- Altogether, I pay just
shy of $10000 a year for Adobe's software. A fact of which I am painfully reminded every time my editors complain that Adobe still doesn't have a decent HDR workflow and that they straight up crash
whenever they feel like it. Now, that wasn't always the case. Once upon a time, when
you paid for software, you owned a perpetual license to use it, before the dark times. Before software-as-a-service. But there is a light in
this dark, dark world. Not every company has
embraced the trend of charging for their software by the month, so I challenged my team to find out, by editing the production
you're watching right now, if we can make videos without touching a single pay-forever app. So that means no Adobe and
what that would be like. So have we freed ourselves then
from the clutches of Adobe? Well, it's complicated. You know what's not complicated though? Whether you should check out our sponsor. Origin PC's new EVO16-S,
ready-to-ship streamer bundle ships within one to two business days and comes with multiple streaming accessories and a 250 gig Samsung
960 EVO M.2 boot drive for quick load times. Learn more at the link below. (upbeat music) Let's begin with ingesting
our camera footage. While Adobe does have Prelude for this, I don't think many people actually use it. It's clunky and it doesn't
offer many advantages over just dragging your
clips straight into Premiere. Kyno, on the other hand, is lightweight, supports a wide array of
codecs and file types, and is excellent at
managing batch processes like transcoding or file renaming. Once you've logged and
organized your footage, a right click action can
bring it straight into the NLE of your choice. - AKA your video editing program. Unlike Prelude, Kyno isn't project-based, it's essentially like
a special file browser, custom-tailored towards editors and the drill-down function is awesome. It lets you see all the
video, audio or image files in that drive or folder, no matter which sub-folder they're in, which is especially
useful when you're dealing with memory cards from
different cameras or recorders which might have different
folder structures. - And it's way better than using Finder. I get the features of
both but it's as simple as just opening up file explorer. It's friggin' sweet. - And the difference between
their billing approach and Adobe's is that if you
decide you don't need updates, you can keep using that software after the support period ends. - This is looking great so far. Then again, we were already using Kyno so that wasn't much of a stretch. Next up is our nonlinear editor or NLE. We actually had a couple of options here, with the main ones being
Vegas Pro, Avid Media Composer and Da Vinci Resolve. Let's start with Vegas because
it has a customizable UI, similar to Premiere Pro, even if it does feel a
little bit old school. The audio-editing tools
in Vegas Pro are actually pretty similar to Premiere, but the lack of Audition's
dynamic linking is a clear downgrade. That means that you have
to send audio from Vegas over to a dedicated audio editor, then pull it back in. Then there's the limited functionality when it comes to working
with multiple sequences within a single project because, well, you can't do that. Now Vegas recently added
the ability to work with nested sequences but
it's a janky solution, involving having a separate
project in your timeline. So suffice to say, despite
my personal liking for it, we're gonna be pulling
the lever on this one. That's a Vegas joke. As for Avid, well honestly,
it's kind of part of the same category we're
trying to get away from. Avid, Adobe, Pro Tools, these are the industry giants
that have robust feature sets but also have equally robust pricing. Avid is also much better suited to a more traditional, film-style workflow, where you might have multiple editors, editing assistants, colorists
and VFX artists working on the same project. We, and most other
YouTube content creators, usually have one or two editors, at most, handling all aspects of a production, which is why the way that
Adobe's apps all dynamically link to each other, without
having to export anything is almost as awesome this
shirt from lttstore.com. Then, there's Da Vinci Resolve. It's cheap, there's even
a free version of it, and it's got great performance,
along with what are arguably the best color grading
controls in any of the programs we've mentioned, including Premiere. It also has built-in audio
editing with Fairlight and built-in effects tools with Fusion. You can have multiple
sequences and nested sequences in one project, making it, well, make a bit more sense
for people who are used to Premiere. Resolve seems to be our best option, so that's what we're gonna
be using to edit the video you're currently enjoying. - (murmurs) a few slick
takes on some standard things like with trimming clips or slip edits. The way it provides visual
feedback makes it a lot easier to do than with Premiere. Color grading is great
because you have a ton of control over everything. And because Resolve is so GPU-accelerated, playback performance is fantastic. Even with color grades or some effects, it's all just pretty smooth. It's not perfect though
since there is this issue where you run out of
GPU memory and you have to restart Resolve. From what I can tell, the only real solution is
to throw more GPUs at it. Learning how to use Resolve
is kind of a steep curve because of it's unusual layout which I honestly find a bit annoying 'cause you can't really customize
it besides resizing panels of it. You can turn them on or off
but you can't undock them and move them around, so really, you're stuck
with the basic layout. You can use more than
one monitor but, again, you can't choose what goes where and you have to disable full screen mode before you can even minimize
