Quality of Premiere

I’ve used both Pr and Resolve for a decade or so. So I can report my experience.

Premiere is a far more user adjustable application. Meaning a bunch of things, from creating and saving your  own customized workspaces to working with tools like specialized keyboards, trackpads, and control surfaces to map their usage to anything you want to use them with in Premiere.

So ... in Premiere I’ve got currently six custom workspaces (used to have nine) ... and don’t use any of the ‘built-in” ones. And my Tangent Elements and Ripple panels can be mapped for anything from color (their “original” use) to rotating/sizing/positioning any screen element in anything like text, clips, you name it.

Resolve is not user-adjustable. So ... if you can get used to the way the UI is setup, it’s marvy, right? A good friend (major colorist) thinks it’s the most intuitive UI every conceived by the mind of man. For me, a decade in? I still struggle to remember where they buried the flipping context menus, because it’s different on every “page” (edit, cut, color, Fairlight [audio ‘page]) throughout the app.

Another notable difference is Premiere is first foremost and always an NLE ... it has audio/color/graphics capabilities, but designed for editors to work with.

Resolve started as a $250,000 per user licensed color-only full on grading app. And after BlackMagic bought it, they added editing/sound/graphics “pages” and turned it into a loss-leader to selll BM hardware. Panels, control surfaces, keyboards, “cut” tools, all of that. As in, the Studio licenses are included in the sale of most of their hardware above $400 cost, from cameras to mixing panels to the $29,000 “Advanced Panel” grading tool.

It has editing, sound, and graphics capabilities, but ... they’ve been cadged into a grading app. Fairlight for sound work is a very different DAW, the only mixing controls you can use are expensive BM ones, and that frustrates a lot of users. Fusion is the graphics “page”, but ... it’s not the full-on graphics app of stand-alone Fusion, and ... the color management between that and the rest of Resolve is ... um ... easy to mess up. So even on the Resolve forums (which I’m on daily) the experienced users there will grant that neither Fairlight nor Fusion is “properly” mooshed into Resolve without having to learn workarounds.

And ... Resolve gets more editing capabilities and keyboard shortcuts every major issue, yet ... it still doesn’t have the full editing toolset/keyboard shorts possible in Premiere. Which I’m told, is also close but not quite yet as broad as what Avid has.

And as BM devs have been trying to mimic the Adobe one-ecosphere concept in Resolve, as a single do-everything for all media on all systems/hardware app ... they’ve also hit more constant bugs and weird stuff. I think that’s probably endemic to that quest for any dev team. The most stable of ‘these’ apps I know of is Baselight, a total grading app ... and it’s old-school. You buy one of three expensive computers from them, you NEVER EVER EVER!!!!! install or add any program to that app, it only runs Baselight ... and you pay something like $1500 a year for a license to use that spendy computer you bought.

BUT ... you do get a rock-solid system and working environment.

Understand, I’ve got enough BM kit here to have several Studio licenses in a drawer ... love my BM cameras and Atem Mini Pro and such. But ... none of the BM control tools for Resolve work on multiple pages. The ‘Cut’ tool only works on the Cut page, that huge and spendy Advanced panel cannot be mapped by the user for anything other than the Color page, the audio boards for the Fairlight audio ‘page’ are expensive and only work with Fairlight ... and none of them can work at all in any other app.

I don’t have the deskspace nor budget to buy any of their Resolve hardware ... and ... as that Elements panel is so incredibly useful across Premiere, and can at least do some color things in Resolve ... and as the Resolve UI is still a puzzler to me, a decade in, Premiere is easily where I edit and do audio (that I don’t flip to Audtion to sweeten) and graphics and such.

I do some color work in Resolve, but only some very specialized stuff as for most of what I do, working with that Elements panel not a mouse! ... I can get good enough fast enough not to need any trip to Resolve.

But that’s all just me. As noted, a good bud and I spend time together at NAB every year ... he loves Resolve, feels it’s incredibly intuitive to use ... and knows  I find it rather unsettling. So he looks at me, shakes his head, rolls his eyes ... and I do the same back at him.

Now if I spent much time “flying” that Advanced panel as he does, I’d probably love me some Resolve too. But as that ain’t gonna happen, I’m probably forever a more Premiere than Resolve user.

Your mileage will vary!