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Changing NLEs from Adobe to Davinci Resolve


Vital Butinar

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So recently I have placed an order for a new Blackmagic camera and along with that camera I am receiving a licence for Davinci Resolve.

 

Anyway it got me thinking the Adobe subscription is not that expensive but then again at the end of the year it adds up to a substantial sum of money. So when I learned that I would be receiving a license for Davinci Resolve I was thinking that I might start editing in it.

 

Now here's the thing I have no problems with learning to use a new tool but I'm just not sure all the tools. I mean I'm sure the coloring part is fantastic and the audio editor but I'm not sure about Fusion the alternative to After Effects. I'm just not sure about Fusion.

 

And also two other things that I like more about Premiere Pro and don't exist in Davinci that you can't set the resolution and frame rate for each timeline but globally for the whole for the whole project. But I guess it's just something you have to figure out in advance and live with it.

 

So anybody have any experience with Davinci Resolve and if I could just get rid of Adobe and use only it?

 

Thanks and best regards.

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Honestly, I don't like Premiere at all. I think it's buggy and Adobe appear to be more focused on features rather then stability. As a professional editor, I can't use the tool at all for anything serious.

 

DaVinci was pretty easy to learn editorial wise. It is missing a bunch of features tho. The major one being a tool which helps select all media on all tracks and slide it back and forward. This is a critical feature when making changes to the timing/length of your timeline and is completely missing in DaVinci. The editor also has some funny quarks that don't exist in any other tool. One that bugs me the most; when grabbing the play head and dragging it left and right in the edges of the visible timeline to show MORE timeline, it tends to get out of hand and skip several minutes instead of seconds. The sensitivity of this control is based on how zoomed in you are, but since the keyboard layout uses the zoom control for the "coloring" panel, you can't use the mouse trackball or the +/- keys for zooming. Ya basically need to build your own command structure for the program, which is annoying. There are dozens of other annoyances from how they deal with keyframes to audio going offline if it's anything else but native codec's.

 

In the end however, I have found DaVinci to be MUCH MORE STABLE when Premiere. It also doesn't have the horribly annoying "max audio gain of 6db" issue OR the tracks being stuck at mono or stereo. You can change all of those parameters at any time. Plus, the "adjustments" window on each track is open all the time, which makes doing audio editing much smoother/easier.

 

I use DaVinci most days for editing short form projects and I'm currently cutting a documentary feature in it. Where yes I do cuss and feel like throwing the machine out the window on the feature, on the short form stuff it works so well, it makes up for it. DaVinci feels like a piece of hardware rather than a program running on the machine. It seamlessly functions with the hardware in it's own environment, which keeps you focused on work without distractions. It's multi-user/project tools are also very good and it doesn't suffer from cache issues like premiere does.

 

Over-all as an video editor only, Premiere has more tools then DaVinci. However, DaVinci is a better written program, it is what the future is going to look like. A program that does 90% of everything at the best level possible, built-in to one program. Where to get full raster video out of Premiere requires checkboxes and long render times, DaVinci does full raster in real-time flawlessly. It doesn't require ANY rendering, it just flat out works no matter how many effect you throw at it. When I go back to Avid and I have to sit and watch a render bar, I always ask myself why I didn't just use DaVinci. So more and more I'm not bothering to open any other program but DaVinci and that tactic so far, has been working great.

 

If DaVinci stays on it's current path, the Adobe suite (Pr, Ae, Me) won't have any reason to exist. They're an antique workflow that is not part of the future at all.

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Honestly, I don't like Premiere at all. I think it's buggy and Adobe appear to be more focused on features rather then stability. As a professional editor, I can't use the tool at all for anything serious.

