Quitting adobe apps for video | Can you make good videos with free software in 2020?

So i’ve been using adobe’s CS6 programs to edit videos, for the past… 6 years or so actually. And for the most part it’s been great, not perfect but pretty good, obviously CS6 is quite old now, but since the 2013 CC update all the adobe apps have been subscription based. And it’s not a cheap subscription, 5,500 DKK per year, and even with student discounts it’s 1,800 a year, about 1,000 more than i’m willing to pay. So today, I will be showing the programs I use now for making videos. The programs I used to use were photoshop, illustrator, audition, after effects and of course premiere pro, so here’s everything you need to know to make the switch.

[intro] 00:52 - If you’ve ever tried out a different video editor, or thought about switching away from premiere or something similar, you might have come to the same realization as me. “Hey, i’m not a premiere editor, i’m an adobe editor” and one of the big reasons why adobe apps are so nice and hard to switch away from is because it’s an ecosystem, you pay for one subscription, and you get all the apps you need, but if you need as much as just one, you’re paying for all of them, so you might as well just use all of them. Luckily i’ve found replacements for all the video related ones, let’s take them one by one and well start with the big one, premiere pro: [cool premiere motion graphics] My alternative to premiere is da vinci resolve. And I’ll actually start this off with my biggest gripe with resolve. It’s a very simple problem, but a problem so big that it almost makes the program literally unusable.

01:46 - It’s this little guy missing vram pop up and freeze frame tons of pop ups oh God no go away. Yeah resolve really likes its vram and if you don’t have enough, it won’t play anything, it won’t export, nothing will work except for saving, thanks. But if you have a graphics card that might not be the newest generation or the highest tier, like a gtx 960, it’s not uncommon to have 1, 2 or 3GB of vram, and that means that you constantly need to keep an eye on that vram usage and you constantly need to worry about not using high res photos or videos, or clicking into fusion or adding too many color nodes, the way I fixed it is that I bought a pre owned gtx 1080 for about 250 eur, but if they fix it in the program, if they make the program continue working normally albeit a little slower even if you’ve used all your vram, that would absolutely be the best new update they could make, and if GTA V can do it, so can blackmagic. But enough complaining, why is it better than premiere, 2 main reasons, speed and color grading Resolve is fast, seriously fast, to show my point here’s a little test I did. I took a 7 second clip, warp stabilized it and did a little color grading, and it’s not some crazy high res footage, it’s some pretty standard 1080p h.264 footage out of my DSLR.

grabs clipboard and in premiere it exported in 1 minute and 50 03:20 - seconds, not bad, but in resolve it took, ohh yikes, 7… seconds throws clipboard that’s a 15fold increase, and with my new graphics card it’s probably closer to 25. That means that a normal 10 minute or so video goes from taking 2-2.5 hours to export, down to 10 or even 5 minutes. And the playback is much smoother too, in premiere I’ll be lucky to get smooth playback on 1080p footage if there’s any sort of color grading on there. In resolve I had to actually head over and download some red code raw 8k footage in 9:1 compression, and I had to color grade it, sharpen it, add a stabilizer and slow it down to 50% with optical flow to get it to stutter a bit.

And 04:10 - even then I could just set the resolution down to a 4th and it would play back smoothly again, and with 8k footage, I literally couldn’t see a difference. But I was cutting it a bit close to that vram limit. | But speed isn’t the only advantage, color grading in resolve is awesome, everything is fairly intuitive, if you come from blender the nodes are gonna be right up your alley, but if not you get used to them pretty quickly. And the tracker is super fast and accurate, and it only takes one click to use. Basically if you’re into color grading, going from premiere CS6 or even CC, to resolve, is like a kid in a candy store.

There’s a good reason that it’s the industry 04:55 - standard for colorists, because it’s the best. | But other than that, resolve can do basically everything that premiere can, some little things are handled better in resolve and some in premiere, but it’ll definitely be faster in resolve. Here are some examples Resolve supports more formats, but premiere handles weird frame rates and resolutions better, image sequences are nicer to work with in resolve, but premiere starts up faster. Adjustment layers are much more powerful in resolve, and you can save fusion clips and adjustment layers in power bins, so that they’re straight in the program and you don’t have to go searching for them on your computer, but copy pasting effects is handled better in premiere, and also in premiere you can double click on compound clips, or nested clips as they’re called to open them in the timeline, it’s a very small thing but it’s really annoying that you can’t do it in resolve. The audio keyframe editing with the live waveform previews in resolve is awesome, and the keyframe editors are just better, but in premiere you can customize the layout of the program completely, sure I get the appeal of everyone’s layout being the same but a little more customization would be nice.

