DaVinci Resolve 16 vs Premiere Pro 2019: Which Is The Better Video Editor?

hi guys Jordan with motion array and it's no surprise that we love Premiere Pro but we also love DaVinci Resolve like a lot so today we're going to be comparing these two programs and seeing which one might be better for you [Music] okay so to start it all out we wanted to just give you a heads up that in preparation for this video we noticed that there was a big trend of people saying to just ditch Premiere Pro completely and switch to resolve because it's totally superior truthfully we have a lot of love for both of these products and we want to try to take a bit more of a neutral approach we're gonna be covering a bunch of different topics so this table of contents might actually help you out if you want to skip to a piece of information in specific bottom line we wanted to let you know what we thought each of these programs was great at where each of them fell a little bit short and then maybe which one was actually better suited to your particular needs but to start it off let's go over a topic that you're gonna be encountering first the price when it comes to price it's really hard to beat DaVinci Resolve because it's free well kind of I mean their free version is free but the free version has pretty much all the same functionality as the paid studio version and we're gonna go over what the difference is between those two are in a second but what we really want to get across to you is to download DaVinci Resolve for free it's amazing and it's free like there's there's literally no reason not to download it so what we need you to do is like pause this video and go download DaVinci Resolve why are you still watching this pause the video and just on top of their free version DaVinci Resolve has their paid studio version which comes in at a price of one payment of two hundred and ninety nine US dollars when you compare that to Premiere Pro subscription based model then Premiere Pro is actually a lot cheaper but only for about a year and then it starts to get more and more expensive every single month that you continue using it and that's assuming that you're only using Premiere Pro a more one to one example would be to actually be using other forms of Creative Cloud software like After Effects and audition which compared a lot more diffusion and Fairlight found within DaVinci Resolve the full price of licensing Premiere Pro with the surrounding products is gonna be 50 $2.99 per month which makes it more expensive than DaVinci Resolve after only about six months of use needless to say DaVinci Resolve especially with its free version is so much more economical than Premiere Pro it's not even funny there's a clear winner here and it's DaVinci Resolve but just so that you're a hundred percent aware the free version of DaVinci Resolve does have some minor limitations no support for footage above ultra-high definition basically nothing above traditional 4k limited multi editor collaboration tools a bunch of effects have been disabled like lens flare and film grain no noise reduction no face refinement no lens correction no ten bit support for the gh 5 this is not an exhaustive list but we hope that it gives you a bit of a basic understanding over whether or not the studio version is a must-have for you or if you can just get away with using the free version and consider upgrading later on down the line but as far as price goes DaVinci Resolve is the clear winner now this section might come as a shock to some as we're actually gonna be talking about who these products are each marketed towards as believe it or not this actually kind of matters and it'll help you to understand why each of these products stand where they do here's what it comes down to Adobe's marketing to video editors is based on the idea that everybody else including the artsy cool people are using it even their most recent marketing stream has celebrities like Billy Eilish showcasing that they use the Creative Cloud suite to be more well creative black magic on the other hand is taking the professional approach no really like all their stuff is like really high-quality professionals are using our products and there's a reason that you always see other black magic products found within the resources for DaVinci Resolve even their splash screens and help support documents have color control panels Blackmagic cameras and basically whatever peripherals you need to deck out your studio into a fully fledged video command station this is why Blackmagic can literally give away such a powerful free version of their software because it supports their ecosystem of really expensive yet admittedly freaking cool products editing Blackmagic raw footage from a Blackmagic camera in DaVinci Resolve instead of Premiere Pro is just love beautiful they even give away a free version of DaVinci Resolve studio when you buy a Blackmagic camera so neat I say anymore so what's the point of the section ok here's the thing this is not a section intended to get you to see one piece of software as superior to the other but more to give you a bit of a backstory over why each company has taken the particular approach that it has and to let you rest assured that you don't need to worry about why each is priced the way that it's priced but more so just to ask what is your dollar better spent on but the one thing that we can't say with certainty is that you to download resolve right now for free just do it make your dreams come true so when it comes to performance one of the benchmarks for success that everybody seems obsessed about is render and export times and I gotta be honest with you I've always been a little bit confused about why this holds such a high standard in everybody's mind I mean don't get me wrong I understand why people obsess over this it's really easy to test for you get really clear concise numbers you can make sure that things are pretty much equal when testing against multiple different pieces of software or platforms but when it comes to the actual amount of time that's spent in my workflow the vast majority of it is on the actual creation of the project and the actual amount of time that