Resolve vs Premier? (Windows)

E

ectobuilder

Veteran
I'm sure this has been talked about a lot.

But why choose one over the other?

Off the top of my head I'm guessing that Resolve's advantage would be support for true 32-bit and native support for pro-res?
 
Resolve reads, but does not write Prores on Windows PC's. It writes Quicktime if you have it installed, but Apple is not supporting that on PC anymore and there are some security risks. Minor if you don't use QT player and browser plugins. It does fully support DNXHD/HR. It supports Cineform if you install the GoPro free app for the codecs. Resolve takes a lot more processing power to run as an editor than Premiere needs. It does not handle audio as well as Premiere. But for color grading, especially color managed workflows with the newest beta release, it is tops.
If you have a suitable computer Resolve is worth giving a try, it's free. I use it for grading and transcoding, but not editing. Others tell me the editor is much improved in the newest release.
Resolve runs adequately on my workstation, but I consider it the absolute bare bones minimum needed.
1150 page instruction manual and a steep learning curve.

i7-4770K on an Asrock thunderbolt mb. OC'd to 4GHZ.
16GB 1866 ram
GTX760 2GB 256 bit GPU
 
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ectobuilder said:
But why choose one over the other?
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The biggie of course is the rental vs. owning model. That's been discussed in plenty of threads here and all over the 'net. Search away.

The big problem I have with Adobe's software is that it's a miss-mash of only quasi-integrated software. Yes, you can shove projects back and forth between PPro and AE, etc. But each programs has its own interface and workflow. What you learn climbing the learning curves for PPro doesn't help you much at all with the learning curves for AE and the other products. The best you can say is that they are loosely integrated, which reflects how they came to be -- mostly, Abobe bought them from startups and shoved them into the Adobe lineup.

BMD is doing more in-house development, and expanding a single piece of software to do more and more things. This is just a different philosophy of software development. And it results in a different set of learning curves and a different workflow. But also a more unified user interface experience.

I'm just sayin' that it's difficult if not impossible to compare NLEs. It really comes down to personal preference. You need to find the tools that work the way you want them to work -- so you spend time building videos and not fighting your tools.

Me? I find myself spending way too much time fighting Adobe's tools. I'm about ready to move to BMD myself. Soon.
 
Bruce Watson said:
BMD is doing more in-house development, and expanding a single piece of software to do more and more things. This is just a different philosophy of software development. And it results in a different set of learning curves and a different workflow. But also a more unified user interface experience.
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True, but they have also pulled an Adobe. BMD bought Resolve, and it had basic conform capabilities. All they've done is expanded and refined that part of the interface to add editing. If you want to emulate the Premiere/AE paradigm, you need Fusion as well, which they also bought from another company. And the interfaces between Resolve and Fusion are just as different as PP and AE. I think that at least for some time, this is the way things will be.

But what's cool is that also gives us the flexibility to create the workflow that's best for us. All the apps play pretty well with each other these days, and even when they don't (like going from Avid to Nuke) there is usually a solution that makes it work (Avid to Resolve, Resolve to Nuke)

Me? I find myself spending way too much time fighting Adobe's tools. I'm about ready to move to BMD myself. Soon.
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Definitely agree. I downgraded to the photography package finally and it's been awesome. Smartest move I made was getting away from Premiere and After Effects.
 
OP: If you're looking for an NLE, you need to factor in hardware and what kind of footage you're editing too. Resolve, as an editor, requires top of the line hardware to edit even DSLR files. For grading though it's excellent. As much as I have a disdain for Adobe, Premiere would be a pretty good choice if you're looking for your first NLE. It runs better on a range of systems, and in the upcoming update there are new features that make an offline/online workflow stupid easy. The biggest drawback to Premiere is stability. Some people have no problems, but a lot of us have nothing but crashes. My work computer is a Mac Pro trashcan, and my home computer is a nice laptop, less than a year old. Premiere crashes regularly on both.

Look into Avid, especially if you're wanting to do narrative films. It's been nothing but stable for me in the year or so that I've been using it and it integrates well with Resolve for grading.
 
