- Altogether, I pay just shy of $10000 a year
for Adobe's software.
A fact of which I am painfully reminded
every time my editors complain that Adobe
still doesn't have a decent HDR workflow
and that they straight up crash whenever they feel like it.
Now, that wasn't always the case.
Once upon a time, when you paid for software,
you owned a perpetual license to use it,
before the dark times.
Before software-as-a-service.
But there is a light in this dark, dark world.
Not every company has embraced the trend of charging
for their software by the month,
so I challenged my team to find out,
by editing the production you're watching right now,
if we can make videos without touching
a single pay-forever app.
So that means no Adobe and what that would be like.
So have we freed ourselves then from the clutches of Adobe?
Well, it's complicated.
You know what's not complicated though?
Whether you should check out our sponsor.
Origin PC's new EVO16-S, ready-to-ship streamer bundle ships
within one to two business days and comes
with multiple streaming accessories
and a 250 gig Samsung 960 EVO M.2 boot drive
for quick load times.
Learn more at the link below.
(upbeat music)
Let's begin with ingesting our camera footage.
While Adobe does have Prelude for this,
I don't think many people actually use it.
It's clunky and it doesn't offer many advantages
over just dragging your clips straight into Premiere.
Kyno, on the other hand, is lightweight,
supports a wide array of codecs and file types,
and is excellent at managing batch processes
like transcoding or file renaming.
Once you've logged and organized your footage,
a right click action can bring it straight into the NLE
of your choice.
- AKA your video editing program.
Unlike Prelude, Kyno isn't project-based,
it's essentially like a special file browser,
custom-tailored towards editors
and the drill-down function is awesome.
It lets you see all the video, audio or image files
in that drive or folder,
no matter which sub-folder they're in,
which is especially useful when you're dealing
with memory cards from different cameras or recorders
which might have different folder structures.
- And it's way better than using Finder.
I get the features of both but it's as simple
as just opening up file explorer.
It's friggin' sweet.
- And the difference between their billing approach
and Adobe's is that if you decide you don't need updates,
you can keep using that software
after the support period ends.
- This is looking great so far.
Then again, we were already using Kyno
so that wasn't much of a stretch.
Next up is our nonlinear editor or NLE.
We actually had a couple of options here,
with the main ones being Vegas Pro, Avid Media Composer
and Da Vinci Resolve.
Let's start with Vegas because it has a customizable UI,
similar to Premiere Pro,
even if it does feel a little bit old school.
The audio-editing tools in Vegas Pro are actually
pretty similar to Premiere,
but the lack of Audition's dynamic linking is
a clear downgrade.
That means that you have to send audio from Vegas
over to a dedicated audio editor,
then pull it back in.
Then there's the limited functionality
when it comes to working with multiple sequences
within a single project
because, well, you can't do that.
Now Vegas recently added the ability to work
with nested sequences but it's a janky solution,
involving having a separate project in your timeline.
So suffice to say, despite my personal liking for it,
we're gonna be pulling the lever on this one.
That's a Vegas joke.
As for Avid, well honestly, it's kind of part of
the same category we're trying to get away from.
Avid, Adobe, Pro Tools,
these are the industry giants that have robust feature sets
but also have equally robust pricing.
Avid is also much better suited to
a more traditional, film-style workflow,
where you might have multiple editors,
editing assistants, colorists and VFX artists working
on the same project.
We, and most other YouTube content creators,
usually have one or two editors, at most,
handling all aspects of a production,
which is why the way that Adobe's apps all dynamically link
to each other, without having to export anything is
almost as awesome this shirt from lttstore.com.
Then, there's Da Vinci Resolve.
It's cheap, there's even a free version of it,
and it's got great performance, along with what are arguably
the best color grading controls in any of the programs
we've mentioned, including Premiere.
It also has built-in audio editing with Fairlight
and built-in effects tools with Fusion.
You can have multiple sequences and nested sequences
in one project, making it,
well, make a bit more sense for people who are used
to Premiere.
Resolve seems to be our best option,
so that's what we're gonna be using to edit the video
you're currently enjoying.
- (murmurs) a few slick takes on some standard things
like with trimming clips or slip edits.
The way it provides visual feedback makes it a lot easier
to do than with Premiere.
Color grading is great because you have a ton
of control over everything.
And because Resolve is so GPU-accelerated,
playback performance is fantastic.
Even with color grades or some effects,
it's all just pretty smooth.
It's not perfect though since there is this issue
where you run out of GPU memory and you have
to restart Resolve.
From what I can tell,
the only real solution is to throw more GPUs at it.
Learning how to use Resolve is kind of a steep curve
because of it's unusual layout
which I honestly find a bit annoying
'cause you can't really customize it besides resizing panels
of it.
You can turn them on or off but you can't undock them
and move them around,
so really, you're stuck with the basic layout.
You can use more than one monitor but, again,
you can't choose what goes where
and you have to disable full screen mode
before you can even minimize or resize the main window.
- Why?
Just why?
At least the price is right though.
Anyway, as we said,
Resolve's audio editing module is called Fairlight
and it's great for cutting and mixing audio.
But compared to Adobe Audition,
or other digital audio workstations like Pro Tools,
Logic and Qbase,
it's fairly light on the features.
