Speaker 1: Everyone is ditching Premiere Pro. Peter McKinnon, goodbye Adobe. Sam Calder, see you later loser Adobe. So should you also be switching to DaVinci 2? Is Final Cut the secret underrated software that's going to level up your workflow? Or will Premiere Pro return once again to make its comeback as the king of the video editors? Well for those who want the quick and dirty answer to this question of which is the best video editing software, I'd recommend DaVinci Resolve. Principally because as well as being completely free, it's also incredibly powerful and in-depth for those who want to start with really simple edits to over time upgrade their skill sets to make their videos just look so professional. The app that I'd recommend if you're a complete beginner though is a little different because that would be Final Cut Pro. Yes there is a one-time price tag of $300 which is going to seem pretty intimidating if you're just a newbie editor and you just want to have a little go at messing around with cutting clips. But of the other two most popular apps, DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro, Final Cut is easily the most user-friendly of the bunch. With its magnetic timeline and lack of any specific tracks, it just makes it a lot less intimidating for any newbie to just jump in and start moving clips around and cutting and making a basic edit. Though many pros including my own editor Zach love Final Cut Pro above all of the others and then they use the more advanced features within DaVinci Resolve like the magic mask to then integrate that into their own Final Cut workflow to get the best of both worlds. So where does all of this leave Premiere Pro? Don't use it. It's expensive with a $21 per month price tag, too unreliable with constant bugs and weird crashes and the whole interface just hasn't aged that well for the modern video editor. Unless you think you're going to be collaborating with other filmmakers in let's say a production company environment where you have no choice but to work with whatever other editors are using then you should just skip it completely. Briefly I did start to use Premiere Pro again a little bit because their auto transcription features are really good but now that DaVinci Resolve have the same feature in their 18.5 beta I pretty much have no reason at all to hop back into Premiere. I have heard less negative comments directed towards Premiere Pro for Windows users versus Mac users so your stability might vary quite a lot. But judging by the amount of filmmakers and YouTubers that are moving from DaVinci to Premiere Pro I can only envision that this software is going to become the staple editing app in the same way that Premiere Pro just dominated the landscape for the past 10 years. Alright so those are my summarized thoughts so now let's get down to the real nitty-gritty of the pros and cons for each software starting with the user interfaces. Premiere and DaVinci are the most similar here with you being able to organize all of your media into different folders just like you'd expect while using Apple's Finder but FCP is quite different because it uses keywords to organize all of your footage and editing element. This can be pretty useful especially when you're pulling selects from your footage because it's just so quick and easy to select sections of your edit and then add them into a specific keyword that you can then just add them all into a timeline rather than putting in all of the raw footage and then cutting it within the timeline itself. But once your project builds up and you start to add more files and more files and more files I actually think this workflow starts to fall flat a little bit especially because you can't go any deeper into a single keyword to really organize all of your footage a bit more intricately. You can somewhat categorize these keywords into folders or even just use Apple's events as folders themselves but it's just really a subpar approach versus the more traditional folder method. DaVinci is the least customizable in terms of windows but I actually prefer it this way because you have specific workspaces that were built for specific tasks throughout your edit versus reshuffling around windows to make some sort of view that suits your needs for whenever you're going to grade or do sound design. It's like having separate rooms in your house for specific purposes versus Premiere Pro and Final Cut giving you the option to constantly swap your furniture around to turn your bathroom into something that kind of resembles a kitchen. It's still a bathroom regardless of the fact that you can wash your dishes and cook your food in there now. DaVinci also has a really cool feature called power bins which are essentially synced bins that live across all of your projects meaning if you have any motion graphics or tracks that you're going to use across every single project you can easily and directly add them in from a power bin right into your timeline. Yes with other apps you can just make a default project that gets duplicated whenever you start getting to work on a new video so that all of your frequent elements are at the ready but remember DaVinci's power bins dynamically update meaning you don't constantly have to resave with new files that you want to add into it and then keep at the ready. DaVinci gets two points here for its interface. Premiere gets a single point for still using a traditional folder structure to organize