 

DaVinci was pretty easy to learn editorial wise. It is missing a bunch of features tho. The major one being a tool which helps select all media on all tracks and slide it back and forward. This is a critical feature when making changes to the timing/length of your timeline and is completely missing in DaVinci. The editor also has some funny quarks that don't exist in any other tool. One that bugs me the most; when grabbing the play head and dragging it left and right in the edges of the visible timeline to show MORE timeline, it tends to get out of hand and skip several minutes instead of seconds. The sensitivity of this control is based on how zoomed in you are, but since the keyboard layout uses the zoom control for the "coloring" panel, you can't use the mouse trackball or the +/- keys for zooming. Ya basically need to build your own command structure for the program, which is annoying. There are dozens of other annoyances from how they deal with keyframes to audio going offline if it's anything else but native codec's.

 

In the end however, I have found DaVinci to be MUCH MORE STABLE when Premiere. It also doesn't have the horribly annoying "max audio gain of 6db" issue OR the tracks being stuck at mono or stereo. You can change all of those parameters at any time. Plus, the "adjustments" window on each track is open all the time, which makes doing audio editing much smoother/easier.

 

I use DaVinci most days for editing short form projects and I'm currently cutting a documentary feature in it. Where yes I do cuss and feel like throwing the machine out the window on the feature, on the short form stuff it works so well, it makes up for it. DaVinci feels like a piece of hardware rather than a program running on the machine. It seamlessly functions with the hardware in it's own environment, which keeps you focused on work without distractions. It's multi-user/project tools are also very good and it doesn't suffer from cache issues like premiere does.

 

Over-all as an video editor only, Premiere has more tools then DaVinci. However, DaVinci is a better written program, it is what the future is going to look like. A program that does 90% of everything at the best level possible, built-in to one program. Where to get full raster video out of Premiere requires checkboxes and long render times, DaVinci does full raster in real-time flawlessly. It doesn't require ANY rendering, it just flat out works no matter how many effect you throw at it. When I go back to Avid and I have to sit and watch a render bar, I always ask myself why I didn't just use DaVinci. So more and more I'm not bothering to open any other program but DaVinci and that tactic so far, has been working great.

 

If DaVinci stays on it's current path, the Adobe suite (Pr, Ae, Me) won't have any reason to exist. They're an antique workflow that is not part of the future at all.

 

Thanks I was thinking in the same way. I have no problem working with a different workflow in different types of software. I was just wondering if I could get rid of my Adobe suite and still do the work.

 

So thank you for your input.

 

As far as Fusion goes I have no problem with working with nodes and any kind of stuff that comes along.

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Just be aware that Resolve is a resource hungry application. I use it for color correction and light editing and it runs well on my HP workstation with a powerful graphics card. But, if you need to work on a laptop, it might not be the best choice and may require one of the most powerful laptops with a good and expensive graphics card.

 

That said... I'm down to only Photoshop from Adobe now. I cancelled the rest of the suite about 18 months ago. :)

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Resolve is far superior to Premiere. Also, if you're familiar with FCP 7, it's about as close as you'll get to that these days. It's a solid editing system and the color correction tools are hard to beat. Fusion and Fairlight are dicey at this point - they're relatively recent integrations into the application, but if you stick primarily to the edit and color windows, it's a good choice. Get yourself a really good GPU (GTX1070 at minimum) and you'll have a good system for color correction. For editing you don't need the GPU power so much.

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Thanks I was thinking in the same way. I have no problem working with a different workflow in different types of software. I was just wondering if I could get rid of my Adobe suite and still do the work.

 

So thank you for your input.

 

As far as Fusion goes I have no problem with working with nodes and any kind of stuff that comes along.

 

Photoshop is very useful, so probably can't entirely get rid of Adobe. I don't think Fusion can edit still images as efficiently as Photoshop, it's a bit more complicated to use.

 

Bruce's comment about computer power is very important tho. DaVinci is a hungry beast and is actually very GPU video memory intensive, rather then CPU intensive. It needs something with as much video memory as you can give it because it buffers literally everything into memory. I suggest a standard GTX1080 8GB as a base card. The TI is very power hungry and your computer's power supply may not be able to handle it. I'm currently running a 980 4gb and it's not enough.