Oh yeah and resolve supports linux, but in my 06:21 - experience the windows version is better. My point is those are all nit picky things and overall resolve is actually better, and it’s free, or if you want the studio version that only costs the same as half a year of creative cloud | Moving on I’m thinking we’ll do these programs in order of most to least used, so next up is… audition [cool audition motion graphics] Audition is actually pretty easy, my alternative is audacity, I actually used to use audacity until I learnt audition, so it’s not that much of a stretch really. But why not fairlight, the built in audio editing tool in resolve? Well reliability, I tried using fairlight to record some stuff, and it doesn’t always save, sometimes when you click stop it just crashes and you lose your recording, sometimes it doesn’t export, and sometimes it lags mid recording, for adding some effects to your audio it’s perfectly fine, just not for recording. But audacity is great, it might not be quite as advanced as something like audition or fairlight, but if you aren’t working mainly with audio, it does the job well, and yes it does have macros, but mainly it’s very reliable and runs on basically anything. Something else that’s very cool is its ability to record system audio, you might notice that all your speakers are in the microphone selector menu, and that’s actually intentional because you can record anything coming out of them just like if it was actually an input.

So that’s really cool 07:54 - and I don’t think audition can do that. Also it’s free and it’s open source so that’s awesome. [cool photoshop animation] Now for photoshop alternatives, i’m sure you could use gimp, I hear that it’s great, but if you wanna edit raw photos you have to add some extension, and even if you can do all the same things, it’s also different enough from photoshop that you have to relearn basically everything. So with a little compromise on the whole being free and able to run on linux thing, there is affinity photo, it does cost 50$ unless you get it on sale like me for 25, but normally it costs 50 and if you’re rocking linux it’s obviously not an option, but it feels a lot more familiar coming from photoshop, and with how little I use it anyways I don’t wanna spend hours relearning a new program. Everything is right where you’re used to, masks, raw editing, text, adjustment layers and individual layer effects, and the LUTs are actually easier to find, and there’s also a macro function which is pretty cool.

Sadly it does cost 50$ but then it is yours 09:06 - forever, and there is a 10 day trial. [cool after effects animation] So after effects is actually a bit special, because it has a very wide range of uses, it can be used for VFX, but I don’t, I use it for motion graphics and for the replacements, yes plural, we’ve got blender and fusion. And I haven’t decided yet which one i’m gonna use for the transitions in this video, but it ended up being this one. Fusion’s pretty straight forward, it’s built into resolve and it absolutely chews through vram, but it’s a very capable replacement for after effects, once you get the hang of it, because it’s pretty unintuitive at first, it’s not something you’re gonna learn by just messing around with it. But there’s also blender, yes a 3d graphics program, for 2d motion graphics, it sounds stupid, but that’s actually excactly why it’s so intuitive, it’ll take a little setup but hear me out.

So you set the camera to orthographic with a 10:10 - scale of your horizontal resolution and place it 10 meters above the origin pointing straight down, this might also be a good time to set your clipping distance to a few kilometers, then go to the world lighting and set it to black, enable motion blur if you want, and I think that’s about it. Now the way you can make stuff is by adding planes or circles or curves with an emission texture on them, and then animate them with the excellent keyframe editing tools in blender, and if you wanna integrate 3d objects that’s obviously super easy. And you can use the z height as a layer number, and it won’t affect the perspective because your camera is orthographic. With this method you can get as creative as you want, the only limit is your imagination and the power of blender, and with how powerful blender is your imagination might fall short. [illustrator] Well i actually never learnt how to use illustrator, and the same with my replacement inkscape, I really don’t know how to use it, because I basically never do.

I guess I’ll 11:20 - have to when it’s time to redesign my logo. But i’ve heard that inkscape is a worthy opponent to illustrator, and I only really included it in the list because if you’re doing more motion graphics than me you’ll need a vector graphics program. And inkscape is free and open source, and very compatible with blender, so that’s probably a good option. | And those were all the programs, I’m not saying that you specifically will be able fill all your video editing needs with these programs, they’re just the ones that work best for my style of editing, but obviously everyone have different needs and maybe some other programs are right for you. But if you’re using adobe apps, maybe you’re a bit tired of the performance, the price or something else, then you should totally check out these programs, they’re all free except for affinity photo, so there’s no harm in trying them out and seeing if they’re for you.

And that’s it for this video, see you in the next one 12:31 - [outtro].