Behind-The-Scenes: Shorter Games

Here's the timeline for the shorter games with worse graphics video!

You may notice it looks... a little different. And that's because I actually edited the entire thing within Davinci Resolve.

My space western video basically broke Premiere and nearly bricked my PC permanently, so I've finally gotten fed up with Adobe products and wanted to try something different. Resolve is a program I've heard a lot about, so I decided to make a whole video with it to see if I like it.

My Thoughts on Davinci Resolve

Resolve is very close to Premiere in many ways, so it was incredibly easy to learn. I basically just set up all my hotkeys the same way I had them in Premiere and 90% of the editing process was the same. Chopping, splicing, layering footage is extremely similar across most video editors, so I expected nothing major to change there.

I am very frustrated by the way that Resolve handles its UI though. Just as an example, you can look at keyframes. You open them up on each piece of footage instead of in their own window, which makes them very annoying to make changes to. And because the button to open the keyframes up is on the end of each piece of footage, it means I just kept clicking that button whenever I tried to trim the end of a clip. Which is not good design to me.

The Fairlight tab for audio editing seems pretty good, but Resolve's preset audio plugins are majorly lacking, so I couldn't get great vocals from them. I ended up having to process my vocals in Adobe Audition and then put them into Resolve, so in the future I might try to download plugins or something that can let me avoid using another program. If I can get good vocals out of Fairlight though, the convenience of keeping everything within Resolve is very appealing.

The Fusion tab is where things start to go crazy though. If you didn't know, Resolve basically has a VFX editor built into the software, accessible with one click into another tab. And it's node-based, which is very different from After Effects, but if you can figure it out you can do a lot of the same things you can in AE. I just used it for keying out my green screen and doing some of the text effects at the beginning of the video, but there's a lot of potential. And again, not having to switch to another program feels amazing.

The final thing to mention is the renderer. My main issue with Adobe that tipped me over the edge was not being able to render out my last video. It did everything from straight up failing to export to hard crashing my computer. And that video was pretty effects-heavy, but even normal renders from Adobe Media Encoder would take a long time and often had problems.

From Resolve though? The entire video exported in 10 minutes, with zero issues. I was actually surprised when I went to the bathroom and the render was done when I got back.

Overall, the whole program has so many things that make me like it infinitely more than the Adobe suite. Mainly, being able to do everything in one program is still so cool to me. Having Premiere, After Effects, and Audition open all at once was something I (and my computer) always hated.

However, Resolve does also have a bunch of really weird issues like keyframes being really finnicky or not having any hotkeys that let you scroll through the timeline without holding the middle mouse button. I think giving myself enough time to get used to its quirks might alleviate the issues, but learning the quirks is still a bit disappointing. Plus, the program did crash a couple times. Less than Premiere usually does, but it's still not perfect.

I'm going to be using Resolve going forward just to learn it, and see how it goes. If there's no issues, I'll probably stick with it. And by issues I mean a monumental amount of them, since I'm very fed up with Adobe and do not want to go back.