WHY do I pay Adobe $10K a YEAR!?

- In total, I pay just under $10,000 a

year

for Adobe software. A fact I'm painfully reminded of every time my editors complain that Adobe still doesn't have a decent HDR workflow and that they fail whenever they feel like it. Now, that wasn't always the case. Once upon a time, when you paid for software, you had 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 all companies have adopted the trend of charging for their software per 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 permanent paid app.

That means no Adobe and what that would be like. Have we freed ourselves from Adobe's clutches then? Well, it's complicated. You know what's not complicated? If you should consult our sponsor. Origin PC's new ready-to-ship EVO16-S transmitter bundle ships in one to two business days and comes with multiple streaming accessories and a 250-gig Samsung 960 EVO M.2 boot drive for fast loading times . Get more information at the next link. (upbeat music) Let's start by ingesting the images from our camera. While Adobe has Prelude for this, I don't think many people use it. It's complicated and doesn't offer many advantages over simply dragging clips directly into Premiere.

Kyno, on the other hand, is lightweight, supports a wide range of codecs and file types, and is great for managing batch processes like transcoding or file renaming. Once you've recorded and organized your footage, a right-click action can take you directly to the NLE of your choice. - Also known as your video editing program. Unlike Prelude, Kyno is not project-based, it's essentially like a special file explorer, customized for editors and the drill-down feature is amazing. Allows you to view all video, audio or image files on that drive or folder, no matter which subfolder they are in, which is especially useful when dealing with memory cards from different cameras or recorders that may have different folder structures . - And it's much better than using Finder.

I understand the features of both, but it's as simple as opening file explorer. It's fucking sweet. - And the difference between your billing approach and Adobe's is that if you decide you don't need updates, you can continue using that software after the support period ends. - This looks very good so far. Then again, we were already using Kyno, so it wasn't a huge stretch. Next is our non-linear editor or NLE. We actually had a couple of options here, the main ones being Vegas Pro, Avid Media Composer and Da Vinci Resolve. Let's start with Vegas because it has a customizable user interface, similar to Premiere Pro, although it looks a little old school.

Vegas Pro's audio editing tools are quite similar to Premiere's, but Audition's lack of dynamic linking is a clear downgrade. That means you have to send audio from Vegas to a dedicated audio editor and then input it back. Then there's the limited functionality when it comes to working with multiple streams 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 silly solution, which involves having a separate project on your timeline. Suffice to say, even though I like it personally, we're going to pull the lever on this one.

That's a Las Vegas joke. As for Avid, honestly, it's part of the same category that we're trying to get away from. Avid, Adobe, Pro Tools, these are the industry giants that have solid feature sets but also equally solid prices. Avid is also much better suited to a more traditional film style workflow, where it is possible to have multiple editors, assistant editors, colorists and visual effects artists working on the same project. We, and most other YouTube content creators, typically have one or two editors, at most, handling all aspects of a production, so the way all Adobe apps link together dynamically each other, without having to export anything, is almost as amazing. this shirt from lttstore.com.

Then there's Da Vinci Resolve. It's cheap, there's even a free version, and it has excellent performance, along with arguably the best color grading controls in any of the programs we've mentioned, including Premiere. It also has integrated audio editing with Fairlight and integrated effects tools with Fusion. You can have multiple sequences and nested sequences in a project, which makes it make a little more sense for people who are used to Premiere. Resolve seems to be our best option, so that's what we'll use to edit the video you're currently enjoying. - (mumbles) some clever takes on some standard stuff, like trimming clips or editing slides.

The way it provides visual information makes it much easier to do than with Premiere. Color grading is great because you have so much control over everything. And because Resolve is so GPU accelerated, playback performance is fantastic. Even with color grading or some effects, everything is quite fluid. It's not perfect though, as there is an issue where you run out of GPU memory and have to restart Resolve. As far as I can tell, the only real solution is to throw more GPUs at it. Learning how to use Resolve is quite a steep curve due to its unusual layout, which I honestly find a bit annoying because you can't customize it other than changing the size of the panels.

You can turn them on or off, but you can't undock or move them, so you're really 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 turn off full screen mode before you can minimize or resize the main window. - Because? Just because? At least the price is right. Anyway, as we said, Resolve's 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 Qbase, its features are quite light.

