Premiere Pro vs DaVinci Resolve

Choose your champion in the battle of the big video-editing apps

- IAN EVENDEN

TWO GREAT TITANS enter the arena. Only one will leave triumphant. These kinds of multi-camera, effects-laden scenes are precisely what Adobe’s Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve were designed to cope with, and it also neatly describes the battle between pro-level non-linear video editing apps. There must be a word for that.

There’s room in this arena for both contenders, however. Nobody has to get hurt. In the red corner we find Premiere Pro, the shinobi from Adobe, famous for work such as Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Sharknado 2: The Second One. Meanwhile, in the blue corner sits Australia’s finest, DaVinci Resolve, fresh from working on Deadpool 2, The Last Jedi, and 35 films at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival you’ve never heard of.

This month we’re comparing nonlinear video editors. This is a type of editing in which the original footage isn’t altered in any way. Edits are kept in the form of companion files generated by specialized software, and on playback the edited video is recreated from a combination of these files and the original source files. This means that the finished movie must be exported as a new file in order to share it or play it back on a different device. It sounds complex, but it’s the way most video-editing apps work. You’ll need a fast PC, a high-resolution monitor, and a large amount of fast storage to work effectively this way.