Why i've FULLY switched to Davinci Resolve (and why you should too)

so for as long as i can remember video editing was always something that fascinated me the art of manipulating visuals in a way that can convey emotion or evoke awe and wonder in the mind of the viewer it made me feel as though i had this superpower and for the longest time i knew that this was what i wanted to do for the foreseeable future until i started to get sick of it not necessarily the act of video editing itself but the countless issues and setbacks that i would experience on a regular basis with the programs that i was using straight up premiere pro is the reason i lost my spark and excitement in video editing the program just simply was not able to keep up with how i wanted to create instead of entering into a creative flow i would regularly end up being interrupted by issues that i would need to troubleshoot that would take up my time and cause unnecessary stress and i want my creative process to be fun not stressful and i know it's not just me pretty much every other video editor i know that use the program would experience the same problems [Music] and that's the absolute worst thing when it comes to making art and for most of my career i just thought that this was the reality of video editing and i would just have to deal with it but then i learned about davinci resolve and let's just say i was blind but now i see this program has drastically improved my overall quality of life literally since so much of my life revolves around video editing i no longer carry around this resentful energy towards my craft and i feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders now just to clarify i still use adobe after effects and i think it's an incredible program but i'm 100 done with premiere pro in my opinion i feel like that program just wasn't able to keep up and in my experience i feel like even final cut is so much better from a performance and reliability standpoint that i would rather use that than continue using premiere now this wasn't the easiest switch for me to make not only did i teach the program in my online school cold or creative but i was also an adobe ambassador and part of their online advertising campaigns so i had a lot of ties to the program but it looks like the time has officially come where i'm saying goodbye to the program that i've been using for almost 15 years of my life and i honestly couldn't be happier about it now full disclosure i am not sponsored by blackmagic and i've never actually worked with them yet i'm just genuinely excited to promote this software because of how much it's benefited my life as a creator so much so that i've devoted half a year of my life to studying the program and creating an in-depth course on colder creative with over 10 modules and 90 video lessons i go in depth into every section of the program and teach my own workflow that i use to edit everything from passion projects to big budget jobs and everything in between i teach everything from assembling your first draft to compositing an advanced transition infusion to node-based color grading my goal was to make this the best place on the internet to get an overall understanding of the entire program and i'm confident that it is exactly that and everything is taught from the ground up so it doesn't matter what level you're at in your video editing career this course is perfect for anyone at any level and that's one thing i hear a lot of many editors think that davinci is too sophisticated or complicated for them but the reality is that although it offers a bunch of advanced features that doesn't mean you need to use all of them it's a program you can grow into you can start off as a beginner but as you work your way towards being a professional there are more sophisticated tools you can pick up and add into your workflow as you grow in my personal opinion i think davinci resolve is the best option out there for any kind of editor whether you're putting together a simple vlog or a complex feature film but enough of that in this video i want to share my experience switching over to davinci resolve and the main reasons why i think it's leading the way in the world of video editing so the first thing we need to talk about is the price so davinci resolve is actually the cheapest option out there and they even offer a free version that doesn't include certain features but is still very capable but the paid studio version of davinci resolve is only a one-time payment of 299 dollars which is the same price as final cut except if you're a professional editor using final cut you'll also need to buy apple's compressor and that will set you back another 50 us dollars so even da vinci's paid version of resolve is cheaper than final cut you also have the option of getting davinci resolve studio for free when you buy one of davinci's cameras which is such a cool thing that blackmagic does mad respect now adobe only offers a subscription plan so depending on whether you only subscribe to one software or all of them you'll be well over that 299 dollar mark in a short period of time and if you plan on using adobe for the next decade then it'll set you back quite a bit this is still crazy to me because the best software on the market literally the software that most feature films these days use is now the cheapest option out there it almost doesn't make sense to me now the second thing i want to talk about is speed and reliability so davinci is fast like really fast like i can throw my 4k 120 fps footage into my project and be able to instantly scrub through my timeline without making proxies and with no dropped frames something i have to deal with all the time in premiere pro now if you've ever used final cut then you know of this speed increase and i would say