I spend rendering exporting and delivering the final project is a small tiny fraction by comparison that being said if you find that your particular workflow has a higher percentage of time spent in that area then you're gonna get a bit of an advantage when using DaVinci Resolve and part of that has to do with the fact that there's a greater reliance on the GPU when at least compared to Premiere Pro which is a lot more CPU driven now exporting is great but what I care a lot more about is the performance experience I get when doing things like adding footage scrubbing cutting playing back footage you know editing now unfortunately Premiere Pro I did notice that resolve tends to do a better job when spreading the workload out among other computer components most notably with that greater emphasis put on the GPU so in Premiere Pro it's a lot more likely that you're gonna be under using the potential of your graphics card especially if you shell that for something really nice DaVinci Resolve on the other hand will help you to have a lot more of a snappy fast playback experience and yes better rendering and exporting as long as you have a good GPU if you don't be prepared to wait for just a little bit there is a reason why Blackmagic Design sells their own external GPU set up because laptop use in DaVinci Resolve can be challenging depending on the laptop of your choice that's not to say that Premiere Pro is an absolute dream on a laptop because it's not always an absolute dream on a laptop but what happens when you put more emphasis on the GPU is that you do take a bit of a hit when you're not able to pack as much punch into a smaller space now both software has their own particular solutions for these sorts of problems Blackmagic like I mentioned before sells an e GPU setup and they also have the ability for you to choose different graphics cards if multiple are available or even select with multiple graphics cards to work at the same time super cool in my opinion but I don't personally want to spend a lot of money just to get a bit of a better performance boost so I actually prefer to go for a software based solution now one of the things that I much prefer Premiere Pro is the way that you can work with proxy files resolve seems to be putting a lot of emphasis on the idea that they want to make your proxy files still look somewhat good and to be honest that's kind of appreciated again getting back to that mindset of the idea that you might have clients watching you edit in your studio but there are still projects when I've been working on work I just want zero latency when working with my footage no matter my computer's hardware and I'm sure that as editors you said to yourself at some point in time I know what my footage looks like I just want to be able to move it around place it in order even if it looks like digital dogs while doing so with Premiere Pro you can actually set up your proxies to some ungodly tiny resolution and then when you toggle your proxies on and off you get disgustingly poor quality but it's absolutely buttery smooth if you're editing on the go with a low powered laptop and you need to make changes fast this can be an absolute lifesaver and it doesn't have to stay like that piece together your edit bippity-boppity-boo and then toggle proxies back on again there you've gotten all your quality back now that 90% of the placement is done options like this have absolutely saved me in the past like same-day wedding edits for clients and even though DaVinci Resolve technically has a workaround that could be similar to this the actual application of it takes enough time that it might actually just be worth it to wait through the lag of you're hungry footage under low power laptop that being said you're not always gonna be editing on a laptop from 2001 and as I mentioned before Blackmagic kind of wants you to be editing like this so let's just wrap a section up both software work great in optimal conditions and Premiere Pro just have a slight edge when working on the go because it doesn't need as many bulky workarounds in some cases but DaVinci Resolve does have an actual performance advantage it's greater emphasis on the GPU means that DaVinci Resolve wins this round Oh premier pro you've mistreated me far too many times in this section premier Pro is not stable and I've actually been surprised about how much more dependent I can be on DaVinci Resolve while it's still in its public beta now to be fair along with that instability comes a wealth of resources to be able to deal with those problems like online forums YouTube videos and even direct product support from Adobe so if you actually ran into a monumental problem I would actually feel a little bit more comfortable that you'd be able to fix it quickly inside of Premiere as opposed to resolve but this section is called stability not fast problem fix ability so again it's a quick section but the edge goes to DaVinci Resolve the timeline functionality for each of these two pieces of software is surprisingly similar they both use the traditional time line format as opposed to something more unique like Final Cut Pro X's magnetic timeline both lets you position your clips in 3d space with essentially an infinite number of possible video and audio tracks to work with in fact for me the key differences between these two timelines come down to really small details that do more to nudge me as opposed to pull me towards one software over the other Premiere Pro has a more traditional feel with hard right angles and harsh edges that make things feel like they're easy to distinguish and understand while resolve on the other hand has a more modern feel with rounded edges for their media clips which feel almost slightly inspired by Final Cut Pro X as far as the visual design goes so far these are just some surface level visual aesthetic preferences but there are some key functional differences that I personally noticed and I think are worth pointing out first of all just as an example both of these programs have a slip function where you can keep the position of the clip where it is in 3d space but simply make that portion of the clip contain an earlier or