media and Final Cut gets no points. Now it's time for editing. Final Cut is the most avant-garde of the three with its magnetic timeline doing some really clever stuff like automatically bumping clips around to stop you overwriting anything. Simple magnetic features like this make a massive difference with how it actually feels to use and edit with the app and both Blackmagic and Adobe should be taking notes to try and integrate this same philosophy into their apps or at least give us the option to turn it on. But when it comes to Final Cut Pro's storylines, these being a group of magnetized clips that are connected together in the timeline and the whole roles feature that tries to make up for the fact that there aren't really any clearly defined tracks, I start questioning whether this whole oh we're Apple we do things differently because that's what Steve would want is the right call. Some people love Final Cut Pro because of these reasons and the magnetic timeline and some people just completely hate it because of this. So I guess it's just a matter of personal taste whether you feel faster editing this way or not. My opinion is that DaVinci seems to be going down the right direction with handling this. With their cut page that takes elements from Final Cut Pro's magnetic timeline while also still giving you the traditional editing experience within their edit page. There's still quite a bunch of room for improvement with the cut page but at least they're moving in the right direction to try and implement the best of both worlds. And yeah I have to admit that Final Cut Pro's editing workflow is oftentimes faster especially for simple edits. With its extra skimmer that lets you use your mouse cursor as a second playhead to scan across your edit. This is one of my favorite features from Final Cut Pro letting you make cuts at blazing speeds as you whisk around the timeline. But once you build up your video and audio layers the magnetic timeline starts to lose its magic for me. Becoming more of a nuisance that you battle against versus something that actively makes the process of editing simpler for you. I know there's going to be some hardcore users of Final Cut Pro that edit with 30 layers of tracks and they can just whisk around the timeline at blazing speeds, lightning fast, and they can do that faster than I'm ever going to be able to do with any editing software. But I still think that you either get your head around this FCP workflow and fall in love with it or you soon start to crave the more freeform nature that Premiere and DaVinci's approach offers you. It's a tie here, one point to each software. Because of the subjective nature around the types of workflows specific to each one maybe being better or worse depending on the kind of content that you're going to be making. Let's kick into grading. DaVinci Resolve, 10 points. That was easy, next topic. Kidding but it's no secret that DaVinci Resolve's color grading is just miles above any other app out there. From the beautiful color interface to the magic mask, there's no editor that even comes close. I would have ranked Premiere Pro in second place because I do actually quite like the whole interface of Lumetri. It's no DaVinci but it's still pretty feature-ripped. However, FCP still beats it just because of how goddamn sluggish it gets once you start to add layers and layers of color correction. It's just downright infuriating to move my sliders around only to then see my grade get updated like half a second later versus Resolve and FCP being pretty much instantaneous. Meaning you can actually grade intuitively to how you're moving the slider around and what impact that's actually having on your image. DaVinci you get two points, FCP you get one point and Premiere no points for you. Visual effects and animations. You can do some pretty decent animations and motion tracking with FCP but as soon as you want to level up your visuals with something like rotoscoping then you have to leave the software and hop over to something like After Effects or even Resolve to do magic masking. Heck, even Apple's own After Effects equivalent software Motion doesn't have any rotoscoping capabilities and I've given it a try. I spent a lot of time learning how to use Motion. I even made this animation that you see on screen but I feel it's just too clunky. I put hours and hours of research into getting my head around it but something just never really quite clicked for me and I ended up just resorting hopping back to After Effects for any compositing or animation work that I wanted to add into my Final Cut Pro edits. And speaking of After Effects, yes it's super powerful and most people like me grew up using it to try out their first gun muzzle flash effect. And in theory it's cool that you can dynamically link compositions directly from Premiere Pro so that you have a live sync whenever you make any changes within After Effects. But from my experience, at least on a Mac, this is just so unreliable and so unstable to the point where it's often simpler to just work directly in After Effects, render out an exported file, import that back into Premiere and then at least then you can actually play it back in real time amongst the stack of many other video tracks. Then we come to Resolve's Fusion Panel, their built-in compositor that's just as powerful as After Effects. But with the whole workflow being pretty different because of its node-based layers versus the traditional, you