's NLE in this context?

Non-Linear Editor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-linear_editing

Non-Linear Editor, which includes things like Adobe Premiere, AVID Media Composer, etc.

And Davinci Resolve's Edit page (I don't know why the ggp says it's not an NLE).

It's an nle like after effects is one. It's not not an nle but it's roots are elsewhere so because of that, it's hard to see it as one, despite advances in the software.

What do you think the Edit page and the Cut page are?

Scary new technology that wasn't around back in the day. Grandpa Simpson said it best: "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"

I switched from Premiere and Vegas to Resolve to work on video editing. It's as much an NLE as any other software and behaves exactly as one. I don't use Fusion at all, I solely work in Edit mode and it does everything I need as well as Premiere did. It's even more stable and comes with more in-built effects that I manipulate by automaations directly in the time line.

I don't know why you're saying it's not a "real" NLE.

According to https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Resolve is: “The world's fastest and most advanced professional NLE.”

Resolve is fantastic for editing these days. Give 18 a shot