Windows
Choose your champion in the battle of the big video-editing apps.
Two great titans enter the arena. Only one will leave triumphant. These kinds of multi-camera, effects-laden scenes are precisely what Adobe’s Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve were designed to cope with, and it also neatly describes the battle between pro-level non-linear video editing apps. There must be a word for that.
There’s room in this arena for both contenders, however. Nobody has to get hurt. In the red corner we find Premiere Pro, the shinobi from Adobe, famous for work such as Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Sharknado 2: The Second One. Meanwhile, in the blue corner sits Australia’s finest, DaVinci Resolve, fresh from working on Deadpool 2, The Last Jedi, and 35 films at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival you’ve never heard of.
This month we’re comparing non-linear video editors. This is a type of editing in which the original footage isn’t altered in any way. Edits are kept in the form of companion files generated by specialised software, and on playback the edited video is recreated from a combination of these files and the original source files. This means that the finished movie must be exported as a new file in order to share it or play it back on a different device. It sounds complex, but it’s the way most video-editing apps work. You’ll need a fast PC, a highresolution monitor, and a large amount of fast storage to work effectively this way.
The big news about DaVinci Resolve, which is owned by mind-blowingly expensive camera company Blackmagic Design, is that there’s a free version that contains 90 percent of the Studio version. All that’s missing is support for resolutions above 4K and frame rates above 60fps, support for multi-GPU systems, some advanced machine learning, HDR, and stereoscopic video tools. Were you thinking of making an 8K 120fps 3D HDR movie? Then you’ll need to part with $475.
For most people, the free version will suffice. It acts as a lure to interest potential customers in Blackmagic’s keyboard with dedicated edit keys and a jog wheel, or the Advanced Panel that looks like part of the space shuttle. Video editing is a heck of a drug.
Resolve began life as a colour correction tool, but has since expanded into almost every corner of video production. Much like Serif’s Affinity suite, it’s broken up into “pages” that offer different functionality. A big new addition is the Cut page, which acts as a lighter version of the main edit suite, and is designed for quick cutting on location, likely on a portable PC with a small screen. It’s more streamlined than the Edit page, which assumes you’re using a larger screen and therefore provides more tools, but it’s enough to hack together something in five minutes to show a client while your camera operator is packing up their gear.
Other pages in Resolve include Fusion, which deals with video effects and 3D compositing; and Fairlight, which is a complete digital audio workstation (DAW)
with mixer, EQ, as well as dynamics processing, sound library support, and a lot more. Colour correction is still there too, with the Colour page dedicated to this subtle art. And finally, the Deliver page handles rendering and exporting, featuring presets for popular video‑hosting sites, as well as having manual controls.
Industry standard
Premiere Pro, on the other hand, is available through Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription scheme that we discussed last month. There’s no free version, but a cut‑down video‑editing program is available for a fixed price in the form of Premiere Elements. This is a different app, however, which shares little more than its name with Premiere Pro, and shouldn’t be confused with the main event. Premiere Rush also exists as part of Creative Cloud, bundled with Premiere Pro (with which its projects are compatible) or as its own subscription – this app is aimed at quick mobile‑editing of videos exported straight to YouTube or similar sites, like Resolve’s Cut page.
Premiere Pro itself has many features designed to speed up the process of video editing, although how useful they are depends entirely on the project you’re working on and the style of editing you prefer. Premiere Pro’s
Assembly window lets you quickly splice clips together before taking them to the Edit window for fine-tuning, and there’s colour grading, effects integration, and audio editing just as you’d expect. Premiere is an app to take your time with, its Lumetri colour‑correction module operating more like Lightroom than Resolve’s does. And while Blackmagic’s app is an all‑in‑one solution, Adobe requires a separate subscription to After Effects if you want to add 3D or other motion graphics to your videos.
Adobe’s products are the industry standard, and can be easier to grasp for beginners. Once you know the layout of one, you can find tools and palettes in many others, and this familiarity is a huge bonus for Premiere Pro. Many editors will want Photoshop installed on the same PC they use for video work, and the shared design language between the two apps goes a long way.
Resolve can more than hold its own against Premiere Pro, but sometimes using the standard app pays dividends for many professionals. Premiere Pro is on version 14, while Resolve is on version 16. These are mature applications that have been improved time and time again through feedback from industry professionals. The cost can be a large factor for those learning an application or working on personal projects, so Resolve’s free version scores highly. A year’s subscription to Premiere Pro costs twice what Resolve Studio costs as a one‑off payment, and this, along with the Fusion and Fairlight pages, makes Resolve a very attractive proposition.
If you’re just dabbling in video editing, Resolve is a no‑brainer, as it’s free. If you want to learn, Premiere Pro does have a learning mode, but consider Premiere Elements, which takes you through the process of non‑linear editing in an approachable way and gives you transferable skills you can use in other apps. Both Premiere Pro and Resolve Studio are serious toys, and while it would be wrong not to recommend an app for that reason, there’s so much pro functionality available for so little money elsewhere, we wonder why any home user would want them.
Premiere Pro Industry standard; easy to grasp; learning resources. Subscription pricing is a downer.
DaVinci Resolve All-in-one; free version is amazing; dedicated hardware available. Enormously complex.