﻿After 20 years of video editing using most of the major editors, in 2024, this is weird to say.
In 2024, I'm switching to the free options. Now, Premiere Pro has been great for the past 10 years,
both with my YouTube content, course content, but also professional video projects for clients. But
recently, my eyes were opened to the alternatives and now that I've seen them, I can't unsee them.
You see, most video editors have very, very similar functions overall: import your footage,
cut it up, add b-roll, add sound and music, add text and effects, do your final edits,
do a bit of polish, and export. Some do it better with advanced features and others are on the basic
side. Some take a really long time to get a project edited and some are quick. Some cost
you a lot of money over time and some don't. And while Premiere does have the advanced features,
it doesn't have the fast workflow, nor the cost-effectiveness or value for money in 2024.
Enter Da Vinci Resolve and CapCut, two editors that between them tick all three boxes. Both
Da Vinci and CapCut cover the beginner stuff of basic editing and exporting all the way through
to advanced stuff like color correction, visual effects, sound editing, and so much more. Better
yet, they're fully functional using the free versions of the software. While they do both have
paid options, you don't need to upgrade unless you want a few extra bells and whistles. And even if
you did, it would be nowhere near the long-term cost of Premiere. But, Mr. Ben, if you're editing
videos professionally, a video editor is an easy expense to justify. Yeah, that might be true, but
why would you invest money when you don't have to? There are so many subscriptions in 2024, so many
paid services that can help you both creatively and business-wise that paying for something that
you can get for free elsewhere doesn't make a lot of sense, especially when the alternatives
have the same functions but also more. Da Vinci and CapCut have features that go far beyond what
Premiere Pro can do in a lot of ways, so I see the cost argument as valid. Yes, you should invest
in good tools, but at the same time, I'd rather be investing that few hundred a year into other
aspects that will help grow my creative business. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but surely if these programs
are free, they can't be good. Yes, they're good. When I first started using Da Vinci and
CapCut from Premiere, the transition was actually super easy, and I found that they had all of the
features that I was using with Premiere Pro, aside from maybe one or two really small ones. But you
can do some really advanced edits with them. They have fantastic features like automatic captions,
drag and drop graphics templates, and a much more modern and intuitive interface, which
makes the overall editing workflow much faster. The way I differentiate them is that CapCut is
more beginner-friendly. Not to say it's a beginner software because I use CapCut to edit this video,
and I consider myself a video professional, but it's beginner-friendly in the regard that even
someone who hasn't edited a video before could use it and not feel overwhelmed. I
can see they really put a lot of thought into the user interface to make it extremely easy
for both beginners and professionals alike to use it, whereas Da Vinci Resolve is for more
advanced projects where you need a lot of finer controls over your edit, like sound editing,
you want to manually tweak the graphics yourself, and of course, the color correction is the best
software in the world for color correction. So, if I was working for clients, I would totally use Da
Vinci Resolve, and even for YouTube videos, I think it's a great option. But that said,
CapCut is just as good in many ways. While it doesn't have the super advanced stuff, it has
all the basics in a super intuitive interface that you can pick up in literally 10 minutes. And then,
once you get going, you can take advantage of its massive template library, which is really such a
fantastic feature because it's got these super modern templates for text effects, transitions,
sound effects, graphic overlays. It even has its own royalty-free music library built into the app.