El Director said:
OP: If you're looking for an NLE, you need to factor in hardware and what kind of footage you're editing too. Resolve, as an editor, requires top of the line hardware to edit even DSLR files. For grading though it's excellent. As much as I have a disdain for Adobe, Premiere would be a pretty good choice if you're looking for your first NLE. It runs better on a range of systems, and in the upcoming update there are new features that make an offline/online workflow stupid easy. The biggest drawback to Premiere is stability. Some people have no problems, but a lot of us have nothing but crashes. My work computer is a Mac Pro trashcan, and my home computer is a nice laptop, less than a year old. Premiere crashes regularly on both.

Look into Avid, especially if you're wanting to do narrative films. It's been nothing but stable for me in the year or so that I've been using it and it integrates well with Resolve for grading.
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In terms of the "top of the line hardware" this is where I am struggling to understand how much I need to spend on a PC.

Currently I've identified $15,000 as the top end (40-ish cores CPU, 80 threads, 512GB RAM, Intel P3600 NVMe SSD's, GTX 1080 x 2). Is this overkill? How would you describe "top end"?
 
ectobuilder said:
But why choose one over the other?
Click to expand...

Though most people won't admit it, I think the fact that it is free is overwhelmingly the reason many people are using it. Resolve really gained a bit of traction when the Magic Lantern hack allowed RAW on the 5DmkIII because it was one of the few programs that played nicely with the .dng sequences.

Feature wise, Premiere offers a lot more but Resolve is much better for coloring.
 
ectobuilder said:
In terms of the "top of the line hardware" this is where I am struggling to understand how much I need to spend on a PC.

Currently I've identified $15,000 as the top end (40-ish cores CPU, 80 threads, 512GB RAM, Intel P3600 NVMe SSD's, GTX 1080 x 2). Is this overkill? How would you describe "top end"?
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I don't know your workload but I use a home build pc intel 7i 5820K with 32 RAM, nvidea 970 lots of ssd. This is enough to run Resolve without much problems. Most important part is to use the files Resolve cab handle (not mp3 but wav, not dji3 footage but dnhdx).
 
Thanks for posting. When I have to move from CS6, I'll be moving away from adobe so I'm looking at alternatives.
 
Use both, I'm lucky enough to have both. I likes the qualifier, denoiser, sharpness, features that resolve has over premiere. Both have their pros and cons, but having both is great.
 
Cineform is now an open source SMPTE standard (VC5) liked DNXHD. There is no licensing for it. Third party transcoding utilities support all three major mezzanine codecs on PC. The free GoPro app includes GoPro studio and the codec package on both Windows and Mac. But it is limited in the range of codecs it imports for conversion, mainly supporting GoPro camera formats.
Raw for Pro converts CDNG and JPEG frame stacks to Cineform or Prores. Footage Studio 4k, my current favorite transcoding utility, supports all three and is fully up to date with support for current 4k resolution video codecs too.
I've switched to Cineform for the most part as my intermediate DI codec. It runs very well in Lightworks.
Resolve requires significantly beefier hardware to run well for editing compared to Premiere or Lightworks.

I like Lightworks better than any NLE I've used so far. It originated more than 20 years ago as the first NLE dedicated to editing feature film DI's from film scans. Its workflow and interface was designed to suit film editors. Coming from an ancient background of cutting 16mm film on Steenbecks and Moviolas, Lightworks just clicked for me.
It will run efficiently on relatively modest hardware IF you edit high quality i-frame DI codecs. At its current stage of evolution it does not handle highly compressed AVC codecs consistently well.

Cineform is the most modern of the mezzanine codecs, based on a JPEG 2000 wavelet transform vs the MPEG-2 DCT base for Prores and DNXD. Cineform codecs align pretty well with comparable levels of Prores:

Cineform Low Cq1 = Prores LT
Cineform Medium Cq2 = Prores Standard
Cineform High Cq3 = Prores HQ
Cinform Filmscan1 Cq4 = Prores YUV 10 bit 4:4:4
Cineform Filmscan2 Cq5 = Prores RGB 4:4:4:4 12 or 16 bit (source dependent).

All of the lower grade Cineform codecs are 10 bit 4:2:2 with varying degrees of intraframe compression. Cq1 "low" is a 113Mbps codec at 1080p.
 
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