later part of what was shot now what you just saw was a visual representation of this happening in Premiere Pro but that actually doesn't happen when you edit in Premiere Pro that's something that I created myself to help show what's actually going on if you actually do this in Premiere Pro you don't get that nice little visualization you actually just get some starting and ending time codes as well as the starting and ending frame that you're working with now in resolve on the other hand you actually do have this visual indication of your clip length and where it is in comparison to all of what's available I can't express to you guys how much I love this it's one of those subtle little details that make the program feel like it was less by programmers and more by video editors I never thought I would need this particular function but as soon as I found it in resolve using the slip tool in Premiere Pro just sort of lost its magic now where the timeline in Premiere Pro really shines at least I feel like is its ability to help you edit lightning-fast premiere seems to be optimized so that your hands can literally go at the same speed as your brain here's a good example both programs let you ripple delete delete an item and have the timeline close in the gap held by that previous clip but Premiere has additional shortcut keys for ripple trim previous and ripple trim next which lets you take your placement of the playhead and decide to cut everything on that clip behind the playhead or in front of it another good example is the extend edit key where you can highlight a particular cut and then wherever that playhead is when you hit the e key will make that cut appear exactly at that spot really shortcut keys like these where you're making one particular task just a little bit faster but that one task is going to be done over and over and over and over and over again really helps you to accumulate more time saved during the course of your entire edit and on top of that being able to get into the zone editing partially has to do with having a zero latency between your brain your hands and what's actually happening on your timeline just to be clear though resolves version sixteen update has an entire new section dedicated to just taking that first pass at cutting your film together to make that process even faster than in the traditional edit timeline and while I totally recognize the improvements made here I just don't feel personally like it's quite reached that lightning-fast speed of Premiere Pro to be fair it might just be a matter of personal preference for me as the kind of content we produce here has a lot of quick cutting that will actually take advantage of really specific shortcut keys like these and that's my personal preference especially having come from the world of editing wedding videos where sometimes the client wants same-day edits but I fully understand and realize that a lot of times piecing together a film isn't about blazing fast speeds so much as it is spending a lot of time on that one moment to make sure that every single cut is exactly the right frame we could spend forever on this with more examples and each timeline has a slew of its own pros and cons but really at the end of the day it feels a little bit more like a personal preference as opposed to a clear winner so this one for me is a die now just a little bit more of a broader scope than the timeline is literally everything else okay well I mean everything else that you can see within your frame which is your workspace and here we can see a couple different approaches taken by these two programs we have a more guided approach from DaVinci Resolve and we have a bit more of a you can do whatever you want approach from Premiere Pro with premiere you have the capability to set your workspace in literally any shape that you want move windows and panels around to create something super efficient for your project needs or just something really interesting and while they've got suggested tabs to switch to four different steps along the editing process these are never necessarily given a priority over top of your own created workspaces you can even get rid of those default workspaces if you like and replace them with your own DaVinci Resolve on the other hand has a more guided step-by-step process with these tabs laid out for you at the bottom here load your media into the workspace start to assemble it and work with it in the Edit tab add effects and composites with the fusion tab color it then work with audio in the Fairlight section then when you're ready to export it you can easily manage that process in the deliver tab I got to say in most cases I don't really like this Apple styled hand-holding approach but to be honest this particular implementation doesn't so much feel like it restricts me so much as gives me nicely labeled freedoms to each their own but I actually really like this workspace layout format in DaVinci Resolve almost as much as I like premiere pros ability to do whatever you want so it's a little bit of a personal opinion and this is a little bit too much of a difference to have an apples to apples comparison so I'm gonna suggest that you look at these and ask which one would suit your own personal style best and for me this one is another draw this one isn't even a competition DaVinci Resolve has been an industry leader in color work for years and the fact that they're upgrading their software to be a better editor from start to finish hasn't taken away from their ability to work with color at all we're not sticking around with this one for too long Premiere Pro is good with color but DaVinci Resolve is freaking amazing treating each clip with their node based approach gives you an unprecedented amount of control when taking your footage through the process of color correction and color grading highly refined masking power windows integrated noise reduction and a slew of other scopes and color wheels it's it's just not fair next section now here's always the topic that comes up when comparing Premiere Pro it to another piece of software dynamic Lincoln right it allows you to take parts of your edit and be able to work with them