Premiere Pro vs AVID Media Composer vs DaVinci vs Final Cut Pro X BATTLE ROYALE | On The Timeline

i edited four different episodes in the same series using four different editing programs so welcome to the premiere pro versus avid media composer versus davinci resolve versus final cut pro 10 battle royale so let's get into it [Music] so i've been a professional video editor since 2017 and i've edited everything from promos to music videos to short films to live events and in all that time i've mostly used adobe premiere pro and just to be super transparent about all of my experiences before this i've only used davinci for color correction and i'm not the best colorist i used avid in third year film school and i've only used final cut pro 10 once when i got my first macbook back in 2014 and i hated it like i hated it and i swore that i would never use it again thus beginning a lifelong feud with anybody who dare speak its name i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding where am i no i am i am or am i and i know what you're going to say oh just another premier fanboy and you'd be correct but seeing as this video somehow became the most viewed video on this channel i decided that i wanted to give all these programs another try and when we started our new series on the page which you know you can go watch over there i saw this as the golden opportunity to do just that since it's a series there would be specific stylistic elements in the presentation of each episode that would create the battleground for these programs to either outshine one another or lag behind and die outside the zone i can't keep this metaphor going we're comparing editing programs let's go so starting with importing your files all these programs allow you to straight up edit the raw h264 footage but avid and final cut work better when you transcode to either dnx or prores i didn't transcode the footage in avid which was probably a mistake i know but i did leave background rendering on in final cut because all those channels always talk about how much quicker it is when you do that and i wanted to test it out also final cut pro copies all of your footage into its library so it just creates duplicates of everything and if you do transcode it sort of makes three copies of everything so when we move to project management final cut has this weird structure of libraries and events instead of bins like all the other programs in final cut when you open an event which is a bin you see a thumbnail view of all your footage which i guess is nice if you have a ton of like 10 second or even a minute long clips but if you have 30 minute clips like us it's a bit of a nightmare so i used the list view throughout but in the list view every time you import footage into that it creates a new folder with the date that those clips were shot on and sometimes the metadata is wrong so it just puts different cameras in different folders within the event which is kind of annoying especially because the macbook screen is really small in premiere and davinci you can just make a bin and then create bins inside of bins for easy organization in avid you can put bins inside folders but not bins in bins so we like to use multicam to sync our footage and just easily select the angle that we want the way that i do this in premiere is just to use the auto audio sync so this was fairly easy in all the programs all of them have a sort of a similar waveform audio sync type thing premiere and da vinci handle the process pretty similarly but the results are sort of too erratic to draw any conclusions avid sort of just syncs things when there's a clap so it would end up with like five clips of mark just stacked on top of one another and then synced to the clap ignoring everything else in the waveform so and then final cut pro 10 would take ages to do this like i'm talking an hour and a half but when it's done it's pretty much spot on so before i actually started editing i changed all the shortcuts to what i was used to in premiere this was fairly easy in all the programs but every program sort of has its own name for the same tool so though davinci has a premier shortcut preset it really leaves a lot to be desired anyways if you are switching to one of these programs i've left a little link in the description for you to download all of my presets for these programs uh just for free just mahala oh and if you like me giving away free stuff press that subscribe button maybe i'll do another thing so when it comes to actually editing and just cutting up the footage the multicam and all these programs work really well you can preview all four angles and then just click on the one that you want and it automatically makes a cut as you going but in premiere when playback is paused you can actually just switch to a different angle none of the other programs do this they always make a cut every time you click on it meaning that you have to go to the beginning of the clip in order to change the angle the magnetic timeline of final cut pro 10 took quite a bit of getting used to but after a couple of days i got the hang of it pretty quick and it's not that bad really now we know avid is an editor and only an editor it's made for long-form tv and form where there's different departments all using their own software and then bringing it back into avid and that workflow probably works really well avid is not made for youtube it's actually pretty bad in youtube and this becomes very apparent when we start talking about graphics effects and text any properties such as scale position and so on need to be applied from an effect in the effect palette and once this is applied it kind of slows down playback a little bit you know what is good for youtube though pressing that little like button right there sorry anyways davinci and final cut have very similar default property inspectors with things like crop added in addition to the standard position rotation and opacity that we have in premiere graphic animation using keyframes is easiest in premiere where you can just see the keyframes next to each property avid does this very similarly but with like a sprinkle of difficulty added if you have to get to the actual keyframes itself in final cut or da vinci you have to open this like sub menu on the timeline to make changes or just use the inspector like i did okay and i have to mention dynamic linking from premiere to after effects which is just the best thing plus with motion graphics and premiere you can actually do some really impressive stuff text in premiere and avid is pretty similar you just click and then change your properties avid having that sprinkle of difficulty again while in davinci and a final cut you have to drag in the template with the animations already applied before you edit anything okay moving on to color obviously da vinci is the best it was made for color before it was an editor and before it was an audio program and an effects program before all of those things da vinci was made for color and it does it really good so if you really want to dial in those color settings davinci is your program but for the rest of us who maybe have limited color experience lumetri in premiere pro is next even when just using