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Participant
September 7, 2023
Question

Switch to Resolve?

  • September 7, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 161 views

Anybody have experience with Resolve or recommend switching? I love adobe but it crashes like crazy and is just wholly unreliable in general. I heard DaVinci doesn't crash nearly as much. I just wish the developers focused on making the product more stable 😞

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2 replies

Mylenium
Legend
September 8, 2023

Entirely depends. Unless you have a full Fusion Studio license and really only pay for Resolve, your options are limited. Sure, its grading and transcoding tools are awesome and basic edits work a charm, but despite them adding new nodes, compositing is pretty basic. After all, they still want you to use Fusion. The rest is just a matter of personal taste. At this point I regret having abandoned Nuke more than anything else, so the equation is even more different for me. At the end of the day each program has its quirks and shortcomings, but I agree, the issues you face with Adobe apps have become intolerable and if there were serious alternatives people would probably all jump ship in a heartbeat. Too bad that there aren't.

 

Mylenium

Community Expert
September 7, 2023

I use both. I find After Effects a much more efficient tool for most of my visual effects and animations. I often have a couple dozen nested comps(pre-comps) with a bunch of layers in each. You also can't beat After Effects for creating MOGTs for animated graphics to be used in Premiere Pro.

 

Davinci (the paid version) is great for some things. When the projects get complex, it is a little harder for me to visualize what is controlling what unless I carefully label all the nodes. 

 

I'm kind of the same way when shooting a video. Some tools work better than others, but most of my work is done with one camera system, and about 90% of my shots are with one lens. Most of my lighting is done with two or three lights and some flags and scrims, but sometimes I need a 40-foot grip truck and a dozen people. 

 

The learning curve for DaVinci was pretty steep. The UI and the workflow are at least as complex as AE's, but the training from Black Magic and a couple of pros on YouTube is pretty good. I keep my system up-to-date and know how to revert to previous builds, so I am not experiencing reliability issues with either app. I did have a problem yesterday with After Effects and a Trapcode Particular update, but it only took me about 15 minutes to solve the problem with rollback to a previous build and clearing out a few files. 

 

I hope this helps. I'm a long way from abandoning Adobe. I think the biggest problem with all editing, VFX, and other software is the incredible proliferation of hardware available on the Windows side. An almost unlimited combination of graphics, CPU, memory, and anti-virus systems exists. No software company can reasonably be expected to release a software update that will work perfectly with every one of those machines. The problem is not as bad on the Mac side.

 

No matter what system you use, keeping backups is always a good idea so you can roll back easily. I keep a backup boot drive with at least the last two versions of my OS and my software on it. If I run into a show-stopping problem, it only takes me about two minutes to reboot to that backup and be working again.