in a more refined way in other programs like audition or After Effects however the flip side is that DaVinci Resolve actually does have other tangential programs that work in a similar way to auditions and After Effects for audio you've got Fairlight and for compositing you've got fusion but here's the thing not only do these programs also work flawlessly with DaVinci Resolve they're actually baked right into DaVinci Resolve all you have to do is press one of these tabs here and boom you're in that other program working with your edit with absolutely no interruptions now look even though these programs were designed to do pretty much literally exactly the same thing work with audio or do compositing the functional use of them once you get inside the program is actually pretty different and you're gonna have people who absolutely swear by using either one or the other but what my job is is to assume that you're either coming in fresh having tried and neither of these two pieces of software or you're going to be switching from one to the other or at least considering it in either direction so I got to take that into account when we go through this particular section either way there's gonna be a bit of a learning curve so here's my personal verdict the audio software that goes along with each of these two programs is great they're each amazingly powerful they allow you to use an insane number of effects and tweak your audio to be just right and they're both pretty easy to use so for the moment we're going to be putting these two programs aside and what we're really going to be focusing on is the difference with the compositing software so when we talk about the difference between fusion and After Effects I gotta say personally I'm less of a fan of fusion and I know that's my own personal bias and keep in mind there's a reason why fusion is used by so many studios on insanely high level productions it's because it's an amazing piece of software but this isn't a comparison between Fusion and After Effects it's a comparison between resolved and Premiere Pro so what my job kind of is is to look at more of a casual user or at least a user that's not going to be spending weeks and weeks and weeks tweaking one single shot inside of either fusion or After Effects I'm looking at users who are gonna be spending the vast majority of their time in either resolve or Premiere Pro so what that means for me is ease of use and how quickly can you learn the software becomes a big point of the conversation and for whatever reason the gods of the internet have just decided that Adobe After Effects has a lot more resources online to be able to learn quickly now some of you might be thinking that that's a strange point to hit on shouldn't we be looking at what each of these two pieces of software has within them and which one is more powerful maybe not the truth is is that I tend to use After Effects a lot to help boost my projects in Premiere Pro and I'm by all means not a beginner user but what I find is that no matter what I tend to throw in Adobe After Effects it's so much more powerful and I'm not even scratching the surface of what it's actually capable of and the same is true with infusion 99% of users are not going to be pushing this program beyond what it can actually do so you're not concerned with can this program handle what I'm going to throw at it you're more concerned with how quickly can I pull off this effect and how easy or frustrating is that experience while I'm doing it and so when it comes to new beginner or even intermediate users you're gonna see a bend towards Adobe After Effects because of that ease of use factor and a more forgiving learning curve and if you don't believe me let's just do a quick example to show you what I mean do you remember back in the price section when we are looking at the rotating numbers of the increase in Premiere Pro priced monthly subscription the way that I actually pulled off that effect was to bring it into After Effects you're gonna quick slider control and some expressions and there we go the effect is easy but regardless of the fact that it's kind of simple when you know how to do it the problem is knowing how to do it to begin with you didn't know that's what you have to do how would you actually acquire that information and that's where learning resources come in I was able to find countless tutorials to get this exact effect within After Effects for comparison's sake I tried looking up how to get this effect in Fusion and I had only two search results for tutorials on the topic and even though they were great tutorials I was still missing a few pieces of key information to apply it to my particular circumstance and when I tried searching for specifically Fusion tutorials on this counting number effect the fusion tutorials were actually buried underneath a bunch of After Effects tutorials even though After Effects or Adobe weren't included in the search terms this is a pretty common effect to pull off so I'm glad that there's a tutorial on it but the more deep you get into different types of effects the more likely you'll find gaps in the tutorial catalog for fusion but please don't mistake what I'm saying and please don't discount fusion if you're actually looking at getting into high-level VFX work or looking to get really really good at compositing actually you should take a look at fusion maybe even over Adobe After Effects like I said before there's reasons that Hollywood studios are actually using fusion it's a little less forgiving for new users but once you actually get past that insane learning curve you can do a lot of incredible things and that node-based system of working with effects might actually be more beneficial to you in the long run but at the end of the day like I mentioned before this is still a review between DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro and when we're taking into account that 99% of the user base we are giving the edge to Premiere Pro because the ease of use factor of Adobe After Effects so at the end of the day what do I recommend for you well like we've said before but seriously there are ways that each of these two programs