or resize the main window. - Why? Just why? At least the price is right though. Anyway, as we said, Resolve's audio editing
module is called Fairlight and it's great for
cutting and mixing audio. But compared to Adobe Audition, or other digital audio
workstations like Pro Tools, Logic and Qbase, it's fairly light on the features. Get it? - We don't do that much audio processing besides some level adjustments. And if we do, Fairlight does support many of the same plugins as Audition. Plus, we're used to Audition
being able to dynamically link with Premiere Pro, so the fact that Fairlight is
essentially part of Resolve is a huge plus. - And how much does
this one cost per month? Really? Wow. The situation is similar
from Ocean Graphics. Vegas Effects would be
a decent option here, if we had gone with Vegas Pro for our NLE, because they actually do have
some linking functionality, similar to Adobe's apps. But we didn't because while
Vegas Effects has some of the same functionality
as Adobe After Effects, and it is comparatively easy to use, it is just nowhere near as capable. Fusion, on the other hand,
is an interesting candidate, particularly for compositing. - But while Fusion's
node-based system makes it an excellent choice for
compositing and special effects, once you get the hang of
the interface that is, motion graphics is kind of
overcomplicated compared to doing it in After Effects. You can use Fusion as a tab within Resolve but if you need some more flexibility, you can also use the
standalone Fusion Studio App, which can be activated
with the same license you bought for resolve. - You know, this is going great so far. I am gonna save so much money. Finally, there's image
editors and, as it turns out, there's a reason that Photoshop
has become the Kleenex of photoshopping stuff. I mean there's Vegas Image,
which comes with Vegas Effects in a package but it's... I don't know, it's less
of a Photoshop alternative and more like a unique and
confusing blend of After Effects and Lightroom. So we'll be going with a
program called Affinity Photo. It doesn't have the latest
Photoshop bells and whistles, and it does do non-destructive
raw image editing for some reason, but for 95% of the stuff people
normally do with Photoshop, it's actually pretty dang good. - As long as you don't need to collaborate with Photoshop users. And while you can export to PSD, there are conversion issues. Though they say that the next
major version will fix these. And the way that layers,
masks and effects work takes a bit of getting used to, although the intuitiveness
of the UI certainly helps. For illustrator-type tasks, there's also Affinity Designer and the story here is much the same. It can open illustrator
files but can't save them, and it's tracing and
pathfinder features are weaker. But overall, it'll get the job done. - So that's it, we did it! We edited a video, start to finish, without Adobe. But are we gonna keep this
liberation train going and swear off them for good? No, we're actually going to
crawl straight back to them and here's why. First up, the size of their
app library is unparalleled, whether you're creating
videos with effects, audio, image, documents, webpages, there's an app for that. And in today's age, where
many creators are one-man, or woman, bands instead of
having a dit for ingesting, as assistant editor for logging, an editor for cutting, a
designer, an animator for graphics and so on and so on and so on, a single ecosystem is very attractive, even if its bugs occasionally
make the biblical plague of locusts look like
not that big of a deal. Second up is intercompatibility. For better or for worse, pretty
much every else uses Adobe and nobody likes to be that guy who sends the weird file formats
that nobody else can open. The thing is you don't get to
pick who you're doing business with and not everybody out there in the great wider world has the tech savvy or the willingness to deal with
your snowflake file format. And guys, it's a creative industry, collaboration is a big part of it. Finally, I realize it's been mentioned a couple times already, but the way that Adobe's
apps dynamically link with each other drastically
cuts down on the time that you would otherwise
spend saving, exporting, editing and then importing
files between your apps. So I asked our team how
close they think we could get to creative suite levels of efficiency and the highest number
that I got back was, "As much as 90%." On the face of it, that
sounds pretty good. That's an A. But let's do some napkin math here. The average video editor
in the United States makes about $29 an hour. We've got seven of those. So assuming that we
were paying those rates, our editing staff would cost
us about $420000 a year. Nice. So then if we were to slash
their productivity by 10% by taking away their preferred software as a cost-saving measure,
we would need to either cut our 17 video per week production schedule, costing the company revenue, or we would need to hire
to cover that difference, costing the company over $40000 a year. Plus, the extra space
we'd need in the building, extra editing workstation, I think you see where I'm going with this. I mean, we're not saying
that using Vegas or Resolve or even some of the awesome,
free editing tools out there, like HitFilm Express,
aren't gonna work for you. We're just saying that even
if does feel a little bit like Stockholm Syndrome, Adobe continues to be our best option. For now. Just like our best option for our sponsor for this video is Corsair. The dark core RGB gaming
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link in the video description. Thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video,
you might enjoy one of our other behind-the-scenes workflow videos where we talked about Parsec, the software that we've
been using to edit videos on our workstations at
the office from home, so that we can isolate
and all that good stuff.