Get it? - We don't do much audio processing other than some level adjustments. And if we do, Fairlight supports many of the same plugins as Audition. Additionally, we're used to Audition being able to link dynamically with Premiere Pro, so the fact that Fairlight is essentially part of Resolve is a big plus. - And how much does this cost per month? Actually? Wow. The situation is similar at Ocean Graphics. Vegas Effects would be a decent option here, if we had gone with Vegas Pro for our NLE, because they actually have some linking functionality, similar to Adobe apps.

But we didn't because, while Vegas Effects has some of the same features as Adobe After Effects and is comparatively easy to use, it's not as capable. Fusion, on the other hand, is an interesting candidate, particularly for compositing. - But while Fusion's node-based system makes it a great choice for compositing and special effects, once you get the hang of the interface, motion graphics are a little too complicated compared to doing it in After Effects. You can use Fusion as a tab within Resolve, but if you need more flexibility, you can also use the standalone Fusion Studio app, which can be activated with the same license you purchased for Resolve. - You know, this is going very well so far.

I'm going to save a lot of money. Finally, there are image editors and, it turns out, there's a reason why Photoshop has become the Kleenex of photoshop stuff. I mean, there's Vegas Image, which comes with Vegas Effects in one package, but it's... I don't know, it's less of an alternative to Photoshop and more of a unique and confusing combination of After Effects and Lightroom. So we'll use a program called Affinity Photo. It doesn't have the latest in Photoshop, and for some reason it does non-destructive raw image editing, but for 95% of the things people typically do with Photoshop, it's actually pretty good. - As long as you don't need to collaborate with Photoshop users.

And although you can export to PSD, there are conversion problems. Although they say the next major version will fix them. And it takes a little time to get used to the way layers, masks and effects work, although the intuitiveness of the user interface certainly helps. For illustrator type tasks, there is also Affinity Designer and the story here is very similar. It can open Illustrator files but can't save them, and its tracking and pathfinding features are weaker. But overall, it will get the job done. - So that's it, we did it! We edit a video, from start to finish, without Adobe.

But are we going to keep this liberation train moving and give them up forever? No, actually we're going to go right back to them and here's why. First, the size of its app library is unparalleled; Whether you're creating videos with effects, audio, images, documents, or web pages, there's an app for that. And in today's era, where many creators are one-man or all-female bands rather than having a dit to ingest, such as assistant editor for recording, editor for cutting, designer, animator for graphics, etc., etc. So on, a single ecosystem is very attractive, even if its insects occasionally make the biblical plague of locusts seem like no big deal.

Second is intercompatibility. For better or worse, almost everyone uses Adobe and no one likes to be that guy who sends strange file formats that no one else can open. The thing is, you can't choose who you're doing business with and not everyone in the big wide world has the technological savvy or 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 already been mentioned a couple of times, but the way Adobe applications dynamically link together dramatically reduces the time you would otherwise spend saving, exporting, editing, and then importing files between your applications.

So I asked our team how close they think we could get to creative suite efficiency levels and the highest number I got was "Up to 90%." At first glance, that sounds pretty good. That's an A. But let's do some napkin math here. The average video editor in the United States earns around $29 per hour. We have seven of those. So assuming we paid those fees, our editing staff would cost us about $420,000 a

year

. Nice. So if we were to reduce their productivity by 10% by taking away their preferred software as a cost-saving measure, we would need to cut our production schedule from 17 videos per week, which would cost the company revenue, or we would need to hire to cover that difference. , which costs the company more than $40,000 a year.

Also, the additional space we would need in the building, the additional 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 though it may seem a bit like Stockholm syndrome, Adobe is still our best option. For now. Like our top choice for our sponsor for this video is Corsair. The Dark Core RGB Gaming Mouse has three different ways to connect to your PC.

Ultra-fast 2.4 GHz, one-millisecond wireless connection. Bluetooth low latency, which is compatible with a wide range of devices. And of course, wired USB for all-day use. It has a Pixart PAW3392 18000 DPI optical sensor. It features Qi wireless charging and has interchangeable side grips for a perfect fit. Oh, and of course it's Corsair. There is dynamic RGB backlighting and customization with Corsair IQ. I mean, how could you have a Corsair product without RGB? So check it out at the link in the video description. Thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy one of our other behind-the-scenes workflow videos where we talk about Parsec, the software we've been using to edit videos on our home office workstations, so we can isolate and all that good stuff.