it's pretty much the same in davinci the overall speed increase in davinci is just one of those things that once you've experienced there's no going back and still to this day i am yet to have a serious problem arise with resolve with premier it was common to have several serious issues with any major project but now with davinci that's a thing of the past and with live save and backups enabled i really don't have to worry about losing progress ever honestly i don't even click save anymore i can just close the program and fully trust that i'm not going to lose any of my progress so just for reliability reasons alone it makes complete sense to make the switch it'll make the editing experience less stressful and more fun which in turn makes your work even better so the next thing i want to talk about is the davinci resolve interface davinci has rethought the entire editing process from the ground up and they've absolutely nailed it they've created an environment that makes me love spending long days immersed in the program now davinci has separated the program into seven sections so that we can focus on one task at a time and not just cram everything into one space so from left to right we have the media tab which allows us to import and organize all of our media then the next tab over is the cut tab which is where i focus on making my select and solely just cutting this tab is basically a really simplified version of the edit tab but it's designed in a very smart way that allows you to avoid having to constantly zoom in and out of your timeline and just makes the process of cutting select a lot easier and more fun and you don't have to use the cut tab if you don't want to if you want to stick to the traditional way of cutting your footage you can do that over in the next tab which is the edit tab this is where we assemble the main edit and this is the part of the program most similar to final cut and premiere pro this is also where i do any kind of speed ramping cropping and keyframing speaking of keyframing you know how you used to have to manually keyframe that slow zoom in and zoom out in all of your videos in premiere well davinci has something called dynamic zoom which allows you to add zooming and panning to your clips incredibly fast just set the green square to where you want the clip to start and the red box to where you want it to end and voila you're done manually keyframing your clips is a thing of the past next we have fusion which is a built-in compositing software that you can use to do more advanced effects and transitions i'll be talking more about fusion in a bit from there we go into the color tab which is the dedicated color grading page and this is what davinci resolve is typically best known for and then we have fairlight which is a digital audio workstation designed specifically for any kind of audio work now you can also do all of your audio work back in the edit tab but fairlight is a dedicated space for this kind of stuff and i personally love to work in here way more because there's just so much more functionality and tools that make the sound design process way more enjoyable and finally we have the deliver page where we focus on exporting our videos it even has a built-in render queue so you can load up all the renders you want to export at once and just render them all back to back this is the feature that final cut is missing and requires you to buy compressor in order to do the same thing and premiere also requires another program to do this called media encoder so that's pretty awesome to have this built right into davinci it feels so right to just have everything i need all in one program and to no longer have to switch between different softwares to bring my ideas to life now that i've experienced the layout of da vinci whenever i go back to premiere or final cut i feel cramped and restricted those programs just feel very outdated to me now and i can confidently say that i'm never ever going to color grade another video in lumetri or final cut it makes me feel like i'm being asked to build a spaceship but in a little garage i'd much rather work in a bigger warehouse dedicated for this type of stuff and that's exactly what davinci resolve is for me it honestly makes me question how i spent so much time in those other programs in the past davinci also operates on a database structure which is so incredibly necessary for optimizing your projects in a way that best suits you and your workflow now a database is basically just an enclosing folder that holds your project files that's it most people just work with one database on their computer and create all of their project files within that one database one of the main features that utilize this database structure is power bins the power bins window basically allows you to create a library of assets that will update within every other project file within your database this is huge for any type of editor we all have those assets we use for every single project whether it's a subscribe graphics sound effects or overlays having to re-import those into your project every single time you make a new project file is such a waste of time but now with power bins every time you update that power bin folder with a new piece of media it auto updates for every other project within that database and you'll also have access to it in every new project you create so it doesn't matter if you're a youtuber or you're creating netflix documentaries if you're not using power bins in your workflow you're seriously missing out and that's just one of the many benefits of using the database structure davinci resolve can also automatically analyze and split up an edited video into individual clips using the scene cut detection feature you could basically import an entire feature