I’m probably guilty of jumping on the YouTuber bandwagon but there was one “why I’m ditching Premier” video that really resonated with me.
reviewing Reddit, comment the cesspit of the internet it seems there is a general “trend” towards this.
why people ditching premier pro for da Vinci resolve?
byu/artofvisuals inVideoEditing
I realised Premier makes editing a nightmare.
By no means am I an expert editor but I can feel when I’m being held back by a tool. If I consider Figma and the feeling of how naturally shortcuts, interactions flow out as I have a creative idea. Premier by contrast has significant barriers, both technical and emotional.
Dislike of Adobe
I have a serious problem with Adobe. Their business ethics and monopolisation don’t bring better products to market. I celebrated wholeheartedly when I heard that the Figma merger was blocked. Record profits and share prices have been achieved since Shantanu Narayen introduced subscriptions with Adobe Cloud and recent gains associated with the introduction of generative AI along with another price hike.
I feel a burning resentment at paying such an unreasonable price every month for something, particularly when it’s not my source of income, but understand that as a professional it’s not that much of a business expense.
I’ve ranted before about the “monthly annual subscriptions” that ping your credit card for the full annual fee when you want to cancel early, it’s immoral.
Maybe I’d feel more comfortable about paying if the software actually worked…
Crashes and Instability
In the last month alone as I have been trying to wrap up some legacy projects I can think of plenty of evidence. For example I recently lost 2 hours of work I did in Doha airport on titles when Pr crashed. I couldn’t remember what I’d written afterwards.
Lagging videos and playback stuttering which also affects exports.
Running from the local SSD on a more than powerful enough Macbook pro. I tried every fix, hours of research, YouTube video “quick solutions”, restarting, rebooting to get nowhere. Files in another project from the same camera on the same hard drive play back fine, explain that. All I could think to do was create a new project. Work on that video stalled and it’s slipped into the old, bottom of the pile never to be done category.
I’m spending my free time which should be spent producing a video fixing the program and getting stressed by it.
Today Premier crashed while I was colour grading and fortunately was able to recover the project but as a “recovery project” which shouldn’t be saved over the old one, so now I have to manage versions and project files.
Cracking & Subscription
Years have passed since I hit up TPB and downloaded the latest CS6 ISO to get my PC laden with trojans, now I sign up for a new 7 day trial every time I have to dip my toes into the Cloud. Again this is just adding to the peripheral hassle and stress around actually producing a video which is supposed to be recreation time.
Davinci Resolve 18
Blackmagic need to do something attractive to unseat Permier even if thats not competing 100% on features.
I’m Instantly attracted to the
- Realtime collaboration Project synch for 5 USD a month
- One off lifetime payment
- Completely free to use if exporting <= 1080p
Can we trust lifetime payments? If the rest of the industry moves onto new project files from newer versions that aren’t supported.
Moving isn’t that easy.
It’s not an easy jump in and go transition to move from years of using the same clunky interface to an entirely new one. However the tabbed approach to editing phases, selection, edit, grading, render etc makes life a lot easier in Davinci Resolve. I never really got on with Workspace layouts in premier and constantly losing panels in the different views.