Comparing Editing in DaVinci Resolve to Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro

[Disclaimer: I purchased Resolve Studio 19 specifically for editing these interviews and writing this article.]

This spring, I decided to edit the video interviews I did at the 2025 NAB Show in Las Vegas using DaVinci Resolve 19. There were several reasons for this, I wanted to:

• Learn the program better, especially under deadline pressure
• Use its speech-to-text features to find highlights
• Take advantage of audio mixing in Fairlight
• Use the color resources of the Color page
• Test its speed against that of Premiere and Final Cut

NOTE: Use of speech-to-text requires the paid version of Resolve Studio.

For this project, I recorded 62 interviews using two Sony cameras recording 1080p H.264 media. I decided against recording 4K or Log due to deadlines. I’m editing using my M2 Max Mac Studio with an 8 TB ThunderBlade SSD RAID. While my editing is on-going – I have 35 interviews completed, with 27 more to go – I have lots of reactions.

NOTE: This article highlights what I learned as I edited these interviews in DaVinci Resolve 19.  THIS article shows how we recorded our interviews at the show. And THIS article describes the gear we used.

THE GOOD

• Performance is smooth, with very few crashes – two so far, both during export.
• The smooth, instant switching between Edit, Fairlight and Color pages using keyboard shortcuts continually amazes me.
• While I don’t know Fairlight as well as I know Adobe Audition, with several  exceptions, I can achieve similar results.
• Keyboard shortcuts emulate those in Final Cut Pro 7 and are similar to Premiere.
• While I know the Cut page was designed for simplicity, I prefer editing using the Edit page. Its harder to learn, but more powerful once you do.

Overall, once I figured out how Resolve works – which took a couple of days – I’m enjoying how the program works.

All three NLEs – Final Cut, Premiere, Resolve – provide industry-leading image and audio quality. While interfaces differ, the quality of their exports is outstanding.

COMPARISONS & PROBLEMS

Final Cut is still, hands-down, the fastest, easiest, and most “fun” to use. Resolve is solidly in second, with Premiere trailing behind. FCP’s batch exports are outstanding for both speed and flexibility; Resolve should take notes. Motion shows the world how to create Motion graphics easily and its integration with FCP is unparalleled. Multicam editing is state of the art and no other app can touch its speed. FCP’s single purchase price is also a plus.

Final Cut’s major weaknesses are totally inadequate audio mixing and the lack of speech-to-text conversion. Yes, we can  export audio to ProTools or use third-party text conversion tools, but Premiere and Resolve have far superior audio tools as part of the native application.

Premiere’s strengths are the user-accessible depth of its tools and its integration with all the other Adobe apps. The quality of its speech-to-text is far – FAR – superior to Resolve, and, while render and export speeds are slow, its editing performance is fine.

Premiere’s major weaknesses are stability and subscription pricing.

Resolves strengths are its industry state-of-the-art Color page, the easy integration of editing, audio, color grading and export, its continued, aggressive development from Blackmagic Design, the depth of its features and its single purchase price.

Resolves weaknesses are its complexity (a trade-off with depth of features), integration problems between Edit and Fairlight pages, batch exports, and Fusion. (Fusion, I’m sure, is great. But we need something understandable by mere humans for animated titles.)

RESOLVE IN DETAIL

After editing 35 ten-minute interviews, here’s what kept bothering me about Resolve.

EDITING

The quality of speech-to-text is really poor. I totally applaud Resolve’s use of local AI processing. I appreciate the security and privacy that provides. Unlike Premiere, Resolve does not send audio files up to the cloud. But, at best, I’m seeing 60-70% accuracy, with entire sentences being dropped and speaker recognition is totally hit-or-miss. This level of quality is OK, perhaps, for guiding a rough cut. But it is certainly insufficient quality to send to a client/producer/associate or for archiving.

Additionally, while I was initially hoping that, once transcripts were created, I could search across multiple projects, to find clips that I need, Resolve does not support this. It does support searching across multiple clips or multiple timelines provided both are in the same project and both are selected prior to starting the search.

Resolve locks frame rates by project. Worse, it locks frame rates based upon the first clip you import into the Media Pool. Unlike Premiere and FCP, which lock frame rates when you add a clip to the timeline, Resolve does so much earlier in the process. The easiest way to fix an incorrect frame rate is to delete the existing project and start over.

It is critical that the first clip I import has the correct frame rate. It took me a few days to get into this habit.

There seems to be no way to set a default preset for frame rate. Resolve defaults to 24 fps. I always shoot 30 fps.

There seems to be no way to change the default timeline setting of four video tracks and 2 audio tracks. While you can create audio tracks after the timeline is created, why can’t this default be settable? Or, use the settings from the last timeline? Or a preference?