film and have da vinci cut up the entire thing like really fast this is a huge deal and is something that saved me a lot of time another amazing feature is the ability to export your timelines as individual clips this is also something i do all the time especially when i need to send individual files to a client or another editor a simple but very important feature for my workflow it's little things like this that makes me really appreciate the amount of thought that blackmagic put into the way that we edit videos now as editors the first thing we think about when switching softwares is our shortcuts having to learn the new shortcuts for a new program can make you feel like you're starting from scratch but thankfully davinci allows you to switch to the default shortcut layout of other programs like final cut or premiere from the keyboard customization menu and if you're wanting to customize your own shortcuts davinci makes this really easy and that's something i personally do all the time my students in colder creative get access to the colder creative keyboard shortcut layout which was thought out from the ground up to make the editing process so much more efficient limiting the amount of time spent searching through the menus of the program and wasting time with repetitive actions my course also provides a pdf cheat sheet so you'll never forget any of these shortcuts now of course we need to talk about color grading this is what da vinci is best known for in the industry and i can completely understand why they've rethought the coloring process from the ground up and thank god they did before i learned da vinci i would not consider myself a good colorist i knew what changes i wanted to make to my image but i wasn't confident in executing my ideas looking back i realized that was simply because the tools in premiere and final cut were just very limiting and clunky to work with da vinci implemented the node workflow into its color tab in order to make the coloring process much faster and way more fun and i know the node workflow sounds intimidating when you haven't worked with nodes before but the reality is that it's not you can learn the foundations of how nodes work in about an hour and after a day of playing around with them you'll be flowing and that's a small initial investment of time that will save you so much more time in the long run and make the coloring process so much more fun so if this is your career why would you not do that and the thing about nodes is that you don't need to make this big elaborate node tree like you see all the professionals doing online you can keep things simple and for things like basic edits you probably won't need to use more than two or three nodes like now i genuinely love the coloring process and i feel so much more capable and confident in making my coloring ideas come to life the color page offers so many powerful tools that make me feel so much more confident in grading any kind of footage even if it's not shot in raw for example i recently shot this job completely on a phone and the footage was 8-bit so it didn't have much color information and normally that makes it harder to execute more stylized grades because your footage starts to fall apart at a certain point but with davinci's powerful color grading tools i was able to do things that i just wouldn't have been able to do before or it just wasn't realistic because it would have taken way too long in a layer based software like premiere or final cut i wouldn't have even attempted much of these changes in other softwares but in davinci i'm able to do things like this very easily but also very quickly so it just makes me feel unstoppable and i find myself thinking outside of the box more often because i could do a lot of the things that were just not possible before so here's a couple of features that i just love within the color tab the first one is the power windows and the tracker these features combined allow me to make specific adjustments to any part of my image and the tracker is ridiculously fast it's like magic we also have some really good noise reduction in the color tab it's probably the best noise reduction i've ever used next is the qualifier which allows me to select very specific hue saturation and luminance ranges in my image that i want to make adjustments to also basically like magic and a tool i use very regularly we also have magic masks which again is like magic this feature allows us to instantly mask out our subject in our video so we can isolate and make changes to just those specific subjects or features and we also have a ton more features like raw editing controls gallery stills versions object removal and so much more all features that have made the coloring process so much more enjoyable for me and don't worry i teach how to use all of these tools and features in my da vinci course and that brings me to fusion fusion is kind of like after effects if you're coming from the world of adobe except it's built into davinci resolve so you don't need to leave the program to use it which just makes so much sense in davinci if i have an idea for a transition or a more complex effect i literally just select the clip or clips i want to use in the edit tab and open up the fusion tab and i can instantly start executing my ideas from there fusion is an extremely powerful compositing software that allows you to do more complex compositing work the main difference between fusion and after effects is that fusion is node based so the workflow is completely different but personally i love the node workflow because it allows me to see all the elements of my composition at a glance nothing is hidden in layers like it would be in after effects i can just see everything in one space which has been really good for my workflow now i