I Switched From Premiere Pro to DaVinci Resolve and I Will Never Regret It Again
Ever since I first launched Windows Movie Maker, I’ve been looking for a good free video editor. Not a perfect one, of course. Not one that could replace a professional workflow, but just good enough. After giving up on “free” and mastering Premiere Pro, I thought my dream would remain unfulfilled. Then I came across DaVinci Resolve .
For those unfamiliar with DaVinci Resolve, it’s a free video editing suite from camera and video production gear maker Blackmagic Design . While the software does have an optional Studio version (a lifetime license costs $300, though many Blackmagic products come with free codes), the free version is so robust and feature-rich that most users probably won’t need to upgrade until editing becomes a full-time job.
At first, I was hesitant to ditch Adobe’s suite. Sure, Premiere Pro was unstable and crashed too often, but my subscription also gave me access to tools like Photoshop and After Effects, which I used in my video projects. Surely a free video editor couldn’t replace all that, I thought. How wrong I was.
Making the Basics Accessible
I’ve come to expect one of two major flaws from free video editors: either they have basic features that work while the advanced tools are ineffective, or they rely on things like AI to “edit for you,” which rarely works. ByteDance-owned CapCut is a good example of both. It’s great for editing TikTok videos, but if you’re looking to develop your skills, you’ll probably hit a ceiling quickly.
On the other hand, DaVinci Resolve is designed primarily for professional video editing. That means if you need to sync footage for a multi-camera shoot or delve into working with color spaces, all of those features are available. However, for beginners, all of those extra features are a plus. One of my favorite aspects of Blackmagic’s design (both Resolve and the camera’s built-in software) is the company’s focus on ease of use without sacrificing performance.
The basis of this approach can be seen in the toolbar at the bottom. The Media, Cut, Edit, and Delivery pages automatically organize your workspace for different tasks. But it’s not just about moving windows around. The Cut page, for example, is a great tool for creating rough cuts from raw footage without worrying about precise editing, transitions, audio levels, and other intricate details that video editors are so preoccupied with. Just arrange your clips in the right order, and head to the Edit page when you’re ready to fine-tune.
The Color page is another of Resolve’s most well-known superpowers. Here, the app offers a professional level of color correction that, frankly, I’ve never seen attempted in other free video editing programs. Although the program is built on Blackmagic’s proprietary BRAW format, it supports a wide range of RAW formats, including ArriRaw, CinemaDNG, and Canon’s Cinema RAW Light.
Ode to Knots
DaVinci Resolve may be a good video editor, but that alone wasn’t enough to convince me. After all, if I still need After Effects, I can keep using Adobe. Although, come to think of it, After Effects is pretty clunky now too. And having grown accustomed to node-based interfaces in apps like Blender, I’m tired of AE’s approach of using layers, like animated cels, to create effects.
Enter Fusion. Fusion is one of Resolve’s specialized editing pages. It’s a full-fledged set of node-based effects. If you’re coming from After Effects, nodes can be a bit of a learning curve, but the benefits are worth it. Nodes are essentially a visual representation of a set of instructions. Think of it like a flowchart, where each node is a specific set of instructions. You can reuse nodes, create non-linear sets of instructions, and, most importantly, easily preview an effect at any point in the chain.
For example, in the screenshot above, I’m using a simple node tree structure created to create a pixelated effect on a CRT. I take the source video, split it into three nodes that isolate the red, green, and blue channels. In the next step, I multiply these channels by a repeating pixel texture. Then, in the final step of the chain, I combine them into the final image. What do you get?
Not bad, huh? Of course, there are a thousand ways to achieve (and improve) this effect — personally, I’m not happy with the darkness of the final image, so I’ll probably continue to tweak it — but adjusting the nodes not only makes it easy to tweak any part of the process, but also allows you to see at a glance what the node tree is doing.
In the node tree screenshot, you can also see a square with a small white dot under the first and last node. This is the preview selection. Select the leftmost circle, and a preview of the effect at that point in the node tree will appear in the left preview window. Select the middle dot, and it will appear in the right window. (In Resolve 20, the third dot is for some reason a VR preview.)
This intuitive and easy-to-use interface supports a large library of powerful effects tools, such as depth maps and excellent modifiers . It’s also incredibly easy to save and share node trees – just select and copy nodes, and you can paste them directly into Resolve or into a text document for online publishing. It’s a comprehensive set of tools that’s well worth exploring.
AI, but this time it’s really good
The final straw that stopped me from switching from Adobe to Resolve was when both companies’ approaches to AI began to become clearer. Adobe was touting the use of generative AI to stretch video clips or find clips based on their descriptions of their content. It’s not that it’s a bad set of tools, but at least to me it felt like AI for the sake of AI. And frankly, I just don’t believe that an artificially stretched clip will look as natural as if it had been shot correctly the first time.
Meanwhile, the latest version of Resolve has something much more useful to me: IntelliScript. This feature can automatically assemble a rough cut based on your video’s script. While it’s not perfect (and is particularly prone to improvisation or incomplete takes), I was able to create an initial rough cut of a nearly two-hour video in under an hour.
This tool is actually built from several other, smaller tools, many of which also use AI in a very targeted way. Resolve has offered automatic video transcription for years, and its text editing feature lets you select sections simply by highlighting spoken text. IntelliScript automates this process, even selecting multiple takes of the same phrase and layering them on top of each other across multiple video tracks. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start.
Many of Resolve’s AI-powered features work this way. Rather than starting with generative AI and forcing it to turn it into a feature, Resolve’s AI features are based on real-world use cases. For example, the Relight tool uses machine learning models to re-light an object in post-production , without having to fiddle with complex masks. It’s a surprisingly powerful tool that helps an editor achieve their goals, rather than trying to directly replace their creative process.
To be fair, Adobe has added some similar features — Premiere Pro added text editing after Resolve — and most of Resolve’s AI-powered features require the paid version of Studio. However, in my opinion, the cost is worth it, as Resolve seems to be doing a better job of developing useful features (whether AI-powered or not) and implementing them first. And often doing it better.
Choosing the right video editing software will always be a deeply personal decision, and the bigger your projects, the more difficult the transition to another format can be. But after years of working with Premiere Pro, I can confidently say that Resolve has met all my needs, and the transition has been much less difficult than I expected.
Oh yeah, Resolve has never crashed during rendering in all the time I’ve been using it. That’s it.