Adobe Premiere Pro and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve are long-standing professional video tools. While Premiere leads the market in editing, DaVinci rules color grading.
Yet these days, both products are neck-and-neck in the race for the “We Do Everything” award, and it’s a pretty fantastic competition. But, when comparing Premiere Pro vs. DaVinci Resolve, which software is better than the other?
Welcome to part 2 of our video series comparing Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve as all-in-one solutions for video editing, effects, and post-production. In the last episode, we covered the history of editing software. Now, we’ll take a deeper look at Premiere Pro versus Davinci Resolve specifically.
You’ll learn about the ins and outs of Premiere and DaVinci and get a look at the differences in their user interfaces, ease of use, and workflows. Dive into the pros and cons of each software and determine which solution is better for you.
DaVinci Resolve vs Premiere Pro: Which Is Better?
Interface (Premiere)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| Premiere is highly customizable, allowing you to choose the best layout. Great cutting experience. | The vast majority of workflow exists in the Edit tab. Overall, there are four main tabs (Home, Import, Edit, and Export). Everything exists in one workspace, which makes the workflow outside of cutting feel crowded and convoluted. |
Interface (DaVinci)
| Pros: | Cons |
| Each part of post-production has a dedicated tab—Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion (titles and effects), Color, Fairlight (audio), and Deliver—providing the functionality of multiple software packages in one organized interface. | Limited customization due to the separation of features within the software. |
Ingesting and Prep (Premiere)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| Industry-standard workflow for copying and organizing ingested media. | There is no built-in Checksum tool to ensure footage copies without errors or corruption. Workflow is time-consuming and clunky when syncing dual-system audio with footage. |
Ingesting and Prep (DaVinci)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| Built-in Checksum tool to copy footage without corruption or error as it ingests. Audio syncing is automatic for dual-system audio with footage, as the software includes waveform matching for an easy workflow. | None. |
Editing (Premiere)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| Classic timeline editing with all the functionality a professional video editor needs. | Unintuitive organization that requires significant window hunting to access all tools. |
Editing (DaVinci)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| The dedicated Cut tab makes it easy to edit traditionally by scrubbing through the source window and finding in-and-out points. You can also use timeline editing. It also allows you to cut in “tape view,” which makes it easy to go through all your footage as one clip and trim the excess. The editing window is uncluttered, allowing you to toggle additional windows for effects and audio mixing. Editing effects like stabilization and captions are easier to find and quicker to render. | When you have in-points and out-points in your timeline, clips don’t paste to the playhead. Instead, they paste to those points automatically. |
Post Production: Effects and Graphics, Color Sound (Premiere)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| Premiere includes basic graphics, titles, audio, and color grading options, but it is limited without the rest of the Adobe ecosystem. | Complete post-production functionality requires After Effects and Audition, so professional video editors need the rest of the Adobe ecosystem. Adobe does not offer a dedicated color-grading application. |
Post Production: Effects and Graphics, Color Sound (DaVinci)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| Complete post-production functionality within DaVinci Resolve. The built-in Fusion tab covers many of the same options as After Effects but makes implementation easier. DaVinci uses a neural engine that makes tracking in Fusion and Color super smart. There’s also Fairlight for complete audio for video, including automatic dialogue replacement (ADR), within Resolve. | DaVinci uses nodes for color grading and motion graphics, which are effective but include a significant learning curve. |
Review, Output, and Delivery (Premiere)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| External application is an advantage here, as you can continue to work in Premiere while your output queue renders in Media Encoder. Premiere includes a Frame.io integration for collaboration. | Collaboration tools are limited compared to DaVinci’s Cloud Presentation features. |
Review, Output, and Delivery (DaVinci)
| Pros: | Cons: |
| DaVinci includes Frame.io integration and built-in Cloud Presentations, which offers even more functionality. You can allow comments to appear directly on your timeline. It also provides a chat and live presentation feature to host a group watch review. | You cannot continue working on a video while the output queue renders. |
How To Choose The Right Software For You
Adobe is a 200 billion dollar company whose software has long been the backbone of the creative community. But this broad community covers photography, graphic design, web design, motion graphics, video, audio, etc.
Blackmagic is over 60 times smaller and laser-focused on video and audio, with products ranging from cameras to software to live production hardware.
Premiere Pro is really good. For all our talk about DaVinci, we’re still editing in Premiere because it’s what we know. Our experience highlights one of the biggest pros of Premiere: lots of video editors are accustomed to using it.
If you aren’t convinced to try Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve yet, let’s conclude with some general pros and cons on the look and feel, overall functionality, and pricing.
Look and Feel
Premiere Pro feels old and crowded. It functions great. But in the race to do it all, Premiere added more and more furniture to the room, so to speak, without building out the footprint. Even after working in the software for a decade, that can get confusing.
DaVinci, on the other hand, is clean, organized, and well-thought-out. It seems like the future of editing. But it also introduces a lot of UI that video editors aren’t familiar with—namely nodes for color grading, which can be a challenge for people who aren’t used to them.
Overall Functionality
Premiere covers everything professional video editors need, but it leaves much to be desired in the quest for a complete all-in-one solution. The necessity of Adobe’s ecosystem means that while you can do everything with Adobe, there’s a lot more importing, exporting, and general switching between applications than feels intuitive for the solo filmmaker’s workflow.
Resolve also covers everything professionals require, including many next-gen features, like its neural engine and fantastic turnkey tracking—even the renders and analyses for smoothing footage seem to run much quicker. While both software include collaboration features, DaVinci’s feels smarter—similar to Avid. But time will tell as we use them a bit more.
Pricing
- Premiere: $22.99/month ($263.88/year).
- DaVinci: Free (95% of features) or a one-time $236 for Studio.
At the time of this recording, Premiere is $22.99 a month or $263.88 a year, which increases to $59.99 a month for access to the full range of Adobe apps.
DaVinci, on the other hand, is free! The free version includes 95% of its functionality. You can gain the rest for a one-time $236 purchase of Resolve Studio, which includes all the bells and whistles (like output in resolutions above 4k, GPU acceleration, noise reduction, lens correction, and more). But for most people, the free version will knock their socks off.
Is DaVinci Resolve Better Than Premiere Pro?
Premiere Pro will likely remain a standard video editing software, alongside Avid, for many projects because it’s what people know. Plus, it’s great for editors who are exactly that: editors who can hand their timelines off to post houses for the rest.
Switching to DaVinci will be a huge learning curve, but I’m pretty certain it’s the future of video editing. I am still learning, but it’s also becoming my new go-to editing software.
— Nick LaClair, SproutVideo Creative Director
So, which is better? Perhaps that isn’t the right question. Instead, how about “which is better for most people?” And by that, we mean small solo video production.
We’re partial to DaVinci Resolve. But, with a free version that’s hard to beat, try it out yourself and see if DaVinci Resolve fits your workflow better than Premiere Pro.
Stay tuned for more DaVinci how-to content coming soon. In the next episode, we’ll cover how to use DaVinci Resolve. Subscribe to our blog for that and many other valuable tips and tricks.
- The History of Video Editing Software—And Why DaVinci Resolve May Be The Future
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