DaVinci Resolve

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

For someone who was new to video editing at the beginning of this year, I have to say it took many hours watching YouTube tutorials to fully understand Davinci Resolves features. It is a professional video editing software for FREE! I was fortunate to have started with Davinci Resolve, and since then have tried many other paid programs which I have since stopped using. From the media stage, cut stage, edit, color correct, and sound stages, it is very clear where you need to start and end to make an amazing video. I found that when using a green screen, this program was much more accurate than other paid ones in doing the color corrections.

Cons

Since I have a Dell Laptop, running Davinci Resolve definitely slowed things down. As it is an intense program, it requires the machine that goes along with that to keep your work flow moving along. I found that my laptop wasn't up to spec, but my husbands desktop was. Ideally, you would want more than 8 gb to run it smoothly.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Firstly, it's free. It has everything anyone would ever need to make a film. From sound editing to colour correcting, all the tools it provides are professional and easy to use. Did I mention that it's free? Another great thing about the software is that it actually uses your GPU. I also particularly like its trimming tools as I find that there aren't many free video editing softwares that give you the ability to make such precise cuts on a video. This is especially useful if you're a video creator who HAS TO cut 'that scene' at just the right moment else the whole film is terrible. Yes, I'm that video creator. Visual playback isn't too shabby either- it does lag sometimes but a feature called optimized media reduces that. Lastly, the thing I probably like the most is the endless options for editing the actual video appearance. You can zoom in on it, crop it, stretch it and keyframe each change to create an animated effect.

Cons

It's system requirements. The software needs AT LEAST 16GB of DDR4 RAM to run smoothly. I currently run it on just 8GB which is fine if you don't mind lag and random software crashes. Davinci Resolve also comes with the default settings for Autosave being off. I learnt that one the hard way. It also sometimes has problems with audio output, particularly when you use more than one output device (like headphones and external speakers). Sometimes it doesn't automatically change to the system device. Another thing I noticed is that, for some odd reason, it randomly outputs mono audio from a stereo audio file but this does eventually fix itself.

Pros

- Free, i can not imagine how can this fully featured software be free
- Mature based user, means better problem solving are readily available. if you have questioned just google with the top result are your friend
- Easy to use
- Many free transition available

Cons

- Too many feature, not for amateur user. I move from Power Director which is easy, just drag & drop render done, Davinci Resolve is for Professional use video editing user, still drag and drop but there are many variable to consider (frame rate, res, preview res)
- rendering, sometime need can stop mid way if you use a lot of transition, there's a setting for that.
- rendering doesnt fully use the available ram, i am using i7 dual channel 16GB ddr5, but when rendering only took 3gigs, even though i permit it to use all of it.
- workflow, inconsistency and slow loading preview rendering for high-res editing.