Get it?
- We don't do that much audio processing
besides some level adjustments.
And if we do, Fairlight does support many
of the same plugins as Audition.
Plus, we're used to Audition being able to dynamically link
with Premiere Pro,
so the fact that Fairlight is essentially part of Resolve is
a huge plus.
- And how much does this one cost per month?
Really?
Wow.
The situation is similar from Ocean Graphics.
Vegas Effects would be a decent option here,
if we had gone with Vegas Pro for our NLE,
because they actually do have some linking functionality,
similar to Adobe's apps.
But we didn't because while Vegas Effects has some
of the same functionality as Adobe After Effects,
and it is comparatively easy to use,
it is just nowhere near as capable.
Fusion, on the other hand, is an interesting candidate,
particularly for compositing.
- But while Fusion's node-based system makes it
an excellent choice for compositing and special effects,
once you get the hang of the interface that is,
motion graphics is kind of overcomplicated compared
to doing it in After Effects.
You can use Fusion as a tab within Resolve
but if you need some more flexibility,
you can also use the standalone Fusion Studio App,
which can be activated with the same license
you bought for resolve.
- You know, this is going great so far.
I am gonna save so much money.
Finally, there's image editors and, as it turns out,
there's a reason that Photoshop has become the Kleenex
of photoshopping stuff.
I mean there's Vegas Image, which comes with Vegas Effects
in a package
but it's...
I don't know, it's less of a Photoshop alternative
and more like a unique and confusing blend of After Effects
and Lightroom.
So we'll be going with a program called Affinity Photo.
It doesn't have the latest Photoshop bells and whistles,
and it does do non-destructive raw image editing
for some reason,
but for 95% of the stuff people normally do with Photoshop,
it's actually pretty dang good.
- As long as you don't need to collaborate
with Photoshop users.
And while you can export to PSD,
there are conversion issues.
Though they say that the next major version will fix these.
And the way that layers, masks and effects work takes
a bit of getting used to,
although the intuitiveness of the UI certainly helps.
For illustrator-type tasks,
there's also Affinity Designer
and the story here is much the same.
It can open illustrator files but can't save them,
and it's tracing and pathfinder features are weaker.
But overall, it'll get the job done.
- So that's it, we did it!
We edited a video, start to finish,
without Adobe.
But are we gonna keep this liberation train going
and swear off them for good?
No, we're actually going to crawl straight back to them
and here's why.
First up, the size of their app library is unparalleled,
whether you're creating videos with effects,
audio, image, documents, webpages,
there's an app for that.
And in today's age, where many creators are one-man,
or woman, bands instead of having a dit for ingesting,
as assistant editor for logging,
an editor for cutting, a designer, an animator for graphics
and so on and so on and so on,
a single ecosystem is very attractive,
even if its bugs occasionally make the biblical plague
of locusts look like not that big of a deal.
Second up is intercompatibility.
For better or for worse, pretty much every else uses Adobe
and nobody likes to be that guy
who sends the weird file formats that nobody else can open.
The thing is you don't get to pick who you're doing business
with and not everybody out there in
the great wider world has the tech savvy
or the willingness to deal with your snowflake file format.
And guys, it's a creative industry,
collaboration is a big part of it.
Finally, I realize it's been mentioned
a couple times already,
but the way that Adobe's apps dynamically link
with each other drastically cuts down on the time
that you would otherwise spend saving, exporting,
editing and then importing files between your apps.
So I asked our team how close they think we could get
to creative suite levels of efficiency
and the highest number that I got back was,
"As much as 90%."
On the face of it, that sounds pretty good.
That's an A.
But let's do some napkin math here.
The average video editor in the United States makes
about $29 an hour.
We've got seven of those.
So assuming that we were paying those rates,
our editing staff would cost us about $420000 a year.
Nice.
So then if we were to slash their productivity by 10%
by taking away their preferred software
as a cost-saving measure, we would need to either cut
our 17 video per week production schedule,
costing the company revenue,
or we would need to hire to cover that difference,
costing the company over $40000 a year.
Plus, the extra space we'd need in the building,
extra editing workstation,
I think you see where I'm going with this.
I mean, we're not saying that using Vegas or Resolve
or even some of the awesome, free editing tools out there,
like HitFilm Express, aren't gonna work for you.
We're just saying that even if does feel a little bit
like Stockholm Syndrome,
Adobe continues to be our best option.
For now.
Just like our best option for our sponsor
for this video is Corsair.
The dark core RGB gaming mouse has three different ways
to connect to your PC.
Ultra-fast, one millisecond, 2.4 GHz wireless.
Low latency Bluetooth, which is compatible with a wide range
of devices.
And, of course, wired USB for all-day use.
It's got an 18000 DPI optical Pixart PAW3392 sensor.
It features Qi wireless charging,
and it's got interchangeable side grips
for a perfect fit.
Oh and, of course, it's Corsair.
There's RGB dynamic backlighting and customization
with Corsair IQ.
I mean, how could you have a Corsair product without RGB?
So go check it out at the link in the video description.
Thanks for watching guys.
If you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy one of our
other behind-the-scenes workflow videos
where we talked about Parsec,
the software that we've been using to edit videos
on our workstations at the office from home,
so that we can isolate and all that good stuff.