DaVinci Resolve

Incredible speed and coloring. If you're a linear editing veteran, you'll adjust to the software fairly quickly. Also, being able to work through cutting, coloring, graphics, and sound design is within the program.

Old habits are hard to break. As I said, you'll adjust quickly to the software, but there are some functions (such as Fusion) that are difficult to pick up if you've been using Adobe After Effects for many years.

The free version of Resolve is by far the most functional and feature rich video editing software out there. It beats out Adobe Premiere in the overall feature set you get, especially when you start to get into building effects in Fusion.

Each update has helped Resolve take more advantage of powerful GPUs so when you're working with VFX you're rewarded by having a high end GPU during playback and rendering.

The color modification options are rich and can do incredible things with your footage. You can easily take non-log footage and apply pre-existing effects and layers to get the look you want.

Fairlight is their audio editing suite, which is how this application started out as so you can imagine that the audio editing tools are amazing, and they are. One of the most convenient tools is the ability for Resolve to use audio analysis to automatically line up multiple clips from different cameras that filmed the same scene. If you find yourself often using a clapboard to align your footage, say good bye (assuming you're capturing audio from each camera).

The community of creators on Resolve is massive and you can find tutorial son how to do almost anything online. It's how I got started learning how to use the software and I'm still scratching the surface of it's capabilities.

The software is huge and cumbersome to learn. Luckily there's tons of tutorials on youtube from many creators that can show you how to do simple to super complex tasks.

If you're moving from Adobe Premiere, you're going to miss the ability to import content from other apps directly inside of your project. Resolve doesn't support integration into Photoshop and whatnot so you can't go from editing an image in PS then open it up in Resolve like you can in Premiere. If you're someone who heavily relies on the Adobe apps, this will be the hardest thing to get past, but once you've adjusted your workflow it doesn't really add that much time to your projects. You're more so losing out on the convenience.

In previous versions it had a tendency to crash randomly. Sometimes effects you create would go corrupt or prevent the project from successfully rendering or the Resolve to crash during rendering. This would require you to pinpoint what part of the video where the failure occurred, find the offending effect, delete and recreate it from scratch. This could be caused by something as simple as a scrolling text box. It was impossible to know what would prevent a video from rendering, which was super frustrating especially when considering the error message doesn't give you any info into what caused the render to fail. They've since made fixes to prevent this from happening, but just something to keep in mind when working in large projects: save often and test your exports.

Even though you can edit video, Davinci Resolve really shines when color correcting and gradind is in the matter. A lot of tools and flexibility you dont have on Premiere, for example.

Learning curve can be a little longer than basic color tools in Premiere.

The level of professionalism, the massive quantity of features, the industry leading algorithms and color manipulations, and the constant updates make for an editing platform that beats out all others.

There are components of the editing workflow such as the special effects tabs that aren't as intuitive as after effects and other vfx applications.