allow you to test out their software for free DaVinci Resolve like we've mentioned has their free version and Premiere Pro has a 7-day free trial if at the end of that seven-day free trial you actually still want to try out and keep using it you can just do that first month for pay and then cancel after that if you really don't like it if you don't like it at the end of that first month you've only lost say 20 ish dollars and if you don't like DaVinci Resolve you didn't pay anything anyways and you can still keep the software but looking back at all the different sections that we covered it's kind of hard not to say that DaVinci Resolve won at least on paper but that being said I still stand by my statement that I think you should download both of these pieces of software and try them out to see which one jives better with you some people will prefer Premiere Pro some people will prefer to Vinci resolve just based on a user experience of what it feels like to actually use these two pieces of software then once you've done that take into account everything price performance stability other ancillary products that go alongside them and then come to your own executive decision if you end up going down the premier pearl route you're probably gonna find an easier time with the learning curve through a wider selection of online tutorials and online resources as well as a wider array of plugins and templates to help kick-start the awesomeness of your projects early on to top it all off you'll have a higher likelihood that your own circle of friends as well as clients have somewhat of a background or familiarity with Premiere Pro but that does come at a much higher cost especially in the long run as well as a piece of software that has known problems in the past with stability and crashing whereas if you go down the resolved route you're getting awesome video editing software for much less if not nothing with an extra emphasis on color workflow and a bend towards the professional studio user the downside is fewer resources for learning and even though you do have awesome compositing software baked right in you might be less inclined to try it out and start using it than something like After Effects depending on how quick you are to take up the node based compositing approach and even though you can pump out projects and resolve extremely quickly you may find that you're doing it just a tad slower than you otherwise would be in Premiere Pro unless you're talking about exclusively rendering and exporting in which case resolve has the edge there as well in the end regardless of what software you choose you're gonna find you're able to make some incredibly high-quality video projects and I will say though that if I was just beginning my journey as a video editor today I would be far more inclined to try the free version of DaVinci Resolve and then consider upgrading to the studio version later on if I thought that I needed those particular features for my own workflow personally I'm satisfied enough with my relationship with Premiere Pro to not switch over to DaVinci Resolve despite feeling like a little bit of a minority of people who are making videos on this topic but I will say that I am still keeping DaVinci Resolve installed on my computer as that cheeky little mistress on the side those color grading and finishing features are far too powerful and awesome not to have available at all times now there's always a concern that whoever's making these comparison videos is bringing in their own personal bias and making recommendations just based entirely on their personal preference and while that's pretty much impossible to avoid let me go ahead and clear up a few things I've used both of these pieces of software on countless different projects and while Premiere Pro has been my NLE of choice for years Premiere Pro has also stabbed me in the back on occasion like for example crashing at the absolute worst possible times not having support for particular codex that's actually one of the reasons that I went and switched over to try to Vinci result in the first place because it was able to handle some black magic raw footage when Premiere Pro couldn't so to be clear for myself personally I absolutely loved Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve and while I do tend to aim towards Premiere Pro for myself personally I also do have some shortcomings with it that I'm still kind of upset about whereas DaVinci Resolve I have a bit more of a neutral feeling towards as for our own personal bias here at motion array there was a time back when we only provided templates for Premiere Pro and After Effects but that hasn't been the case for a long time now in fact we have templates for everything from Premiere Pro and After Effects to Final Cut Pro X Adobe Rush and yes even DaVinci Resolve so we really don't have a financial incentive for you to choose one of these pieces of software over the other which is why we keep telling you to download DaVinci Resolve for free like seriously test it out play around with it and if you don't like it at the end of the day you still have industry-leading color capabilities at the tip of your fingers but guys that's it for me if you wanted to save some time working in either Premiere Pro DaVinci Resolve or even Final Cut or Adobe rush for that matter feel free to check out all of our templates stock footage royalty-free music and well anything that can make your project look and sound that much more awesome but guys thanks so much for stopping by and I can't wait to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Motion Array Tutorials

Views: 196,740

Keywords: Davinci Resolve vs premiere pro, davinci resolve 16, premiere pro cc 2019, davinci resolve vs premiere pro 2019, davinci resolve vs premiere pro, Resolve, Resolve 16, Premiere, Pro, Premiere Pro, 16, Editing, Video Editing, Video, Software, Blackmagic, Blackmagic Design, Fusion, adobe premiere pro, davinci resolve, motion array, motion array review, adobe premiere pro cc 2019, blackmagic design, premiere pro vs davinci resolve

Id: NdXftqjJ9n4

Length: 25min 41sec (1541 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019