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As far as other software for Photoshoping and vector graphics I'm covered I can use anything else like Gimp or Inkscape or even some other stuff. It's just the video editing and FX stuff.

I guess I'll try to move to Davinci and keep Adobe for now with the intent to move off Adobe gradually. :)

 

Thanks for the input guys.

 

I guess now I have to dive into Fusion :)

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I just use Photoshop from the last full version I bought, which is getting on for ten years old now but does everything I regularly need.

 

Yes, they're focussed on features not stability or speed, and certainly in some parts of the world it is not a good deal as a rental. Yes, they're getting a lot of trade from young beginners who don't understand the difference between capital and revenue, but the way they seem to have worked it out is that it's exactly as expensive as buying every new version of Creative Suite, which nobody ever did because all those new features were rarely that useful. It is much more expensive outside the US, because of no reason other than greed.

 

It has had very little worthwhile work done on it since the launch of Creative Cloud. This is why After Effects still uses the version of Javascript from 1999 (OK, it theoretically went to final standard in March 2000) as its scripting language, the reason the scripting interpreter is such a horrific memory hog, spawning one interpreter instance per layer, and why there are still such crushing limitations on what can be scripted - and that's just the scripting engine. The whole application is dog slow and still doesn't support large CPU core counts as well as it could and should. It is very expensive software. This is not acceptable.

 

Yes, fixing all that is a lot of work. Yes, it probably involves tearing the whole application down to the bare bones and rebuilding it. It is a vast undertaking, and one that's going to create a lot of compatibility issues with plugins, which are key to many (most?) workflows. After Effects is a very, very large piece of software and it is widely used in a huge variety of circumstances. I like it a lot and have used it a lot. But the complete, ongoing neglect of core problems is not OK.

 

Adobe is a very large, very successful, very powerful company. It is capable of doing that work. It simply doesn't care to, because these are problems that are not obvious to the college kids who have never known anything any different. Why would Adobe spend the money? So AE languishes.

 

So yes, I would like nothing more than to replace everything in Creative Suite with third party apps. Blackmagic have offered us a tantalising option with Resolve plus Fusion (and of course Fairlight, which is often overlooked.) The editing in Resolve is fine, though how can you really get that wrong. I don't know enough about Fairlight to comment. Fusion, however, is not AE, even if only because the conversion training is a 'mare. There is really no worthwhile alternative to AE, at least at the level at which AE operates right now. There is also no sensible alternative to Photoshop.

 

Adobe know this.

 

P

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Good point about the Adobe engine and how antique/inefficient it is. Premiere feels like a final cut 7 engine that hasn't been updated. They really need to work on that because DaVinci started from scratch with their media core and it's extremely efficient/effective at managing multi-core/multi-thread operations. It's also far better at using the GPU, where Premiere says it can do certain GPU tasks that DaVinci does much better.

 

Where Premiere is only getting worse, DaVinci is only getting better.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well the verdict is in.

 

I just finished a project I tried to do only in Davinci and while I was able to do everything I needed I would not say that I was able to do do everything with the same ease as in the Adobe Suite.

Yes it worked fluently without any problems but it did crash once but if I use proxy files in Premiere Pro it works just fine.

 

I would say that if I didn't have the ability to use the Adobe Suite I could manage in Resolve but unfortunately I think it's just not there yet.

 

Hope it will be because some stuff is just great. Like rendering time.

 

Best regards.

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Like any program, the more you work with it, the more you figure out work-arounds. Honestly adobe is missing around 40% of the tools I use in Avid, so even Adobe is a paradigm shift from the Avid workflow which in my opinion as an editor is the best. So you gotta just work around the issues, use the program's strengths and focus on them vs getting upset about it's slight weaknesses.

