all together I paid just shy of ten
thousand dollars a year for Adobe software a fact of which I am painfully
reminded every time my editors complain that adobe still doesn't have a decent
HDR workflow and that they straight up crash whatever they feel like it
now that wasn't always the case once upon a time when you paid for
software you owned a Perpetual license to use it before the dark times
before software as a service
but there is a light in this dark dark world
not every company has embraced the trend
of charging for their software by the month so I challenged my team to find
out by editing the production you're watching right now if we can make videos
without touching a single pay forever
app so that means no Adobe and what that
would be like so have we freed ourselves then from the
clutches of adobe well it's complicated
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let's begin with ingesting our camera
footage while Adobe does have prelude for this I don't think many people
actually use it it's clunky and it doesn't offer many advantages over just
dragging your Clips straight into Premiere kind of on the other hand is
lightweight supports a wide array of codecs and file types and is excellent
at managing batch processes like transcoding or file renaming once you've
logged and organized your footage a right-click action can bring it straight
into the nle of your choice AKA your video editing program
unlike Prelude kaino isn't Project based
it's essentially like a special file browser custom tailored towards editors
and the drill down function is awesome it lets you see all the video audio or
image files in that drive or folder no matter which subfolder they're in which
is especially useful when you're dealing with memory cards from different cameras
or recorders which might have different folder structures and it's way better
than using finder I get the features of both but it's as simple as just opening
up file explorer it's friggin sweet and the difference between their billing
approach and adobe's is that if you decide you don't need updates you can
keep using the software after the support period ends this is looking
great so far then again we were already using kaino so that wasn't much of a
stretch next up is our non-linear editor or nle we actually had a couple of
options here with the main ones being Vegas Pro Avid media composer and
DaVinci Resolve let's start with Vegas because it has a customizable UI similar
to Premiere Pro even if it does feel a little bit old school
the audio editing Tools in Vegas Pro are actually pretty similar to Premiere but
the lack of auditions Dynamic linking is
a clear downgrade that means that you have to send audio from Vegas over to a
dedicated audio editor then pull it back in then there's the limited
functionality when it comes to working with multiple sequences within a single
project because well you can't do that now Vegas recently added the ability to
work with nested sequences but it's a
janky solution involving having a separate project in your timeline so
suffice to say despite my personal liking for it we're not going to be
pulling the lever on this one that's a Vegas joke
as for Avid well honestly it's kind of part of the same category we're trying
to get away from Avid Adobe Pro Tools
these are the industry Giants that have
robust feature sets but also have equally robust pricing Avid is also much
better suited to a more traditional film style workflow where you might have
multiple editors editing assistants colorists and VFX artists working on the
same project we and most other YouTube
content creators usually have one or two editors at most handling all aspects of
a production which is why the way that adobe's apps all dynamically link to
each other without having to export anything is almost as awesome as this
shirt from ltdstore.com then there's DaVinci Resolve it's cheap
there's even a free version of it and it's got great performance along with
what are arguably the best color rating controls in any of the programs we've
mentioned including Premiere it also has built-in audio editing with fairlight
and built-in effects tools with Fusion you can have multiple sequences and
nested sequences in one project making it well make a bit more sense for people
who are used to Premiere resolve seems to be our best option so that's what
we're going to be using to edit the video you're currently enjoying it's
kind of a few slick takes on some standard things like with trimming Clips
or slip edits the way it provides visual feedback makes it a lot easier to do
than with premiere color grading is great because you have a ton of control
over everything and because resolve is so GPU accelerated playback performance
is fantastic even with color grades or some effects it's all just pretty smooth
it's not perfect though since there's this issue where you run out of GPU
memory and you have to restart resolve from what I can tell the only real
solution is to throw more gpus at it learning how to use resolve is kind of a
steep curve because of its unusual layout which I honestly find a bit
annoying because you can't really customize it besides resizing panels of
it you can turn them on or off but you can't undock them and move them around
so really you're stuck with the basic layout you can use more than one monitor
but again you can't choose what goes where and you have to disable full
screen mode before you can even minimize or resize the main window why
just why at least the price is right though
anyway as we said resolves audio editing
