Hey guys Jordy here for Cinecom.net and welcome to Creative Tuesday. Now, don't worry I'm not leaving Premiere Pro But I do read your comments guys and many of you are actually asking whether I have a crack for Premiere Pro... which I will not get into or free alternatives which I do love to share my thoughts about. So I've tried out seven different programs for you,
some of which I'm sure you have never heard about and I'm going to share my thoughts as a Premiere user. The first one on the list is Lightworks and you're probably wondering now:
"Jordy, what laptop is that?" Well for this video we have partnered up with
OMEN and AMD and they have provided us with the OMEN 15 And I know "another laptop" but this again falls in a whole different category. The OMEN 15 is very affordable. That does come with some compromises but what they didn't compromise on are the specs inside and I'm actually very thrilled about the amd Ryzen 7 4800h mobile processor with Radeon graphics as it rocks an NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti we get 16 gigs of ram and one terabyte of storage on an NVMe SSD. Now that is for the model that they have provided us, there are different configurations as well. This AMD processor has eight cores running at a base clock of 2.9 gigahertz. Phew... That is pretty insane for what this laptop costs and since video editing is still a very cpu intensive task it makes this laptop actually very useful for that. But let's get started now Lightworks is a super lightweight editing program. It starts fast, playback and editing in general goes super smooth and that is because of its slim feature set. It is mostly used for simple editing and very basic effects. So even though that you get a professional tool set for editing it doesn't come with many features. That could be either a drawback or a positive note for the type of work that you do. One thing it does have are some very nice color correction and grading tools. Lightworks is completely free however
you are limited to a certain file format and you cannot export higher than a 720p resolution. If that is a problem for you then there is of course the pro version which doesn't have more features other than the export options and the supported file formats. Let's fire up the second editing program on the list, which is called Shotcut. This one is completely free. There's no pro version or anything like that and I find it very similar to Lightworks. However, making animations using keyframes is actually much more intuitive right here. You get the three color wheels and other grading tools. It's very lightweight and I didn't find any stability issues. However, it does have problems playing back 4k footage, and I tested this on different computers and it always had these issues so it had nothing to do with the OMEN. As a reference I edited on this laptop working with 5k Red RAW footage and it goes pretty okay. You can definitely notice the power of the Ryzen 4800 right here. And once I made 4k proxies from the RAW files editing went butter smooth so it's often a software limitation that playback isn't going so well. Moving on Davinci Resolve Probably the best one on the list but also the most popular and I know that a lot of you guys are already working in it. Resolve has a couple of workspaces in which you can do different tasks like editing, fusion is for VFX, color grading and, sound mix. Within every color space you basically get any tool that a professional video editor needs. Key framing goes very smooth, there is a pretty big effects library and their color grading tools are of course one of the best on the market. However, it does all work very differently than Premiere. I had lots of trouble because it is node based. It's not worse, but it's something that you need to get familiar with and that could take some time You know, it's like AMD. I never worked with it for an unknown reason and you guys have always been telling me to try it out. And you're right! I mean every year we make this editing computer build guide and for some reason I never included AMD. But that's definitely going to change and i'm planning to do some side-by-side testing next time. Anyways moving on to
Avid Media Composer It's considered the standard for video editing in film and television. Although that has been changing a little bit in the last couple of years. Avid is actually a pretty expensive program but they also have a light version which they call "FIRST" and that is free. Now media composer is a very complicated story. On one end you get a very stable program, it is super responsive even much better than Premiere. You have all the tools that you need but even though it's a feature packed editing program I had the most frustrations with this one. It felt like the interface just didn't make sense. I tried making a title which was so hard to figure out how, it didn't show anything when I was typing and it was creating animations that I didn't asked it to do. And when I tried animating a clip I could create keyframes but I wasn't able to change the position until suddenly my clip started to rotate. Also every action I do requires a thousand clicks. Simple tasks like deleting effects, moving clips around in a timeline or simply changing the speed of a clip all felt so bulky and not user friendly. Now