busybee fluffy rambles

The good

DaVinci Resolve has a much better title generator than Final Cut, and doesn’t make me want to pull my hair out.

The “Fusion” compositing system looks incredibly powerful, and like it also replaces AfterEffects as well as Premiere. I ended up not using it for this project, however.

I also like that it lets you organize your media collection as you see fit, rather than forcing you into a “library” (which is of course a very Apple thing that’s specific to Final Cut Pro).

$300 for a one-time purchase of the pro version kicks the pants off of anything Adobe offers today, and this also makes it a lot more feasible for non-profit organizations to afford. (Final Cut Pro is also a $300 one-time purchase, but it’s Mac-only.)

The middling

The UI is very quirky. It’s not always clear what view I need to be in to do things. In particular, I really don’t understand the distinction between the “cut” and “edit” views (which seem to behave very differently from each other), and figuring out how to actually get into the Fusion view for a particular node (or creating a new composition) is perilous and seems to have the potential for trashing your timeline.

A lot of the UI is also really annoying in that things like scrolling and zooming don’t match established macOS conventions, although that is probably configurable.

Nested clip/timeline management is extremely obnoxious, and I really dislike how you have to set a single format and framerate for the entire project rather than being able to flexibly adapt framerates for different timelines (which Final Cut is brilliant at).

I really do not like how the playhead is necessarily tied to the timeline display. Maybe there’s an option to decouple them though. I should probably read the manual.

Also one thing I really like from both Final Cut and Premiere is the ability to continue work on a project while a snapshotted version of it renders out. DVR doesn’t seem to have such a capability; once you’re rendering, that’s all the app lets happen. Even being able to check my timeline so I can write my YouTube timestamps while I wait for the render to happen would be nice.

The upsetting

It’d be really nice if Fusion graphs could use the audio tracks of a media source as an input, rather than forcing everything to be video. The state of audio visualizers for Fusion is absolutely abysmal, and needing to convert everything into a .wav (usually with a fairly low file size limit!) makes it much more difficult to work with than should be necessary.

The keyframe editor is, frankly, crap. It’s hard to tell what’s going on in it, the frame handles don’t actually line up right on the timeline, it’s very easy to accidentally mess everything up because you tried to drag a single handle without noticing that a lot of other stuff was selected, and the UX on it is extremely unergonomic. The fact that Final Cut Pro’s keyframe editor is better than DVR’s is absolutely shameful. (FCP’s can’t hold a candle to Premiere’s, either.)

Actually arranging visual elements on the frame is also really obnoxious. There’s no layout guides, no direct controls (everything goes through the property inspector), and everything feels just so fiddly and messy. This is another thing where it feels like they really want everything to be done using Fusion but from what I can tell Fusion makes it very difficult to see the timeline relationship between things.

The effect plugin system is extremely fussy and limited, and wants you to do everything in Fusion instead of just providing simple presets that you can drop onto your clips. There are traditional effect plugins but most of them are locked to the pro version and even then none of them are for things like, y'know, simple color grading or contrast/gamma stuff, which all lives on its own little thing and also uses yet another completely different UI concept from everything else (which sort of makes sense given DVR’s legacy as originally being color-grading software but it’s still annoying).

There’s also a lot of effects that I’ve taken for granted in both FCP and Premiere that are apparently missing (or relegated to overly-complex Fusion graphs) in DVR, such as advanced focus pulling and static/glitch/CRT effects and so on. And of course even if those things did exist in DVR, the awful keyframe editor and plugin settings editor would make them very annoying to actually work with.

It’s also really annoying how all GPU acceleration is paywalled for the Pro version. I understand the advanced filters and functions being Pro-only, but why would they make basic compositing run in software on the free version? That’s more code for them to write and maintain for a worse-performing product! It’s understandable from a business sense, but from an engineering standpoint it makes me itch.

Oh, and media loves to disconnect at the drop of a hat (which is something Premiere is notorious for as well, to be fair), and reconnecting it seems to require that it be the exact same file. No easy way to replace a media file with a new version, for example.

Things I’m looking forward to trying later

The paid version has a really good speech-to-text engine that can be used for generating really good closed captions. I haven’t had a chance to try it but from what I’ve heard it is extremely easy to work with, and caption authoring is something that FCP has historically been pretty bad at.

Conclusion

At this point, I feel that DaVinci Resolve is fine for quick video edits, and it does a few things incredibly well that the other software I’ve used does not. But I think for most video projects I’m going to still default to Final Cut Pro, because for all its problems, at least it lets me do what I’m trying to do without getting in the way too badly.

My opinion of it will almost certainly change as I get more familiar with it.