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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

Comparing usability/stability of premiere against anything is kind of putting your finger on the scale lol

Right, but it is the SOTA and the sort of poster boy of everything kdenlive competes with.

Resolve/Resolve Studio and FCPX have significant presences as well.

I’d say its closest “competitors” are really Resolve and iMovie (much more robust than iMovie but same market more or less) since anyone who’s doing this professionally is going to pay for Avid/Premiere/Resolve Studio/maybe FCPX and not use kdenlive. Resolve is more geared towards casual use and hobbyists, while still being powerful in its own right (and free, of course).

Premiere is a (finicky) subscription based professional tool. kdenlive will never be a replacement for that and doesn’t strike me as an attempt at one.

Is it? I'd say in the higher end that would be Media Composer.

Premiere is in the unique position of being the oldest video editing suite on the market - the first version was released in 1991! Much as with Photoshop, this sort of automatically makes it the gold standard.

Avid/1 was released in 1989. And there were others before it, although I think often on more proprietary or niche hardware (Avid/1 was Mac already).

Things like that: https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/lucasfilm-originals-the-editd...

I think Media Composer always had a lead in feature film / TV. It's possible Premiere Pro had a lead in other markets.

It used to be the "gold standard" but a while ago just about everything else ate its lunch.

Resolve has an amazing free-as-in-beer version and the fully paid for one is currently £225 - and that's it, you've bought it, no subscription. Adobe biffed that one.

For VFX you've got a separate app, Adobe After Effects, which was absolutely amazing, but Resolve uses a node-based VFX chain rather than AE's Photoshop-like layers. Now okay, if you're used to AE and layers then nodes are a steepish learning curve - but if you're already using Blender or Unreal Engine (and lots of VFX folk are) then it's a nice simple jump.

Resolve's training material is way better than Premiere's, too.

You alluded to this but it’s worth expanding this point a bit: Adobe wants you to pay for premiere, Lightroom, audition, after effects, etc. all separately too. One $300 USD purchase and you have resolve studio (premiere), fairlight (audition but admittedly not as feature rich/stable), fusion (after effects), and now photo (Lightroom, new though so probably not at its level yet), all in one software package. Plus BMD’s industry standard color tools.

The cost of an Adobe subscription just makes no sense to me anymore unless you’re a photographer or graphic designer primarily as BMD hasn’t replaced that pipeline (yet). For video and vfx work fusion is great. Anything more advanced in the animation/effects world and you’re leaving NLE’s entirely anyway.

Also let’s talk about Adobe cloud manager…

Edit: it would be ~$60/mo for the above in creative cloud. $720 a year.

Compositors like Nuke are also node-based.

It's almost like nodes are a better technique than layers for this sort of work, and AE was wrong all along... ;-)

Even if they were the oldest NLE, that does not automatically make them “the gold standard.”

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