And Resolve, as far as I know, is the only video editing software with Photoshop-like color management controls if you choose to use them. Admittedly, those controls are a little hard to access and understand, but they are there and can really help with predicting how your video is going to look on other devices. Still not as good as what Ps provides as there are no embedded "working space" profiles yet in video, AFAIK, but it's a start.
And I was just told a couple of days ago that the pay version of Resolve has facial recognition built in that can track characters within your scene which might allow you to have specific color corrections or effects follow that person as they move through the frame. Not exactly sure how I might use that, but still, an interesting use of that technology for sure.
Peter Figen wrote:
And Resolve, as far as I know, is the only video editing software with Photoshop-like color management controls if you choose to use them. Admittedly, those controls are a little hard to access and understand, but they are there and can really help with predicting how your video is going to look on other devices. Still not as good as what Ps provides as there are no embedded "working space" profiles yet in video, AFAIK, but it's a start.
Selective Colour in the manner of Photoshop would be great. Can Resolve do Highlight Recovery like ACR? That is one thing I find lacking in FCPX and associated plugins like Colorista.
Resolve has controls that do that but they're not called that. You have to sort of feel them out in their color grading module. Premiere Pro does have a Photoshop like Highlight/Shadow tool but the rest of the interface is kind of lacking. But hell, download a copy and take a tour. It's set up in modules - Import, Edit, Audio and Deliver and each has their specific function.
I've been working on color grading and audio on some videos for a good friend of mine in Monterey, and have been exporting just the audio out of Resolve, which I then run through iZotope RX which is such an amazing piece of software for audio - pricey but worth it for clicks and pops, breath control, de-essing, hum, distortion removal, etc., and then into Logic Pro for manual volume automation and overall LUFS volume settings, and then re-importing that audio into Resolve for final YouTube output.
And for those who are outputting video for YouTube, you want to set your audio levels to approximately -14db to -15db LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) for music and approximately -18 db LUFS for spoken word. If you have your audio too loud, YouTube/Spotify/Tidal/Apple etc. will turn it down for you can often it'll sound like crap. If your audio is too quiet, some services will turn it up automatically, but not YouTube. There is a website called www.loudnesspenalty.com by British mastering engineer Ian Shepherd where you can drop an audio file and see how it's going to be treated by various streaming services in their normalization routines.
You're welcome Rajan. I spent a good part of the summer listening to Ian Shepherd's podcast, The Mastering Show, cramming four years of podcasts into two and a half months and where I learned all about the "loudness wars" and about that website I linked. The way I see it, all of this audio stuff is just an extension of what we already do and for those of us who are doing video, we're also doing audio and have to learn about that as well.
I have Davinci Resolve Studio, Adobe Premiere Pro, FCPX, and Avid Media Composer on my computer and each has strengths and weaknesses over the others. If you are just getting started, I would strongly recommend Davinci Resolve - the free version. It has better color correcting capabilities than Photoshop and pretty good editing and audio effects. It does require a pretty powerful computer and graphic card to work well. It can be a bit limiting for fast multi camera editing, and wouldn't be my first choice for a multi user environment. If you are doing most of your camera work with a SLR (not a dedicated video camera with advanced lighting and audio equipment and a team of people to do editing, color correcting, audio work etc), it is hard to beat.
Definitely plan to spend some time with tutorials, as some of its features are not intuitive when starting out (unlike FCPX or even Premiere).
Island wrote:
I have Davinci Resolve Studio, Adobe Premiere Pro, FCPX, and Avid Media Composer on my computer and each has strengths and weaknesses over the others. If you are just getting started, I would strongly recommend Davinci Resolve - the free version. It has better color correcting capabilities than Photoshop and pretty good editing and audio effects. It does require a pretty powerful computer and graphic card to work well. It can be a bit limiting for fast multi camera editing, and wouldn't be my first choice for a multi user environment. If you are doing most of your camera work with a SLR (not a dedicated video camera with advanced lighting and audio equipment and a team of people to do editing, color correcting, audio work etc), it is hard to beat.
Definitely plan to spend some time with tutorials, as some of its features are not intuitive when starting out (unlike FCPX or even Premiere)....Show more →
Won't say Davinci is user friendly. Yes, I liked the free version, but I had to watch a lot of 'Davinci for dummies' videos first just to get started. Still, I was working with the older version of this app. Maybe something has changed since then.
But it's great alternative to Adobe.
I also worked with Hitfilm and... well, can't recall the name of another soft at the moment, but maybe I'll get back to this thread later.
Another vote for Resolve, but it has a long learning curve if you want to go beyond the basics. I've been using it and training in it for four years now and still consider myself a beginner. Ripple Training has some excellent tutorials for Resolve that are well worth the cost -- the basic training by Steve Martin is great and will get you up and running pretty quickly. They also have a good tutorial on Fairlight and the advanced color grading tutorial will keep you busy for months if not years.
It's an incredibly powerful tool but you can also do very basic editing and audio on it if your needs are minimal.
I also second the warnings about needing a powerful computer, and especially you need to meet the GPU specs. It won't run well on many laptops; for best performance you should use a desktop computer with a GPU that meets the specs in the manual. Otherwise you'll have frequent crashes and slow editing and rendering.
The only NLE video editor I have used until recently is Final Cut Pro X ... I purchased it about a year after introduction and must say I became an instant fan of the magnetic timeline which took a lot of fire from the Old School editors. In the early going, FCP X was missing some key features and capabilities ... now a decade later ... FCP X is a full-featured option that is lean on resources and long on capabilities. The learning curve was quite easy, even for a novice like me. I'm a big fan of the assist I received from Ripple Training to get up to speed with FCP X and is associate app, Motion 5.
Recently I have moved much of my video editing to my iPad Pro using the Lumafusion iOS app ... it's not a complete replacement for a desktop solution but it can handle live skimming a timeline with four layers of 4k video without dropping a frame ... the developer for Lumafusion has steadily improved the app with the most recent update to v3.0 adding some key new capabilities with a few more coming down the pipeline very soon. It's amazing what can be accomplished with this $30 (often on sale for as little as $20) app on a tablet.
Since you are a beginner in video editing, I would suggest checking out this article: https://winbizsolutionsindia.com/video-editing-software/.
The article is really helpful and will give you a bunch of video editing software options to choose from. It mostly talks about the free video editing tools but you’ll also find 3 paid options for video editing software that are considered the best in 2021