know, stacked Photoshop type layers. This works similar to industry standard compositing software like Nuke but because a lot of us aren't really working on big Hollywood productions on the regular, we're not really familiar with this alternative workflow. It's cool that you can supercharge your edits without having to ever leave DaVinci. And the whole workflow of just selecting a clip, clicking on the Fusion tab to be greeted with a brand new canvas specifically dedicated to any animation or compositing work you want to do, doing your changes and then having these be reflected back as soon as you go on the edit page again. It's an absolute editor's dream even if the learning curve is quite a bit steeper than After Effects. DaVinci, you get a point. Premiere Pro, you get a point as well because of the After Effects integration even though it can sometimes be a bit hit and miss. And FCP, no points for you. Let's have a look at the audio workflow. As much as I've tried to deal with FCP not having traditional audio lanes, it still frustrates me to edit without them. If I'm working on a YouTube video and I want to add audio effects to all of the dialogue, I'm forced to compound the clips just so I can apply effects on multiple clips within different tracks, making it a pain if I want to go back in to tighten up the J-cuts because I have to hop in and out of a compound. Premiere and Resolve don't have these issues with their much more traditional track-based workflows and mixers where you can just apply an effect to an entire track. Resolve is definitely more advanced in this area with quick audio actions like fade handles at the start and end of each clip so you don't always have to make keyframes and the dedicated Fairlight page with its super pro audio editing capabilities. You can get by with FCP's audio but my personal taste still yearns for a traditional editing workflow whenever I use it. So Final Cut Pro, no points this time. Premiere, you get a point and DaVinci Resolve, you get two points. And now for a quick fire round looking at some of the most notable features of each software. Captions. This is Premiere Pro's time to shine. Adobe's whole Sensei AI features can do some seriously impressive stuff when it comes to auto-captioning. And also the Remix music tool for intelligently stretching and shortening any of the tracks that you have in your timeline to fit whatever edit you're trying to do. And recently the text-based editing workflow that's just been introduced in Premiere's beta. Or it's already out if you're watching this a couple months after I shot this video. DaVinci's recent 18.5 beta has auto-captioning so it's almost caught up to what Adobe are doing with their whole Sensei AI. But Final Cut still needs a third-party plugin to caption videos by bouncing out your footage to something like CapCut or Descript. So if captions are something that you're going to be doing a lot in your projects, then just remember you're going to be quite a bit slower unless you're going to be using Resolve or Premiere. Premiere, one point. DaVinci, one point. And Final Cut, no points. Both Resolve and FCP save every single action that you do. Meaning if your app happens to randomly crash, you're not filled with the panic-inducing anxiety of the last five minutes of your edit just disappearing forever. No, my amazing cat zoom animation. I worked on that for so well for five minutes but it felt long to me. Premiere on the other hand doesn't have any sort of life-save capabilities. Meaning if the software crashes or rather when it crashes, your work is gone for good. This is just dumb and Adobe needs to fix this as soon as possible if they hope of having any chance of getting back the lesions of fans who are now sat on the fence questioning whether to hop over to a completely new editing software. Resolve and FCP, one point here. Premiere, no points. Batch exporting clips out of a timeline. In Resolve, you can export out an entire timeline as separate clips. Meaning a bunch of b-roll clips can be put in a timeline, exported out as individual files and then you can just save them in a folder somewhere for easy access on your future project. You can even make a brand new power pin just for these b-roll clips and just have it at the ready whenever you need to use them. You can't batch export clips with FCP without using Apple's other software compressor and with Premiere Pro, there doesn't seem to be any really easy way to batch export at all. So Resolve, that's another point for you. Let's take a look at how easy it is to do super simple motion tracking. Final Cut Pro's motion tracking is probably the easiest of all of these apps. For simple things like tracking text onto a person, it's just a few clicks away to get something that looks pretty professional. Resolve has tracking but it has to be done in the fusion page rather than directly within the edit page. Which is a bummer because then you're basically forced to get your head around a whole other interface which you probably don't want to be doing for more simple edits. And Premiere has no motion tracking at all unless you use After Effects or some sort of third-party plugin. So FCP, here's your well-deserved two points. DaVinci, you get a point as well. And Premiere, null points. How easy is it to get your head around how each of these softwares actually work? Premiere and DaVinci are pretty similar but I feel that DaVinci has a higher learning curve due