And these templates aren't just generic simple templates. Some of them are advanced, dare I say,
After Effects level. Like, these aren't just the most basic text animations. These are fully modern
animated graphics that look like they were made for the year we're in, as opposed to Premiere
Pro that's had the exact same text effects for the last 10 years. Seriously, they look like they were
made for videos from the '90s where a barn door wipe was the most fancy effect ever, and there
isn't much more than that built into the program unless you go and source other effects from paid
websites. But in terms of the inbuilt stuff, it's barely got anything. And this is what slowed me
down with my edits. Is I had to bring in external graphics and they really froze up Premiere when I
was working on super long projects, whereas Da Vinci and CapCut have way more inbuilt
templates that won't crash your computer as fast, at least that's been my experience so far. Plus,
with CapCut, the library is huge and they update them all the time. And what I love is you can just
drag and drop them onto the timeline. You don't have to manually keyframe animations. You just
drag and drop the effect onto your text and it does it instantly. And even though I consider
myself an advanced editor, I don't want to be wasting unnecessary time animating text and doing
all that menial stuff that is often associated with motion graphics. Something else great about
CapCut is you can use it with multiple devices. Not only is it a desktop editor, but you can edit
on your phone, tablet, and it's even accessible in an internet browser that is getting with the
times, unlike Premiere that is only a desktop app. It's so much better having the flexibility to edit
wherever you want on whichever device you want. CapCut even does pretty advanced stuff like the
annoying little man here. This was just one click of a button inside the desktop software to remove
the background. And then I added a filter, which is called Big Mouth filter to my face. Again,
drag and drop. Then I changed his voice with an automatic audio filter. Yeah, so,
but After Effects is still better. Maybe it is, but I would say if you're an After Effects user,
just try Da Vinci Resolve because the Fusion tab is Blackmagic's equivalent to After Effects and
it can do some super advanced stuff. I found since I've transitioned to Da Vinci Resolve,
while I have had very specific things that I used to do in Premiere, I found new workflows in Da
Vinci that did the exact same thing. Of course, it's a different process to achieve that result,
but from doing a Google search or looking on ChatGPT, sometimes I ask it like what's the
equivalent of that feature in Da Vinci Resolve and it will tell me. And there's been very few
features that I've missed from Premiere that isn't a feature of Da Vinci Resolve. So, I just say if
you're an After Effects user, give Da Vinci a go. It's free. See if it's got that feature
you like. If it doesn't, by all means, keep After Effects. But just saying, could be worth it. So,
I guess I'm making this video to encourage you to re-evaluate. I think as creatives,
we tend to stick with what we know, and we stick with it for too long. In today's day and age,
everything is evolving much faster, technology is getting better, there's way more competition,
more different options of creative tools you can use, and it's best for you to have the best tool
for the job. And I just find for me right now, I was holding on to Premiere as long as I possibly
could. I knew it probably wasn't the best, but now that I found these two, it's totally transformed
my content creation and means I can post a lot more content because it's so much easier to
edit and I'm not spending unnecessary time doing menial stuff in the editing room when I could be
focusing on my video ideas and going through more ideas faster. New platforms really are very easy
to learn, especially CapCut. Da Vinci is a bit more advanced, but it won't take you that long
if you're transitioning from Premiere. And I'd also add that as a skilled editor, you can learn
any tool because you know what the process is, you know what the end result you want is. So, the
tool you use isn't as important, which is why if you can make your video editing workflow work in
a simpler program that costs less, that has more templates, more workflow shortcuts, don't you owe
it to yourself to give it a go? Time is money. How much of your time are you going to waste over the
next few years taking twice as long as you need to be? I can definitely say that I'm guilty of this.
That said, I'm sure Premiere Pro does still have some use cases that it's better than Da Vinci and
CapCut at. There's not many one tool that I can think of that I liked in Premiere that I don't
have now, or at least I don't think is the remix tool where you could drag any music track out to
fit any length of time. But even that isn't in my top 20 tools I need in a video editor. So, I'm
willing to forego it for being able to edit twice as fast in CapCut and Da Vinci. Unfortunately,
I hate to say it, but Adobe just hasn't innovated enough in the past 10 years. The editor looks more
or less the same as it did 10 years ago, and right now, it doesn't really feel like a video
editor from the year it's in. I hope they change this. Please do, Adobe. But for now, I'll be using
Da Vinci and CapCut. In the meantime, I'll still use Photoshop though, because I do think that's
still industry-leading. I love the generative fill feature and the generative expand. But that said,
again, if you use Photoshop, it's worth looking at the alternatives because there's also Affinity
Photo and many, many others. Thanks for watching my video. Let me know your thoughts below. Will
you switch to Da Vinci Resolve or CapCut, or are you going to stick with Premiere Pro? Now,
if you're ready to make the switch and you want to learn Da Vinci Resolve as quickly as possible,
in this video here, I teach the entire start to finish workflow in just 12 minutes.