Goodbye, Adobe. My name is Matt Johnson, and today I am going to share three big reasons why video editors are switching from Premiere Pro to DaVinci Resolve.
Full disclosure, I am one of those filmmakers who is switching, but I want you to know I am still planning on making videos and tutorials about Premiere Pro. As you may have seen from some of my recent videos, I am starting to make videos about DaVinci Resolve as well.
Reason 1: Stability
The first reason so many filmmakers are switching to Resolve is stability. Over the years Premiere has gained a reputation as a program that is very prone to crashing. In my anecdotal experience as a PC user I have only experienced crashes once or twice a month at most, but I have friends on Mac who have Premiere crash multiple times daily.
For context, I have a reasonably powerful desktop by today’s standards, but I built it way back in 2016 whenever it was top of the line, and it still runs Premiere quite well. It is strange to me that Mac users have more issues with crashing, especially considering Apple computers are more of a closed ecosystem with less hardware variety. But hey, I am not a software engineer for Adobe, so I cannot speak to why Premiere users experience so much more crashing on Mac versus PC.
Regardless, this has caused many filmmakers to start looking at alternatives like DaVinci for a more stable program, and they are finding it. The general consensus among editors is that DaVinci is one of the most stable video editing programs out there. That said, have I experienced DaVinci crashing? Yes, multiple times actually. But it definitely was not any more than I experienced Premiere crashing.
In addition, in version 14 Blackmagic introduced a feature to Resolve called Live Save, where the program instantly and automatically saves every single click, cut and button press you make while editing. That means in the rare instance the program does crash, whenever you reopen it you do not lose any work and all of your edits are right there where you left them.
Compare that to Premiere Pro, which auto saves by default every 20 minutes. If you have a crash at 18 minutes and you forgot to manually save, you just lost a lot of work. Not to mention, as your project gets larger those auto saves can take significantly longer, sometimes up to 30 seconds to a minute in my experience, which really interrupts your editing flow. There is nothing worse than having the whole edit in your head, working your way through it, and suddenly having to pause for a minute while it saves and you try to keep everything in your brain.
Also, unlike Premiere Pro, which uses separate project files to save all your edits, DaVinci uses a centralized database system which is less susceptible to project corruption. So if you have trauma from opening a Premiere project and getting a pop up telling you the project file is unopenable, you do not need to worry about that with DaVinci.
It is really a one-two punch. DaVinci is more stable than Premiere, so it is less likely to crash, and then in the event it ever does crash, you are not going to lose any progress anyway because of how the program is designed.
Reason 2: Speed
Closely linked to stability is the second reason many filmmakers are switching, and that is speed.
There are really two aspects of speed whenever it comes to video editing. First you have rendering performance, which is how fast your editing software can render a video. That is the most common way editing program speeds get benchmarked, because it is very easy to press render, watch a countdown timer, and know exactly how long it takes.
But there is arguably a more important area of speed than render speed, and it affects every single video editor, and that is timeline speed. How quick and responsive the program is whenever you are clicking around, playing back clips at one or two times speed, making cuts, adding effects. Ideally you want your editing software as fast as possible on the timeline, because any time there is a delay or a hiccup where the program does not do what it is supposed to, you are losing productivity and possibly falling out of your creative flow.
A Detour Back To 2010
Come back in time with me. The year is 2010, and at this point nobody is thinking about using DaVinci as a video editor. It is too early. Apple has just released Final Cut Pro X, this fancy newfangled software that is being universally hated online because everything is confusing and the timeline is completely different. Why is it magnetic? Nobody understands it. Nobody likes it.
Final Cut’s predecessor, Final Cut Pro 7, is getting quite old, and video editors are starting to look for an alternative, because they are all buying these fancy new DSLR cameras that film video and finding themselves needing to use a program like MPEG Streamclip to transcode all their footage before they can even edit it. MPEG Streamclip. There is a blast from the past.
Right around then a savior appears. Adobe announces Premiere Pro CS5, and one of the greatest innovations of CS5 is a feature called the Mercury Playback Engine. Adobe has done what everyone thinks is impossible and created video editing software that does not require you to transcode any of your footage before you import it. You do not need to spend hours before you can start editing. You can literally import any clip, including RED raw footage, and immediately begin editing on the timeline because it plays back smoothly.
Nowadays we take that for granted. You throw any footage into any editing software and it just works. But back in 2010 this was completely revolutionary, and Premiere Pro CS5 was the only option.
Back To The Present
Here we are many years later, and it is starting to look like Adobe has been resting on their laurels. The Mercury Playback Engine is still there, but once you start throwing 4K, 6K or 8K highly compressed footage like H.265 at it, Premiere starts to slow down a lot. We are talking a few frames per second if you are lucky. Quite a far cry from DSLR 1080p back in the day. Of course this varies depending on your camera, hardware and codecs, but the point is that on timeline performance, Premiere started to lose its edge.