to its node-based workflow in the fusion and color tab versus a more traditional layer workflow that many of us will be familiar with if we've come from software like Photoshop. FCP is the most confusing if you're coming from Premiere or DaVinci because of its magnetic timeline and a lack of any real video and audio tracks. But if you have no editing experience whatsoever, FCP is the least intimidating to get to grips with of the three. Directly because you don't have to worry about any of these things. It very much has an Apple feel to it with a clean and easy to use interface. But funnily enough the difficulties I had when trying to learn it were more related to unlearning the last 10 years of Premiere Pro editing knowledge that I'd acquired. So FCP you get half a point just because you're the least intimidating to new users but arguably the most intimidating for experienced editors. The cost of each app. Clear winner here is DaVinci because it's the only one that's actually completely free. There is a paid version that adds a couple of extra really nice features but you can pretty much do 90% of what you'd want to do in an edit in the free version. Also all of the new updates of DaVinci are upgradable for free. So honestly it's a no-brainer to download it right now if you haven't already. Even if it won't be your main editor of choice. FCP still isn't cheap at $300 but at least it's a one-time payment that you buy and then you keep it forever. And you can mess around with a full function version for three months with Apple's free trial. Premiere Pro is the biggest loser here with a subscription-based model that will force you to shell out at least $21 a month just to have the privilege of being able to access it. Meaning by the time one year is over you could have fully paid for either Resolve or Final Cut in their entirety. DaVinci two sexy points for you for being free. FCP one point and Premiere you're too bloody expensive zero points. Now which software is best for your long-term investment? So a few years ago I would have said learn Premiere because you're not going to be able to avoid situations where you need to know how to use it in order to work with a production company or to collaborate with another filmmaker, things like this. But with just the variety of other editing jobs that you can get now, things like freelancing for other YouTubers, content creators, other businesses, you have a lot more autonomy for which software you can use to get the job done and keep your clients happy. Some of the biggest YouTubers out there use FCP, some still are sticking with Premiere and a lot of them are migrating over to Resolve. I myself went from Premiere to FCP and now I've been learning Resolve just to keep up with the trend of why people are swapping over. But I'm likely to use both FCP and Resolve for now depending on the project that I'm making and the workflow that will be the most enjoyable to edit with. It does seem like Resolve is the most on it when listening to feedback from its customers and implementing them into software features with regular updates being added all the time, way more than Final Cut and Premiere. So if I had to give a point here, it would be one point for Resolve. Here's the final scores for each software. But remember, regardless of Resolve thrashing the other two in terms of the score, FCP still might be the software for you just because of how different it is to the other two. And ideally, I'd recommend that you learn the basics of all three. Download a trial for each or just get the software for free if it's Resolve. Then see which you prefer. You'll be a better editor by knowing your way around more than just one app, opening up your skill set so that when you need to use a software that wouldn't be your first choice. You can hold your own and get the video done on time. Even if you're going to be clenching your fists the whole time knowing how much easier it would be to grade all of these clips if only you were using DaVinci Resolve. The point of this video wasn't to bash Adobe or make Blackmagic happy so that they're going to sponsor me. Please Blackmagic, that sexy color grading controller would just look so nice on my desk. The point is to hopefully wake up the developers of these apps to the frustrations of users like me with the hope that they'll actually listen to us and help make our creative lives easier. Meaning that we can make more of the things that we want with as little friction to do so. There is no perfect software out there but at the end of the day you should choose a software based on how good you feel using it. Do the interface and tools inspire you to stay in the flow? Reducing the gap between what's in your mind and how to get that down onto a timeline. For now I'm sticking with DaVinci and Final Cut but I'll be keeping a watchful eye on Premiere in case they happen to start providing a workflow that best suits me on my content creation journey. Let me know which software you're using and any feature requests that you'd love to have added to them. Check out this video if you want to see what it was like for a 12-year Premiere user to swap over to Final Cut Pro. Spoiler alert it was hellish. Click the subscribe button if you haven't done so already because if you don't you're going to have to use Windows Movie Maker to edit all of your projects forever. No Bill no I don't want to use it. I don't want to use the software. See you in the next video.