Great comment all around albeit with maybe a bit outdated yet personal experience.
I would say, don’t underestimate blender, it has a lot of parallel progress going on and while I never used it for video editing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty powerful in that area.
I’m personally a resolve user and I think it doesn’t have anything to envy from avid or premiere at this stage (you admit yourself it was 8 years since you tried it). It’s incredibly powerful and the free version should get you by for most projects though you might run into a few things where you wish you had the studio version.
My personal experience when I was shopping around before settling on resolve (3/4 years ago) was that all the other FOSS options I tried were mid at best.
Regarding Resolve, that’s actually the only bit of insight I could offer based on recent experiences compared to all the outdated info about the FOSS stuff. Of course nothing said here can be objective given personal preference but based on trying to get work done this is my impression at the present time.
I use the studio version every day for colour grading, it is fantastic for that. I couldn’t get used to fusion, being only a kind of bodge-job amateur in visual FX and motion GFX, it’s very hard to get used to after initially using after effects for that kind of work however I understand it’s very good. The editing side however, I really want it to be good enough, and if I was doing maybe an ad, or a corporate gig or perhaps short YouTube videos or interviews, it’d probably be fine. However, try as I might and try I really really did, I could not judge it on par on a recent major documentary project where I was forced to use it, compared to Premiere or Avid. It has far more recent, really cool features that I think in time will become indispensible and I love playing with them, but the basic nuts and bolts, while very nearly being there, don’t seem to work as comfortably at scale. Things like multi camera workflows in particular work in frustrating ways that hold you back and become inefficient with enough scale, the lack of auto-patching too gets on my nerves and I also find it extremely frustrating how many things cannot be done keyboard only, even with the crazy expensive full-size editor keyboard. A lot of the problems are quite minor things that would sound like nitpicking to most users but once you find yourself dealing with a big enough pool of footage and timelines the importance of the little things becomes manifest. It’s definitely getting better, at a rapid pace. I’m team Resolve because I just want them to win, especially because despite proclaiming it better, I really dislike using Avid and I also really dislike Adobe as a company even if I generally like their software.
Great comment all around albeit with maybe a bit outdated yet personal experience.
I would say, don’t underestimate blender, it has a lot of parallel progress going on and while I never used it for video editing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty powerful in that area.
I’m personally a resolve user and I think it doesn’t have anything to envy from avid or premiere at this stage (you admit yourself it was 8 years since you tried it). It’s incredibly powerful and the free version should get you by for most projects though you might run into a few things where you wish you had the studio version.
My personal experience when I was shopping around before settling on resolve (3/4 years ago) was that all the other FOSS options I tried were mid at best.
Regarding Resolve, that’s actually the only bit of insight I could offer based on recent experiences compared to all the outdated info about the FOSS stuff. Of course nothing said here can be objective given personal preference but based on trying to get work done this is my impression at the present time.
I use the studio version every day for colour grading, it is fantastic for that. I couldn’t get used to fusion, being only a kind of bodge-job amateur in visual FX and motion GFX, it’s very hard to get used to after initially using after effects for that kind of work however I understand it’s very good. The editing side however, I really want it to be good enough, and if I was doing maybe an ad, or a corporate gig or perhaps short YouTube videos or interviews, it’d probably be fine. However, try as I might and try I really really did, I could not judge it on par on a recent major documentary project where I was forced to use it, compared to Premiere or Avid. It has far more recent, really cool features that I think in time will become indispensible and I love playing with them, but the basic nuts and bolts, while very nearly being there, don’t seem to work as comfortably at scale. Things like multi camera workflows in particular work in frustrating ways that hold you back and become inefficient with enough scale, the lack of auto-patching too gets on my nerves and I also find it extremely frustrating how many things cannot be done keyboard only, even with the crazy expensive full-size editor keyboard. A lot of the problems are quite minor things that would sound like nitpicking to most users but once you find yourself dealing with a big enough pool of footage and timelines the importance of the little things becomes manifest. It’s definitely getting better, at a rapid pace. I’m team Resolve because I just want them to win, especially because despite proclaiming it better, I really dislike using Avid and I also really dislike Adobe as a company even if I generally like their software.