Enter DaVinci Resolve. All I know is that the company name Blackmagic is a great term, because I am pretty sure that is what the DaVinci software engineers are doing to get such smooth and fast playback on the timeline. It is scary fast, and most importantly, it is fast even on slower hardware.
Resolve blew my mind recently. I took a trip with my family and of course brought along my a7S III to film a ton of footage, and whenever I got back I did not bother copying that footage to the SSD I normally edit from. Instead I kept all of this 4K 60fps highly compressed footage on my super slow spinning Western Digital My Book external hard drive. If you have ever used one of these, they are fantastic for backups, but if you ever want to edit from one, that incredibly slow 5400 rpm drive inside is going to significantly impede your editing speed. Or at least it used to, in Premiere Pro.
Because whenever I imported that high resolution, high frame rate, highly compressed footage into DaVinci Resolve from that super slow spinning hard drive, Resolve still played it back effortlessly. You hit play, it takes maybe half a second to stabilize, and then it is playing back at a rock solid 60fps. It is really impressive.
I think that as more filmmakers upgrade to better cameras with higher resolution footage, often filming in highly compressed H.265 or raw, things are going to be really slow for them in Premiere unless they make proxies. But with Resolve they can import that footage and immediately begin editing it natively.
Lastly on speed, I mentioned rendering and exporting earlier, and the truth is that is another area where Resolve easily beats Premiere Pro. Edit the exact same project in both programs on the same computer with the same hardware, and Resolve will take better advantage of that hardware, resulting in multiple minutes saved on every video you export.
Heck, I know we are talking about filmmakers leaving Premiere for Resolve, but if you look at Apple’s new Macs with their own proprietary chips running Final Cut Pro, Resolve oftentimes exports videos faster than Final Cut can. Which is crazy, because Apple literally makes the Mac hardware and the Final Cut software, and DaVinci’s engineers have figured out how to get more performance out of their software even though they are not the ones designing the chips. I told you, it is black magic. Literally.
Reason 3: Features
You have got stability, you have got speed, and those are two fantastic reasons filmmakers are switching. But lastly we need to talk about features.
Here is where things get really crazy, because if you look nine years ago, nobody was talking about Resolve as a video editor. It did not have the capability to be one. Resolve has always been an incredibly capable color grading tool that colorists have used on Hollywood films for many years. But in the last nine years Blackmagic has put a ton of work into adding basically all the features filmmakers need, so it has not only world class coloring but incredibly capable editing tools as well.
I remember every year around NAB in April, Blackmagic would send me an email saying, hey, we have an update to Resolve, it is free, it adds a ton of features. And I always thought, oh, that is neat. But every year those features have added up.
What it really feels like is that Premiere is already a mature program. Do not get me wrong, Adobe has added updates to Premiere, heck, they release updates twice a year, but those updates feel like small incremental improvements and not dramatic under the hood changes. Compare that to Resolve, which literally had to add video editing features from scratch, and you start to see why Resolve’s updates have been so big year over year, building on themselves.
If you want to know why features are the reason filmmakers are switching, here it is in a nutshell. Look at the last big update to Premiere Pro versus the last big update to DaVinci Resolve.
In Premiere’s last big update they dramatically changed how you import and export footage, moving away from pop up windows to a new tabbed interface that completely takes over the entire program screen. That was a huge shift, and while myself and basically all other filmmakers would probably be okay with it if it made importing and exporting quicker and easier, this update felt more like change for change’s sake. It felt like Adobe thought they needed to update Premiere without actually thinking about how video editors use the program.
I think we can all agree that in any program, the more you have to click, the longer it takes to do something. That is why video editors take the time to learn keyboard shortcuts for everything. The issue is that this update hid many of the features of the export window, which meant you had to click multiple more times to get to the settings you need to finally export your video. So in short, Adobe’s big update to importing and exporting confused many filmmakers and made the whole process more convoluted than it needed to be. It is a bad update.
Compare that to DaVinci Resolve, whose big update in Resolve 18 was the addition of cloud video editing. In essence, if you want to collaborate with another editor where both of you can be editing the same project and getting a ton done even faster, you can now do that, even if you are in Texas like me and your other editor is around the world in Australia. So cool.
Here is where things get crazy though, because I know you may be getting ready to comment that Premiere Pro already had this feature. Well, Premiere Pro has had cloud video editing for many years, but the issue is that Adobe locks it behind an extra subscription fee for a product called Creative Cloud for Teams, which at the time of making this video is $85 per month, $30 more than a normal Creative Cloud subscription. If you want to edit a video collaboratively, every person you are editing with needs that extra $30 tacked onto their subscription, and then you have to create a completely different type of project to edit together.