the basic color correction sliders you get a ton of control final cut is third and i couldn't get avid to work as advertised i don't know if i was supposed to apply an effect or something but the color workspace just didn't work for me probably did something wrong as i said i'm not a color expert so take that for what it is i might not be an expert in color but i do know about audio and audio will just always work better in tracks it's just so much easier to apply plugins to an entire track instead of to individual clips and this is where final cut fails even when you sort your audio by lanes you can't apply effects to that entire lane which come on apple avid actually has a leg up in this one since it uses the same default audio plugins as pro tools because it's made by the same company one odd thing though is that you have to specify when a clip is stereo by default it just imports the stereo track as two mono tracks and then you just lose all the panning you can fix this as just a bit of extra clicking and i don't know why it happens now i didn't really like fairlight in davinci all that much it doesn't make sense to me while you would have a window for audio and then not be able to edit any of the audio when i'm in the zone for audio and i think of a sound effect i want to be able to just drag that sound effect straight in without having to go back to the edit tab put in the clip then go back to fairlight and then mix that clip similarly to the stereo woes and avid davinci seems to hate mono clips when i put a piece of mono audio on the timeline it only plays through the left channel and i have to go to fairlight create a new mono channel move it out of the stereo channel and i just don't understand why this happens premiere is actually pretty powerful when it comes to audio its audio plugins though could use a little bit of work especially its eq plugins i only really used compression from all of the default plugins as i like to use fab filter for eq and izotope rx-7 and accusonus era4 for noise reduction but the compressors in each program were pretty good now for arguably the most important part of the process and i feel like the most overlooked part of the process exporting you're probably thinking i'm gonna do some kind of speed test but no i'm not there's enough people who do that i'm talking about this because avid wouldn't let me export my video that's a good youtube title right there isn't it anyways it would get to the part where i resized mark when he's explaining the script and it would just crash over and over and over and over and this was the night before upload it was hell i ended up removing all the effects from every clip and then exported it twice with the different layers and then just put everything back together in premiere i know technically i didn't finish that video on avid and i don't even care it just refused it's probably because i didn't transcode my footage i know i know i'm sorry the other programs worked really well no issues i didn't really notice any sort of speed improvement in final cut i'm sure it was like a minute or two faster i guess in the long run a minute here and a minute there it just adds up to two minutes and then eventually an hour i couldn't be bothered okay so now how much do these programs cost nothing beats free so obviously da vinci wins here hands down and even the studio license is only 299 dollars and then after that you get free updates forever that's cool same with final cut premiere and avid are subscription based avid costs 24 dollars per month excluding that and if you just get premiere it's also around 24 but this is where cc really shines for sixty dollars a month you get access to all of their programs all of them all there's a lot there's like a lot of programs there and you even get access to portfolio which lets you design your own website for free now avid does offer a one-time perpetual license in addition to your monthly subscription so if you do decide to cancel that monthly payment you get to keep the program minus any future updates and when it comes to trials final cut pro offers 90 days of free use which is that's a lot that's also the one that i used avid has a 30-day free trial which is also what i used we already had a studio license for da vinci so i just use the studio license and then premiere also has a 30-day trial but i already own it so okay so who won well no one really won but i think i would lost but again avid is not made for youtube it has a ton of functionality outside of what i used it for plus i heard it's really stable when you're editing really long episodes or forms or whatever but please just don't use avid if you're only going to be using it for youtube it's not made for youtube if you want to be an editor in hollywood then learn absolutely everything that you can about avid it's the industry standard over there south africa learn premiere it's what we use for tv and film and youtube and just everything so am i switching no i'm staying with premiere but if premiere suddenly stopped working or disappeared off the face of the earth which one do you think i should use let me know in the comments the most important thing is that you don't quit editing just because you don't understand the program just use something else who cares just don't quit please just never quit so that's it for a very brief overview of all these programs if you would like to see me take an in-depth look at each program individually let me know down in the comments maybe i'll take a look at it also if you like this video give it a thumbs up and while you're down there just next to the like button there's a red button it's called subscribe and then when you're done there just click on the bell and then you'll be notified every time we upload a new video which is every tuesday and every friday with a new short film on the first friday of every month so until next time stay inside make your movie [Music] you

Channel: Looped Pictures

Views: 25,777

Keywords: South Africa, Short Film, short, film, movie, short movies, johannesburg, independent, 6 shorts in 6 weeks, looped pictures, makeyourmovie, make your movie, premiere pro, media composer, Davinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro X, Apple, AVID, ADOBE, Blackmagic Design, editing, software, program, timeline, on the timeline, video editing, movie making, editing apps, video editing apps, video editing sofware, battle royale, what should I edit with, comparison, compare, test, editor, edit

Id: F8LcM0lqJvs

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NLE_Ninja85]

Cool video. I hope you are ready for the diehard FCPX ppl coming at you for using it "wrong". And I use Premiere and FCPX regularly so I know their strengths and weaknesses after so many years.

[u/ThatAdly]

I have seen so many Premiere VS X NLE videos now. But this was actually really entertaining! Youve earned a new sub, nice job

[u/ItsOnlyTony]

RIP Vegas

But really, why wasn't Vegas compared as well? Just curious

[u/[deleted]]

This guy seems nice

[u/SavageJackalope]

Grapics

[u/MarcosaurusRex]

Still learning how to video edit myself for youtube! This was insightful on which program to try next.

[u/Jezzack]

I very liked your editing😊