After 20 years of video editing using most of
the major editors, in 2024, this is weird to say. In 2024, I'm switching to the free options. Now,
Premiere Pro has been great for the past 10 years, both with my YouTube content, course content, but
also professional video projects for clients. But recently, my eyes were opened to the alternatives
and now that I've seen them, I can't unsee them. You see, most video editors have very, very
similar functions overall: import your footage, cut it up, add b-roll, add sound and music,
add text and effects, do your final edits, do a bit of polish, and export. Some do it better
with advanced features and others are on the basic side. Some take a really long time to get a
project edited and some are quick. Some cost you a lot of money over time and some don't. And
while Premiere does have the advanced features, it doesn't have the fast workflow, nor the
cost-effectiveness or value for money in 2024. Enter Da Vinci Resolve and CapCut, two editors
that between them tick all three boxes. Both Da Vinci and CapCut cover the beginner stuff of
basic editing and exporting all the way through to advanced stuff like color correction, visual
effects, sound editing, and so much more. Better yet, they're fully functional using the free
versions of the software. While they do both have paid options, you don't need to upgrade unless you
want a few extra bells and whistles. And even if you did, it would be nowhere near the long-term
cost of Premiere. But, Mr. Ben, if you're editing videos professionally, a video editor is an easy
expense to justify. Yeah, that might be true, but why would you invest money when you don't have to?
There are so many subscriptions in 2024, so many paid services that can help you both creatively
and business-wise that paying for something that you can get for free elsewhere doesn't make a
lot of sense, especially when the alternatives have the same functions but also more. Da Vinci
and CapCut have features that go far beyond what Premiere Pro can do in a lot of ways, so I see
the cost argument as valid. Yes, you should invest in good tools, but at the same time, I'd rather
be investing that few hundred a year into other aspects that will help grow my creative business.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but surely if these programs are free, they can't be good. Yes, they're
good. When I first started using Da Vinci and CapCut from Premiere, the transition was actually
super easy, and I found that they had all of the features that I was using with Premiere Pro, aside
from maybe one or two really small ones. But you can do some really advanced edits with them. They
have fantastic features like automatic captions, drag and drop graphics templates, and a much
more modern and intuitive interface, which makes the overall editing workflow much faster.
The way I differentiate them is that CapCut is more beginner-friendly. Not to say it's a beginner
software because I use CapCut to edit this video, and I consider myself a video professional, but
it's beginner-friendly in the regard that even someone who hasn't edited a video before
could use it and not feel overwhelmed. I can see they really put a lot of thought into
the user interface to make it extremely easy for both beginners and professionals alike to
use it, whereas Da Vinci Resolve is for more advanced projects where you need a lot of finer
controls over your edit, like sound editing, you want to manually tweak the graphics yourself,
and of course, the color correction is the best software in the world for color correction. So, if
I was working for clients, I would totally use Da Vinci Resolve, and even for YouTube videos,
I think it's a great option. But that said, CapCut is just as good in many ways. While it
doesn't have the super advanced stuff, it has all the basics in a super intuitive interface that
you can pick up in literally 10 minutes. And then, once you get going, you can take advantage of its
massive template library, which is really such a fantastic feature because it's got these super
modern templates for text effects, transitions, sound effects, graphic overlays. It even has its
own royalty-free music library built into the app. And these templates aren't just generic simple
templates. Some of them are advanced, dare I say, After Effects level. Like, these aren't just the
most basic text animations. These are fully modern animated graphics that look like they were made
for the year we're in, as opposed to Premiere Pro that's had the exact same text effects for the
last 10 years. Seriously, they look like they were made for videos from the '90s where a barn door
wipe was the most fancy effect ever, and there isn't much more than that built into the program
unless you go and source other effects from paid websites. But in terms of the inbuilt stuff, it's
barely got anything. And this is what slowed me down with my edits. Is I had to bring in external
graphics and they really froze up Premiere when I was working on super long projects, whereas
Da Vinci and CapCut have way more inbuilt templates that won't crash your computer as fast,
at least that's been my experience so far. Plus, with CapCut, the library is huge and they update
them all the time. And what I love is you can just drag and drop them onto the timeline. You don't
have to manually keyframe animations. You just drag and drop the effect onto your text and it
does it instantly. And even though I consider myself an advanced editor, I don't want to be
wasting unnecessary time animating text and doing all that menial stuff that is often associated
with motion graphics. Something else great about CapCut is you can use it with multiple devices.
