So yeah, covid didn’t treat my business well. Anyone else? Yeah, thought so. It did, though, give me an opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do, but the flow of work I had before kept me from exploring. With very few editing jobs, I quit Adobe Premiere cold turkey.
I didn’t hate Premiere, but I didn’t really love it.
I used it for about 7 years on both a Mac and a PC and got pretty good at it. No real big differences. My editing style is straightforward, simple cuts, dissolves and fades. I used a few After Effects templates in my workflow, but that was so infrequent that I don’t even think it counts.
There are two things I struggled with Premiere…. 1) Crashing when it mattered the most (all moments matter) and 2) The subscription cost.
I could never figure out the crashing, and I was tired of trying new drivers, installing updates, and just trying to manage my computer’s resources in order to get it to not crash. Not fun. My editing workstation was fairly powerful, and I used it almost exclusively as an editing workstation, but Premiere still crumbled at times. Other editing and design apps worked just fine, so go figure. I’m no programmer (I was a while ago), and I know the code is infinitely complicated, but I was paying good money to use this “great” tool.
So that leads me to the subscription cost. I hated paying it. I’m still paying it. My clients insist on sending me InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat and After Effects assets because it’s just the industry standard. I’ll stop paying soon, though, and somehow get them to export something for me that I can use.
On to Davinci Resolve.
I owned a Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 4.6K a while back. If not for the sheer size, the camera puts out a BEAUTIFUL image. I tried using Resolve to edit the footage, but work was constant enough that I didn’t have the time to learn the workflow… and nodes. Fast forward to covid, and I’ve got the time!
I’ll wrap this up quick, but all you need is a solid two days of watching your favorite YouTube Resolve “pro” and you’ll see how easy the workflow can be. I’ve literally cut my editing time down by more than 50%. Now a part of that is because it just hasn’t crashed on me. The workflow (left to right) is sweet and simple, but the way it uses the CPU, GPU, and memory must be better than Premiere. No cringing apprehension every time I see it calculating an effect or transition.
After I learned how effective Resolve can be on my straightforward workflow, I decided to do another covid related thing… I bought a shiny new, blazingly fast editing workstation. I’ll talk about that on the next one, but here’s a quick stat…
My 30s final exports, they’re done in seconds.