There seems to be no way to build a project template.

Whenever a new project is created, Resolve opens to the Cut page. However, I can’t edit until I import something first. Yes, I can import on the Cut page, but the Media Pool is MUCH! better. I’d like a preference that allows me to choose which page opens when a new project is created.

EXPORTING

Every interview has three versions which are identical except for the closing slide: 1. My website, 2. YouTube, 3. Creative Cow (which hasn’t started posting yet). Exporting a project requires that I configure the export settings (there’s no way that I’ve discovered to create a preset), click a button to send that export to the Render engine, then render the file. While FCP is easier, Resolve is not awful… except: Once that file is in the Render Engine, if I go back to the timeline and change the slide, so I can add the second version into the render queue, the first version is changed.

In other words, changing anything in the timeline after a project is loaded into the render queue, changes the file in the render queue. Unlike Final Cut, where I can queue up multiple versions of the same timeline, Resolve can’t handle that. This means I need to wait for each version to export before making changes. Grrr….

Data burn-in is an easy way to add watermarks to an entire project. But, if Data burn-in is opened from the Deliver page, rather than the Edit page, formatting of the watermark is lost.

FUSION & TITLES

I was SHOCKED to discover that a Fusion title – Simple Box 2-lines Lower – does not support accented characters! For example, ü or é. The font “Open Sans” has the characters, but the title can’t display them. I thought all text handling was done by the OS, why is Fusion so restricted?

Thinking of Fusion – which is impossible to learn without reading an 800-page manual – there needs to be a MUCH!! easier way to add drop shadows to text than taking a title into Fusion and trying to figure out how to add a drop shadow. Lower thirds need two lines of text, drop shadows, a background with variable colors and opacity and some design element. It should not require Fusion to modify or create.

Resolve would be much nicer to use if we had more “business-like,” tasteful, animated lower-third titles. In other words, unlike FCP, design the titles for grown-ups.

The difficulties of working with lower thirds are almost enough to avoid using the application for interviews or documentary work.

FAIRLIGHT

Unlike Audition, there is no way to lock audio tracks in Fairlight to prevent them from shifting position horizontally. This means it is very easy to move an audio clip out of sync with video.

I don’t think it is possible to create an audio template in Fairlight. For example, all my interviews use three tracks – two mono and one stereo. Each mono track has a default dynamic setting, EQ setting and effects setting. The effects processing order is changed the same way on each track. It would be nice to set this as a preset/template/pattern to save time setting up an edit. I can do this in Audition, but not Fairlight.

If I could create templates, I could use Fairlight to record my audio books.

Fairlight can’t handle multiple audio tracks in a multicam clip. In my edit, I have two video clips and two, separate, audio clips for each edit, plus music. If I build these into a multicam clip, the audio tracks are not editable in Fairlight.

I have not found a way to sync the playhead position in Fairlight to the current playhead position in the Edit page timeline. For example, as I’m editing, I hear a loud pop. I want to quickly switch to Fairlight and get rid of the pop, but the Fairlight playhead is nowhere near the same position. It takes a lot of searching – even using the red bar in the bottom scroll bar – to find the playhead. Too much time, in fact.

Thinking of removing pops, nlike Audition, it is very difficult to select a small, sub-frame, section of an audio clip to get rid of a pop. First, a default preference locking audio edits to frame boundaries needs to be turned off. Next, you need to significantly zoom into the audio clip. Third, you need to select the correct audio tool. Fourth, you need to drag from the top of the clip, though the waveform you need to select is in the middle of the clip. Then, after you press the Delete key, you discover you haven’t zoomed in enough. Repeat.

It would be GREAT if we could apply whatever magic the Deliver page uses to normalize audio to match the specs of YouTube as a setting in Fairlight. This one feature – creating “YouTube perfect” audio – was the main reason I chose to edit these interviews in Resolve.

Fairlight needs the same audio clip analysis that Audition provides. I use that feature after exporting every mix to make sure I don’t have any distortion or clipped frames and that my loudness levels are in spec. I DO like Fairlight’s audio meters that measure average levels and are settable to YouTube settings.

SUMMARY

Yeah, there’s a lot here. Does that mean we should not use Resolve? No. Not at all.

The Color page is beyond amazing. While Fairlight needs love from people who know video editing, it essentially equals Adobe Audition and blows the doors off Final Cut.

Once you get over the learning curve, the speed of editing in Resolve is essentially the same as FCP or Premiere. FCP is still fastest for multicam, renders and exports.

I view this experience very positively. There is far more to like than dislike in Resolve. But, if these features are important to you, you need to know they are there. And, if we are lucky, perhaps Blackmagic will decide to look at some of these more carefully.

As always, share your thoughts in the comments.

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