 

I use DaVinci now around 80% of the time, rarely switching back to Avid for a feature film and NEVER use Premiere anymore. I can't keep Premiere from glitching or crashing, it's insufferable. DaVinci can crash, but it really depends on how much ram you have, how fast your GPU is and if you have an SSD boot drive with plenty of room for caches. Premiere likes the same things BTW, so it's not just a DaVinci thing.

 

I do think DaVinci is one major revision away from fixing most of its issues. Again, I've just figured out work-arounds and it's fine. I've spent 2 years working on a feature documentary with mixed frame rates, resolutions, 4 different media types and cameras, all splashed together in Resolve. It "kinda" works, but not optimal and NONE of it work work in Premiere without only being able to playback for a few seconds at a time. So I was forced to use DaVinci and it's been a lifesaver. Most of the issues I can deal with by just chilling and letting the background render take over.

 

One small thing, you can program the keyboard to do more than the GUI can do. I hope you spent some time testing the key commands and finding some of the things you were missing are in there.

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Like any program, the more you work with it, the more you figure out work-arounds. Honestly adobe is missing around 40% of the tools I use in Avid, so even Adobe is a paradigm shift from the Avid workflow which in my opinion as an editor is the best. So you gotta just work around the issues, use the program's strengths and focus on them vs getting upset about it's slight weaknesses.

 

I use DaVinci now around 80% of the time, rarely switching back to Avid for a feature film and NEVER use Premiere anymore. I can't keep Premiere from glitching or crashing, it's insufferable. DaVinci can crash, but it really depends on how much ram you have, how fast your GPU is and if you have an SSD boot drive with plenty of room for caches. Premiere likes the same things BTW, so it's not just a DaVinci thing.

 

I do think DaVinci is one major revision away from fixing most of its issues. Again, I've just figured out work-arounds and it's fine. I've spent 2 years working on a feature documentary with mixed frame rates, resolutions, 4 different media types and cameras, all splashed together in Resolve. It "kinda" works, but not optimal and NONE of it work work in Premiere without only being able to playback for a few seconds at a time. So I was forced to use DaVinci and it's been a lifesaver. Most of the issues I can deal with by just chilling and letting the background render take over.

 

One small thing, you can program the keyboard to do more than the GUI can do. I hope you spent some time testing the key commands and finding some of the things you were missing are in there.

 

True. The keyboard was a life saver and like I said I did everything and there were no major issues just a few things that are weird. Other than that it played stuff back better than any other software.

Like I was disusing with my partner if there was nothing else it would be just fine and I agree about Premiere. As for Avid I have worked on it but I can't have all the software.

 

Like I said I hope it gets better with time and I definitely will use it but not sure if for the majority of projects.

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I personally don't like Premiere much but it is useful for some stuff I work with. I also use Photoshop, After Effects and Audition a lot so it does not hurt to have the Premiere come with the same package.

 

Honestly speaking, I think Premiere is pretty much piece of crap program for most professional uses, it is not very reliable and it is pretty awkward and slow to use for large scale editing I think, especially on mac. The main purpose for the whole program as I see it is for fast turnaround one-man-band video guys who do low budget commercials and indie films etc. where it is useful to have lots of basic features in the same program so that you can edit and finish completely within Premiere even if it's very slow to do (for example grading with Lumetri) and unpractical at times (but still useful for beginner indie guys who don't want to learn to use any other programs and don't know any better nor have high standards for end result...)

 

FCPX lacks most of the essential features I need so I rarely use it for actual editing. It also does not have very good integration with any other essential pro programs. It is pretty much "editors love it, all the post persons hate it" program :P .

 

Resolve is now more reliable than the previous versions so I would consider it "pretty ok" for basic editing. At least it is fast to grade the end result then even when the editing is not super fast with it.

