In my defense, I never liked Premiere. After Effects, sure. After Effects is great. Of course, a cohort did call it, “The MS Paint of VFX, but you know, good for some things.” But Premiere… it was never for me. When I switched from Vegas to Premiere, the learning curve sucked. I’d dropped Premiere back in the CS 2 days because I was young and it was terrible, so to come back felt a bit weird. Things had changed. Suddenly, the Photoshop integration was good. Dynamic Link was perfect. The interface… still sluggish, but it was better. Creative Cloud’s business model might be reprehensible, but the price Adobe gave me and the power that came with it, I was sold. To relearn Premiere I went formal. I powered through a couple of courses on Lynda, and found out how to do a ton of new stuff in After Effects. I learned how to better configure Premiere to solve the sluggishness and comical render times. I’d even rebuilt all of our automated video render tools in AME, and shared the presets with the team so we could spread out renders. I’d been lured back. Briefly. I’m jumping ship again. I still love AE, and I’ll still use Premiere when working with the rest of the video team, but those clever kids at Blackmagic have won me over. I’ve switched to DaVinci Resolve. Y’all were expecting REAPER, I know, and it’s a fine video editor, but Resolve has come together as a great NLE. I’m not sure you could smoothly edit a feature in it, but for short format with a lot of VFX, and the technical mega projects I always end up with, Resolve is great. I still need to build some tools for it, but out of the box nothing else can do the powerful node based VFX in Fusion, color grading beyond compare, and not too shabby audio with Fairlight. In fact, I’d go so far to say Resolve is better than REAPER (as an NLE), and better than the Premiere/AE combo, but only because Premiere lets AE down. Fusion is fantastic, and incredibly powerful. 15.2 (out today!) even fixed the awful keyboard configuration, and I’ve already remapped the controls to be more like my DAW setup. There are some issues, of course. Resolve isn’t quite as quick an editor as Premiere or MC, and multiclip operations are a mess. Try toggling the VFX for an entire timeline and get back to me. For now though, I’m hooked, and I can’t wait to see what clever features Blackmagic comes up with next. Maybe I’ll build a Resolve farm to go with my ffmpeg farm… Then maybe I’ll fight ‘em…]]>