I'm going to blame myself for that as I'm not used to editing with Avid. But from all the programs that I tested and researched I spent the most time in Avid, and I still don't get it. But maybe you do it's great that it's free so you can try it out without losing any money. [Clap] Alright, let's move on to HitFilm Express. Also a very popular editing program among creators and its interface comes very close to Premiere Pro. In fact, it feels exactly like i'm editing in Premiere. There was absolutely no learning curve for me. Creating animations works exactly the same and you even have all the customizations to ease your keyframes or even to fine tune them in a graph editor. And what I really love is that there's even a motion blur option by default. We get our familiar toolbar with things like the Rate Stretch Tool, we can draw masks and animate it over time and there's even a motion tracker. Something that Premiere can't do unless you bring your footage to After Effects. So personally I'm the most excited about HitFilm but that is probably because it just feels so familiar. The biggest drawback that I found was playback. If you're working with 4k or higher resolutions hitfilm does have a lot of trouble playing that back while other programs like Avid or Resolve went butter smooth. And going back to the OMEN 15 for a quick moment as I already mentioned, there is some pretty nice hardware inside Yet, the price point is far the lowest that we've seen in the laptops, we've covered recently. That has some drawbacks, for instance we're looking at a full HD display. It is an IPS panel, but I couldn't find anything back about its color profile. So if color accuracy is important to you I do recommend getting an external monitor which you can just simply hook up to the HMDI port. There are a bunch of ports and also an internal sd card reader. You know how much I love that. Now the body itself is a little more bulky weighing more than 2kg or more than 5 Pounds. and the housing is plastic. I mean if everything was top notch, we'd also be looking at a whole different pricing category. Anyways moving on to premiere alternative number six: This program is called Kdenlive. Completely free and open source. Which comes again with most of the professional features that we need in an editing program. We can animate properties using keyframes, there are a bunch of effects, not many but the essentials are there. We have color grading tools like the color wheels and even scopes such as the waveform vector scope, etc. We have masking abilities and there's even a motion tracker. So we get all the features that we need. It does feel a little bit old-fashioned, but playback actually goes pretty smooth. It has some trouble loading in footage, but once it sits in the timeline, it goes fine. So it's definitely a worthy Premiere alternative. And this brings us to the last one, which is Filmora Pro. Now I am cheating a little bit with the last one as it's actually not free... There is a free version that gives you all of the features But it will leave a watermark when you export. If you don't like that you can get the editing program for 150 bucks or something, which is actually very cheap for what you get. Now the reason that I put it on the list is because it also comes with all of the features that we look for in a professional program. And just like HitFilm it resembles Premiere Pro a lot. We can create keyframes, change its graph, even enable motion blur for animations, we get some intuitive color correction tools with scopes, we can create masks, and also motion track our shots. Unfortunately, just like HitFilm, Filmora also suffers from playback issues with higher resolution footage. Even though we get a ton of professional features It is definitely not where Premiere is at and that's kind of the moral of the story. If you follow us on instagram, you know that we complain a lot about Premiere , mostly about its instability and crashes but I'm also very thankful. From the seven alternatives I don't think that any of these reach the same level of what Premiere can do and how user-friendly it is, at least that is from my experience and my personal thought. For you it could be different because I know how many of you love to work in Resolve and I do had a great experience in that program. So it's going to be different for everybody. I'd say try out some of the free editing programs that caught your interest, all the links are listed down below and I've also included two bonus editing programs. one is called Media 100 which is only for Mac, unfortunately. And the other is Cinelerra , which only works on linux. I haven't tried out that last one yet, but from their website, it looks pretty promising. I hope that you've enjoyed the video and learned something new about the other video editing programs on the market. Just like I learned that an AMD processor is perfect for video editing. Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you OMEN and AMD for the support and as always Stay Creative! And we got some more gifts from OMEN as well. I got a mouse with a mouse pad, which is super smooth Oh, yeah. I got a headset with a microphone so I can game at work. Heyeyeyeyey... What was that? I even got a pillow so I could sleep at work. Oh damn it. Is that christmas decoration?