module is called fairlight and it's great for cutting and mixing audio but
compared to Adobe Audition or other digital audio workstations like Pro
Tools logic and Cubase it's fairly light
on the features get it we don't do that much audio
processing besides some level adjustments and if we do fairlight does
support many of the same plugins as audition plus we're used to audition
being able to dynamically link with Premiere Pro so the fact that fairlight
is essentially part of resolve is a huge
plus and how much does this one cost per month
really wow the situation is similar for Motion
Graphics Vegas effects would be a decent option here if we had gone with Vegas
Pro for our nle because they actually do have Sun linking functionality similar
to adobe's apps but we didn't because while Vegas
effects has some of the same functionality as Adobe After Effects and
it is comparatively easy to use it is just nowhere near as capable Fusion on
the other hand is an interesting candidate particularly for compositing
but while Fusion's node-based system makes it an excellent choice for
compositing and special effects once you get the hang of the interface that is
Motion Graphics is kind of over complicated compared to doing it in
After Effects you can use Fusion as a tab within resolve but if you need some
more flexibility you can also use a standalone Fusion studio app which can
be activated with the same license you bought for resolve you know this is
going great so far I am going to save so
much money finally there's image editors and as it turns out well there's a
reason that photoshop has become the kleenex of well photoshopping stuff I
mean there's Vegas image which comes with Vegas effects in a package but it's
I don't know it's less of a Photoshop alternative and more like a unique and
confusing blend of After Effects and Lightroom so we'll be going with a
program called Affinity photo it doesn't have the latest Photoshop
bells and whistles and it doesn't do non-destructive raw image editing for
some reason but for 95 of the stuff that
people normally do with Photoshop it's actually pretty dang good as long as you
don't need to collaborate with Photoshop users and while you can export to PSD
there are conversion issues though they say that the next major version will fix
these and the way that layers masks and
effects work takes a bit of getting used to although the intuitiveness of the UI
certainly helps for illustrator type tasks there's also Affinity designer and
the story here is much the same it can open Illustrator files but can't save
them and it's tracing and Pathfinder features are weaker but overall it'll
get the job done so that's it we did it
we edited a video start to finish without Adobe
but are we gonna keep this Liberation train going and swear off them for good
no we're actually going to crawl straight back to them and here's why
first up the size of their app library is unparalleled whether you're creating
videos with effects audio image documents web pages
there's an app for that and in today's age where many creators are one man or
woman bands instead of having a dip for ingesting an assistant editor for
logging an editor for cutting a designer an animator for graphics and so on and
so on and so on a single ecosystem is
very attractive even if its bugs occasionally make the biblical plague of
locusts look like not that big of a deal second up is intercompatibility for
better for worse pretty much everybody else uses Adobe and nobody likes to be
that guy who sends the weird file formats that nobody else can open the
thing is you don't get to pick who you're doing business with and not
everybody out there in the great wider world has the tech savvy or the
willingness to deal with your snowflake file format and guys it's a creative
industry collaboration is a big part of it finally I realize it's been mentioned
a couple times already but the way that adobe's apps dynamically link with each
other drastically cuts down on the time that you would otherwise spend saving
exporting editing and then importing
files between your apps so I asked our
team how close they think we could get to Creative Suite levels of efficiency
and the highest number that I got back was as much as 90 percent
on the face of it that sounds pretty good that's an A but let's do some
napkin math here the average video editor in the United States makes about
29 an hour we've got seven of those so
assuming that we were paying those rates our editing staff would cost us about
four twenty thousand dollars a year nice
so then if we were to slash their productivity by ten percent by taking
away their preferred software as a cost saving measure we would need to either
cut our 17 video per week production schedule costing the company revenue or
we would need to hire to cover that difference costing the company over
forty thousand dollars a year plus the
extra space we'd need in the building extra editing workstation I think you
see where I'm going with this I mean we're not saying that using Vegas or
resolve or even some of the awesome free
editing tools out there like hitfilm Express aren't going to work for you
we're just saying that even if it does feel a little bit like Stockholm
syndrome Adobe continues to be our best option
for now
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watching guys if you enjoyed this video you might enjoy one of our other behind
the scenes workflow videos where we talked about parsec the software that
we've been using to edit videos on our workstations at the office from home so
that we can isolate and all that good stuff