Not only is it a desktop editor, but you can edit on your phone, tablet, and it's even accessible
in an internet browser that is getting with the times, unlike Premiere that is only a desktop app.
It's so much better having the flexibility to edit wherever you want on whichever device you want.
CapCut even does pretty advanced stuff like the annoying little man here. This was just one click
of a button inside the desktop software to remove the background. And then I added a filter, which
is called Big Mouth filter to my face. Again, drag and drop. Then I changed his voice
with an automatic audio filter. Yeah, so, but After Effects is still better. Maybe it is,
but I would say if you're an After Effects user, just try Da Vinci Resolve because the Fusion tab
is Blackmagic's equivalent to After Effects and it can do some super advanced stuff. I found
since I've transitioned to Da Vinci Resolve, while I have had very specific things that I used
to do in Premiere, I found new workflows in Da Vinci that did the exact same thing. Of course,
it's a different process to achieve that result, but from doing a Google search or looking on
ChatGPT, sometimes I ask it like what's the equivalent of that feature in Da Vinci Resolve
and it will tell me. And there's been very few features that I've missed from Premiere that isn't
a feature of Da Vinci Resolve. So, I just say if you're an After Effects user, give Da Vinci
a go. It's free. See if it's got that feature you like. If it doesn't, by all means, keep After
Effects. But just saying, could be worth it. So, I guess I'm making this video to encourage
you to re-evaluate. I think as creatives, we tend to stick with what we know, and we stick
with it for too long. In today's day and age, everything is evolving much faster, technology
is getting better, there's way more competition, more different options of creative tools you can
use, and it's best for you to have the best tool for the job. And I just find for me right now, I
was holding on to Premiere as long as I possibly could. I knew it probably wasn't the best, but now
that I found these two, it's totally transformed my content creation and means I can post a lot
more content because it's so much easier to edit and I'm not spending unnecessary time doing
menial stuff in the editing room when I could be focusing on my video ideas and going through more
ideas faster. New platforms really are very easy to learn, especially CapCut. Da Vinci is a bit
more advanced, but it won't take you that long if you're transitioning from Premiere. And I'd
also add that as a skilled editor, you can learn any tool because you know what the process is,
you know what the end result you want is. So, the tool you use isn't as important, which is why if
you can make your video editing workflow work in a simpler program that costs less, that has more
templates, more workflow shortcuts, don't you owe it to yourself to give it a go? Time is money. How
much of your time are you going to waste over the next few years taking twice as long as you need to
be? I can definitely say that I'm guilty of this. That said, I'm sure Premiere Pro does still have
some use cases that it's better than Da Vinci and CapCut at. There's not many one tool that I can
think of that I liked in Premiere that I don't have now, or at least I don't think is the remix
tool where you could drag any music track out to fit any length of time. But even that isn't in
my top 20 tools I need in a video editor. So, I'm willing to forego it for being able to edit twice
as fast in CapCut and Da Vinci. Unfortunately, I hate to say it, but Adobe just hasn't innovated
enough in the past 10 years. The editor looks more or less the same as it did 10 years ago, and
right now, it doesn't really feel like a video editor from the year it's in. I hope they change
this. Please do, Adobe. But for now, I'll be using Da Vinci and CapCut. In the meantime, I'll still
use Photoshop though, because I do think that's still industry-leading. I love the generative fill
feature and the generative expand. But that said, again, if you use Photoshop, it's worth looking
at the alternatives because there's also Affinity Photo and many, many others. Thanks for watching
my video. Let me know your thoughts below. Will you switch to Da Vinci Resolve or CapCut, or
are you going to stick with Premiere Pro? Now, if you're ready to make the switch and you want
to learn Da Vinci Resolve as quickly as possible, in this video here, I teach the entire
start to finish workflow in just 12 minutes.