 

 

BTW, I really love Audition for basic sound work like making of docs and similar stuff. It also seems to be pretty reliable in my use. The funny thing is, it is NOT originally an Adobe program... it is based on CoolEdit from the early 2000 something which Adobe bought and just added new features when keeping the interface and other stuff the same. Maybe their 'anti-Midas touch' thus did not reach the core of the program and it is a bit better working than other Adobe stuff :lol:

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Premiere's audio tools are catastrophically bad. Let me play out the most major issue. I have a double mono camera system, but I only wanna use one track from it. If you set the track as stereo, you can't make the left channel "mono" and if you set track as mono, you can't use just one of the two tracks. This means, you have to go to each one of your clips, listen to the entire recording, determine which track is best, manually change the track to left or right, then dump it into your timeline. Are you **(obscenity removed)** kidding me?

 

Has anyone else noticed how nearly anything you do audio effect wise in Premiere, requires a render? Literally, I'll add a global compressor to each one of my tracks and now if I wish to make any level change in my, ohh I say 700 clip sequence, I need to re-render the entire section to even hear the change. What if I don't like the change, what if I need to just preview the change in real time? Nope can't do it. If ya wanna hear your effects in your mix, you've gotta render it out. What the ballox? Is this 1997?

 

Then you have Avid which basically has Pro Tools built-in. Every track is mono, period. So you put your double mono tracks in and as you edit, you tweak what track you want. The real time effects are, real time, no rendering necessary. I will go one step further and say yes, some of Avid's effects require rendering, but at least you can preview the **(obscenity removed)** out of it first before rendering.

 

DaVinci's audio is kind of a hybrid between Avid and Premiere sadly. It has issues with the double mono, but they're workable with a global setting. Plus, it real time renders all effects, including VST aftermarket effects, which I have a few of. That's so super nice, it really works so well previewing in real time and being able to make quick adjustments.

 

I gotta say, I've become a faster editor in DaVinci then any other program, including Avid. For me, once you have a project together, Avid is a bit slow to manipulate things after the fact. Not so with DaVinci, it just moves right along when editing long form stuff in real time.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Interesting. I had my first Resolve hiccup. With a relatively simple thing too. I was trying to chop off the end and start of a vertical video from a phone and reverse the speed. But for some reason even though it could play the sound in Davinci I could not export the video with audio no matter how much I tried. I eventually decided it was taking too much time and did everything in a different software.Interesting. I had my first Resolve hiccup. With a relatively simple thing too. I was trying to chop off the end and start of a vertical video from a phone and reverse the speed. But for some reason even though it could play the sound in Davinci I could not export the video with audio no matter how much I tried. I eventually decided it was taking too much time and did everything in a different software.

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  • 1 month later...

Well after getting my Pocket 4K I absolutely love blackmagic raw and love the Davinci color grading. I can honestly say that I haven't ever before been able to color grade an image like I am able now and it's also fast to render a video. But some other things just get under your skin. I can honestly say that Premiere can not hold a candle to Davinci as far as color grading but the user interface us much better in Premiere and so is some of the workflow. Don't even get me started with Fusion which is a mystery all in it's self. And I have nothing against using nodes but this thing is confusing and I'm still trying to learn but I'm at least half a year away from the same skill set I've got in AE.

I've been thinking about a round tip workflow with Davinci and Premiere, AE but I still think that it would be even more confusing.

I can't wait to try the non beta version of 16.

Best regards.

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  • 5 months later...

Well here's a little update.
After doing a couple of projects with the new Blackmagic cameras and editing everything in Resolve I can honestly say that I love editing in Resolve more than I did in Premiere and had no regrets about getting rid of the Adobe subscription since all the projects have now been done in Resolve for the last couple of months.

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2 hours ago, Vital Butinar said:

Well here's a little update.
After doing a couple of projects with the new Blackmagic cameras and editing everything in Resolve I can honestly say that I love editing in Resolve more than I did in Premiere and had no regrets about getting rid of the Adobe subscription since all the projects have now been done in Resolve for the last couple of months.

It does work great! Just need the hardware to make it sing! 

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