Editing in something else? I covered HUGE DaVinci Resolve 20 Updates For Wedding Video Editors too.
It is incredibly convoluted, enough that the vast majority of editors have no idea the feature exists, and if they wanted to use it they would not even know how to start. Heck, I have never even made a tutorial about how to use it, because nobody has ever asked me for one.
Compare that to DaVinci Resolve, where I recently had a member of my Learn Wedding Filmmaking Facebook group post that they needed some help, saying, hey, I have DaVinci Resolve 18 and the cloud editing, I would love it if someone could help me edit this wedding video collaboratively. Boom.
Adobe could have had filmmakers talking about this and collaborating years ago, but the first time I have ever seen anyone talk about cloud collaborative video editing, it is from DaVinci, because they made it easier to use, more accessible to filmmakers, and most importantly, they did not lock it behind an extra paywall on top of a subscription people are already paying for.
Bonus Reason 4: Price
Speaking of the subscription, we have one bonus reason, and this is really the biggest and most obvious one. If I do not mention it here I know I am going to get angry comments. The bonus reason filmmakers are leaving Premiere Pro for DaVinci Resolve is very simple. The price.
At the time of making this video, a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud costs $55 per month, or 660 bucks per year, which is a pretty healthy chunk of change. As a professional using this tool to make money I have been fine paying the fee, but look at the landscape. Look at how pricing for video editing software has changed.
Nine years ago Adobe had just released Creative Cloud and were charging 50 bucks a month for it, and if you wanted DaVinci Resolve, which was really a more specialized color grading tool that had just started adding editing features, it was going to cost you about $1,000. Do not ask me about prices before 2013, it gets a lot crazier.
But then things changed, because Blackmagic got aggressive. Really aggressive. They dropped the price of DaVinci Resolve to $300, which perfectly competes with Apple’s Final Cut, also $300. And then they went even further and began offering a completely free version of DaVinci Resolve that still has 90 percent of the capabilities and features of the full version. And even if you do pay for Final Cut or Resolve, it is still only a one time $300 fee, where once you pay you get free updates for the foreseeable future.
To be clear, as far as I am aware neither Apple nor Blackmagic has ever guaranteed free software updates for life, but looking at their track record for almost the past decade, I do not think they are going to start charging for upgrades.
So here is where we are at. For me and many other filmmakers, I am basically locked into the Adobe ecosystem for probably the rest of my life. I have way too many old projects that I still access very often and will need to access in the future, so I am going to have to keep paying for Creative Cloud. Maybe you feel the same way.
But while there may be many filmmakers who feel stuck in the Adobe ecosystem paying that monthly fee, some of us are going to escape. Some of us are going to make a clean break. And that is another big reason filmmakers are leaving for Resolve, the thought that they could go from paying hundreds to paying nothing per year. That is super enticing.
Plus, think about all the new filmmakers out there just getting started. Maybe you are one of them and you just bought your first camera and you are thinking about what editing software to use. Whenever you are a new filmmaker you do not have a lot of money and you have a lot of gear to invest in, and you are looking at the price for software saying, wait a second, I can either pay Adobe every month for the foreseeable future, or use DaVinci Resolve completely for free and maybe eventually pay them $300 once. The choice is really obvious.
Tying It All Together
The reason video editors are leaving Premiere Pro for DaVinci Resolve really comes down to Resolve being more stable and less crashy, faster both on the timeline and when rendering, plus DaVinci adding many features filmmakers actually want without introducing change for the sake of change. Throw in the fact that DaVinci offers all of this for the low, low price of free, or $300 at most, compared to a high priced monthly subscription, and it all becomes very obvious.
Can Premiere turn things around? I do not know. Part of me wants to believe they can, but to do so it is going to require a massive rewrite of the underlying code the program is built on, where they optimize Premiere to fix those crashes once and for all and really compete on speed. And most importantly, Adobe needs to make video editors feel like they are getting their money’s worth for the program they are paying for every single month.
The vast majority of Premiere Pro’s issues are self-inflicted wounds Adobe has given themselves, and it is no surprise that Blackmagic saw that, capitalized on it, and put the work into DaVinci Resolve to start to take over.
Did I miss any reasons filmmakers are leaving Premiere Pro for DaVinci? Am I crazy? Let me know.
I also put together a free guide called Edit Videos Like A Pro. It is going to help you regardless of whether you edit in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut, and it shows you some of the most important video editing techniques I have learned, the ones that took me years to figure out.
I colored this video with my color presets. If you want to go deeper, I have filmmaking courses here, and here is my full list of filmmaking gear.
Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!