Why Video Editors Are Switching to DaVinci Resolve in Droves | Hacker News Reader

Why Video Editors Are Switching to DaVinci Resolve in Droves

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57 pointssoopurman25 comments

I'm a colorist working with Resolve professionaly on large projects for over a decade.

The pro editing world working on six, seven, and eight figure projects (I don't do studio blockbusters) is currently 75% premiere, 19% avid, 5% FCP hold outs (usually stubborn Oscar winning editors), and <1% Resolve. I've worked with one single editor cutting in Resolve in the past 18 months (approximately 200 projects ranging from global ad campaigns, to narrative tv and film, to major music videos).

The amateur and digital only world (YouTube) are the ones switching primarily because Resolve is cheap or free (depending on your needs). No one wants to subscribe to Adobe, Premiere crashes too much, Avid is too confusing for this audience (who don't need the professional workplace features), and the new FCP is a joke. Vegas was popular on the ultra low end for a while but it's just lacking too many features.

No one really cares about Resolve running Linux outside of ultra high end color suites and tech guys dabbling in video.

The real question is what these percentages will be next year or the year after

For me it came down to a single, simple factor. Pricing.

I bought a perpetual license for Resolve Studio for $295. Premiere Pro costs $21/mo., in perpetuity. So over even a relatively short time horizon of 2 years, my costs of ownership for Resolve Studio is still $295, but Premiere would cost me $504, and would keep costing me more and more money forever, likely at an increasing rate, as Adobe loves jacking up the monthly prices of their "Services" without actually improving the product.

Bottom line for me is I LOATHE software subscriptions, and will happily spend more to actually own the software I use, though in this case Resolve is actually CHEAPER to own, so it's a win-win for me, and a mounting loss for Adobe with no end in sight, as they're never going back to perpetual licenses as they've gotten fat and lazy suckling on the teat of "Recurring revenue" and are motivated by greed and short term profit above all else.

FCPX is a one-time purchase isn't it?

That’s only on mac though

Macs are used far less in Hollywood than they people think they are. They're too expensive for most television work and too limited for film work.

If Apple didn't mandate that Apple TV productions use FCP it would probably already be dead.

> If Apple didn't mandate that Apple TV productions use FCP it would probably already be dead.

That’s false. Even Apple commercials aren’t required to use FCPX.

FCPX is no slouch. Two of its biggest problems are (1) a lack of serious “multiplayer” (large team workflow) capabilities and (2) an industry perception that FCPX isn’t as “safe” a long-term bet as, say, Avid solutions. If you’re a smaller creator, it’s still a better and more reliable choice than Premiere in my experience.

At my previous employer, we were required to use Apple laptops for our production workflow as a condition of the show being distributed on Apple TV.

It's the only reason we overpaid for Apple computers when we could have had superior, cheaper alternatives for a quarter of the price.

Maybe for Intel-based Macs. With Apple Silicon Macs, I don't think that's true anymore. You can get cheaper computers, sure. And maybe you can get better ones. P

But not ones that are both better and cheaper. The M1 and M2 chips turned that market on its head.

Only Mac stans think that M1 or M2 computers are better than the competition.

They're the best at a specific benchmark (single core power consumption) that isn't relevant to how they're intended to be used, and which frequently ends up with M-based laptops being paper by their Windows competition at most tasks.

Source? Looking at this real-life test, an M1 Pro laptop exports and manipulates video faster than a beefy RTX 3080 laptop: https://ymcinema.com/2021/11/02/whatre-the-ideal-laptops-for.... This is the first comparison of apple silicon to PC that I saw when checking your claim

From what I heard all the time, new Apple hardware is on par for multimedia work now. The only thing you don't get is gaming compatibility/performance, so if you reuse your hardware for that then yeah.

It's extremely expensive since you have to buy apple hardware to run it.

If it was crazy expensive then sure, but since apple silicon it's probably the best portable hardware out there for the price so I don't buy this argument.

and if you locked yourself to microsoft ecosystem for some other reason that's on you...

Resolve works on Linux too, which is one reason I support them over other options.

I think a typical video editor has to use some software that doesn't run on Linux (there's more to the process than just Resolve)...

I'm a programmer who picked up video-editing 2 years ago, and I used DaVinci because it was free, but damn, these video editors are powerful beasts. And there's so much to learn.

You can even remote-control DaVinci from Python (if only there was a Javascript library available), and edit videos programmatically. Mind blown.

For me the move was because Vegas licensing was a pain. Despite having paid I couldn't get it working on a second PC, and I didn't want to pay for every new version. (I had gotten it during a humble sale.)

Resolve was no cost and did all I needed. Albeit if quirky and picky about input formats.

Let me add one big reason to the list: lots of TV broadcasting equipment is Linux-based.

And on Linux, Resolve is like the only good option. Final Cut and Premiere simply don't work there.

In theory. Practicality there are still problems with Nvidia drivers (CUDA) and linux cannot render 10bit, which is especially in case of Resolve as color grading tool, huge problem.

how has kdenlive come up in the last year? i remember reading reviews and frustrations from users about losing data from crashes but the team has been pretty active viz fixing bugs so has anyone tested it very recently and is it better or worse?

how is it compared to its paid competition?

Not great

Last I tried it's an ok basic editor for simple projects, but it lacked the 3d features and more advanced stuff like stabilization, tracking, frame generation, etc.. that Resolve has.

Basically it's a timeline editor like Resolves "Edit" tab.

Reminded me to check out Natron to see if it was still moving along. It's branded as a video compositor. Might be worth playing with them both again.

https://github.com/NatronGitHub/Natron

> The Speed Editor costs $295 and comes with a Resolve Studio license, making it worth the cost even if you barely use it.

You can even flip it on ebay and recoup most of the program licensing costs!(if they allow you to separate the program license from the hardware)

You can get the physical dongle version and sell the Editor on (or vice versa)

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