Adobe Premiere vs Davinci Resolve. Which editing software is better for you?
Video editor comparison for the newbies
There are people on this list who make content full time for huge brands & influencers, startup business owners that need to figure it out, and people who exclusively make troll memes on Twitter.
Quite the spread. This post is for people who are on the greener side of things and just getting their feet wet.
Or maybe you make a ton of videos on a small army of phones already but want more powerful tools on the desktop.
Which software do is the best to start with? How much does it matter? What about things like CapCut or RunwayML? Where do they fit into the ecosystem?
All questions I get regularly in DMs. Answer is usually the same.
Start with Davinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. One of those two will be your bread and butter, then add things depending on your needs. Do a lot of podcasts? Check out Descript. Need to animate graphics or text beyond basic transitions? Learn After Effects.
Why These Two?
Simple, I use both Davinici Resolve and Adobe Premiere regularly and have good reason to.
People ask about Final Cut Pro, Filmora, Sony Vegas, AVID and a few others but I can’t really comment much because I don’t have my hands on those very much.
Between Resolve and Premiere, my bases are very well covered. Whether that’s animating titles, cutting footage together, doing very specific color correction tasks, or working with stock assets.
Where should a complete n00b start?
If your totally new to video editing and need somewhere to start, go download the free version of Davinci Resolve, open a browser window to Google or YouTube. Look up basic “getting started” tutorials and don’t plan on closing that window it for a month.
At the least go look up how to import footage and add basic title text then fill in your knowledge as you go.
The free tier of Resolve has a few features and effects that they limit to only the paid version, but for the most part there’s very little childproofing.
It’s very very powerful to the point where I was scratching my head. How is this no money? They sell hardware interfaces that are awesome and range from a few hundred bucks to $40-50K. You can get one of those later if you want. Spending $400 for the Speed Editor was a big help for the jog wheel alone.
More importantly..
Davinci has a free/one-time pricing structure. If you want to upgrade, there’s no subscription. The full copy of Resolve is half the price of a single year of Adobe Creative Cloud.
This is probably a much better fit for someone who works in sprints and is not doing video content every week You might need to knock out a bunch of content for a product launch, then your next two months not so much because you’re focused on other tasks.
Same deal for someone who is young/student/living with parents/etc and still figuring themselves out. Nice not to be locked into a subscription for something you’re not entirely sure is the right direction to go.
The Skills Transfer
Lets say you learn the living shit out of Resolve and then need to switch to Adobe Suite because you need some only Adobe has it feature or program.
Resolve is a deep enough program that a lot of what you learn will transfer over to other products. The same cannot be said if you decided to do everything in CapCut or iMovie. There’s going to be a lot of new concepts and tools to learn so you’ll be fighting a steeper learning curve.
If you’re coming from Resolve, it’s mostly all the same stuff but the buttons are in different places. You’ll switch over pretty painlessly.
So, I’ll say it again. If you’re new to editing and want actionable advice on where to start: Begin with the free version of Davinici Resolve and branch out from there if necessary.
Resolve is also better at some things
Even if you decide to be a full blown Adobe bro, knowing Resolve will still help you. No reason you can’t bounce footage between both.
It allows you to do very specific things with color correction that can transform average looking video footage to a professional looking result. Go look up before and after videos on YouTube of people doing color grading tutorials to see.
Both the color grading page as well as the Fusion page in Resolve (Fusion is their equivalent of After Effects) use a node-based workflow that is completely different than how Adobe does things.
This took me some getting used to, but sometimes it’s easier to have a visual representation of what is affecting what via the node tree. It’s closer to programming in the sense that if some effect you want doesn’t exist, but you can break that effect down into a series of steps, you can build it yourself.
The Adobe way of doing things is basically to bury features in layers of menus that keeps getting more bloated as they add new features.
Also, the Resolve editing workflow is in one software. Want to do After Effects-like things on a single clip in your edit, just pop over to the Fusion tab, do your thing, then go back. The Adobe ecosystem is not like this. You have to bounce between entirely different programs which gets clunky sometimes.
Time To Shill For Adobe
Adobe is more expensive and requires a subscription plan. Their way or the highway and they know it.
But I’d jump straight in here if you know you’re going to need tools like Photoshop or a dedicated audio editor.
Depending on which plan you do, you’ll pay around $80 a month for the full Adobe Creative Cloud or you can pay $50/mo with a 1-year commitment (there’s a fee if you bail out early).
I wouldn’t bother with single app subscriptions for the most part because a lot of the value of using Adobe products is in the ecosystem.
You can edit a graphic in Photoshop or Illustrator, drag that straight into After Effects and edit. If you change your PSD or AI file, you see those changes reflected in After Effects. Then you can send that whole thing to a Premiere session where you finalize your edit.
But the Adobe ecosystem isn’t limited to just their products.
The community and 3rd party software ecosystem is much larger. If you subscribe to Motion Array, they have Premiere and After Effects specific assets like transitions, effects, and even whole project template files you can customize. Entire businesses are built around selling 3rd party scripts like Video Copilot and AEscripts.
There is additionally a much bigger variety of educational and tutorial content, both free and paid with Adobe as well.
If hiring a pro video editor to take over or collaborate with is on your roadmap anytime soon, this is another good reason to just jump in with Adobe because odds are high they use it. Collaborating will be much smoother if you’re on the same system.
How I’ve starting doing things if I’m setting up a VA to work on something for me, I’ll make a project file, record a screencast demonstrating anything, then send that off while the VA does the more time-intense, repetitive work, then set that back and I finish.
Other Stuff
Tools like Runway are very interesting. They're building some legitimately amazing AI features. My friend and Jungle resident zoomer expert
has recommended CapCut and I'd probably look into this if I was banging out TikTok content for a lot of my day on a small army of burner phones.But for most of my work I consider this stuff supplemental and am not going to make this the central place where most of my work comes together because there are too many limitations. Missing a feature like basic batch export can be a real bummer if you’re aiming to push a lot of content out.
Speaking of which..
Batch Export
Both Adobe and Davinci have this and it’s silly not to take advantage of it. Its built into Resolve’s Deliver page and Adobe uses a software called Media Encoder. They both do the same thing more or less. You are able to export videos from your project to their final format.
I like Media Encoder more personally because sometimes I need to transcode a bunch of existing video or audio files from one format to another that don’t need any editing. Just drag them in, set some numbers, and hit go.
This will come in handy if you’re hiring pro camera operators to shoot footage for an event or something and expect to have them turn over footage that you will edit with your people. Many higher end cameras shoot in specialized codecs that you can’t just drag into your editor and go, so you need to transcode to something more edit friendly like Apple ProRes 422. Media Encoder helps and Premier is kind of the honey badger of video editors. Performance might not be ideal, but you can drag in all kinds of weird footage to the timeline and it usually handles it.
If you’re still in Davinci land and open source tool I used in the pre-Adobe days was FFmpeg. More of a nerdy developer type of tool, but it’s good to eat your vegetables. Learn it.
But back to batching. Another common task is I have to render 30 videos for a client that are all variations of a social media ad. There’s just no way I’m sitting there doing them one by one.
Instead, setup In and Out points on each video in the timeline, set render output settings, hit go, get lunch, then check everything when I’m back.
Just Start
This is really the biggest thing. Don’t over think stuff.
If you read this whole thing and still don’t know where to start, you’d be better off flipping a coin and getting busy instead of sitting around for another 2 weeks researching it.