do know that learning the node-based compositing software does have a steeper learning curve because there's more rules you need to learn first before you can start to flow in the software but personally i do think it's worth it to invest the time into learning because it'll just level you up to a whole new level as an editor just like after effects there's an endless amount of possibilities within fusion and i don't know all of the features of both of these programs but i continue to learn and grow as i work in them more and more so next up we have fairlight fairlight is a daw built right into davinci that allows you to focus on strictly just the sound design element of your videos it has a host of features that make it stand out to me the first one being the sound library which makes sound designing a million times more fun because you no longer have to import your individual sounds every time you can just connect a library and have the program catalog all of those sounds from that folder so you can quickly access all of your sound effects right from within the program the sound library is another feature within resolve that utilizes the database structure to allow you to navigate to different sound libraries from different databases which is also freaking awesome we also have the index which allows us to quickly reorganize all of our tracks by simply just dragging and dropping them in this window and we also have the option to hide certain tracks without muting them this is game changing for sound design because it allows us to hide the tracks that no longer need work and to just focus on the tracks that we are currently working on it's simple but just makes so much sense now the fairlight list goes on and i can't cover all these features in this video but automation vsts and buses are also some incredibly powerful features that enable me to be a much more professional sound designer and just make the overall process a lot more fun now that brings me to my final point the company itself blackmagic blackmagic is the company that made davinci resolve what it is today and they're a major reason why i've been able to confidently make the switch to this new software i see how forward thinking the company is when it comes to making constant improvements to their software i'm a big believer in blackmagic and their willingness to listen to their users i'm constantly seeing improvements with every update they push out which was very reassuring for me when making the switch now there's so many reasons as to why i believe this program is number one but if i was to go through all of them this video would probably be a couple hours in length and i also wanted to take some time to talk about some of the things that i don't like about the program the first thing that i don't like about davinci resolve is that more people don't use it so it makes collaborating a bit more complicated if you want to work with people that use premier or final cut although davinci does make the process as simple as possible allowing you to export xmls of your timeline to use on other softwares it's never the most fun process moving projects from one software to another especially if they're more elaborate but more and more editors are making the switch to davinci so this will be less of an issue over time also one thing i do miss from premiere pro is the ability to expand any panel within my workspace to fill the entire frame although i do think that the layout of davinci is as good as it can get i do sometimes wish that i can expand my timeline to fill the screen so blackmagic if you're watching this please consider adding this option so i actually only had one other problem with the program and it looks like davinci has already resolved this problem in the newest update which is version 18. so that's it and that's pretty much it i've thought about this for a while and i can't really think of any other issues that i have with this program whereas if you were to ask me what issues i have with premiere or final cut those lists would be pretty long so if you're interested in upgrading your skills as an editor i think there's no better time than right now to make the switch to davinci resolve and i think there's no better way to make the switch than to have me teach you everything i know from start to finish i made this davinci course because i saw that there were not enough resources for editors to easily make the switch online personally i couldn't find certain answers to my questions anywhere on the internet so the only place i could go was the davinci resolve manual itself and i know that most people don't like to learn this way that's why i created this course to help anyone at any level get an in-depth understanding of the program in this course you'll learn my exact workflow that i use to edit six-figure plus jobs and all the tips and insights i've gathered throughout the process of learning this program that will save you all the hassle of having to scour the internet for answers everything you need all in one place i also share my custom keyboard shortcut layout that i've developed over my lifespan as an editor that allows me to edit ridiculously fast and efficiently this course consists of over 90 video lessons totaling over 18 hours of content it really is the one stop shop for everything you need to thoroughly learn this program and of course you'll also get access to all future davinci lessons as well you can learn more by visiting coldercreative.com or by clicking the link in the description but that's it for this video i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day i'll see you guys soon

Channel: kold

Views: 1,133,005

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Id: LhONgaaLjHk

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022