I occasionally use iMovie to create fun movies mostly for me and the family. On a scale of 1 - 10, I’m probably a 6 when it comes to being able to use the app comfortably, but it’s taken me a while to get there.
I’ve seen Adobe Premiere in action, but wasn’t able to get any sort of tutorial on how it works.
Can anyone offer some insight on the app? It seems much more powerful than iMovie. Does that mean the learning curve is much greater?
I’m not a user of Premier or Final Cut Pro, but I know people who are frequent users. Here’s what I know.
Adobe Premiere requires a monthly subscription or a paid add on to a Creative Cloud subscription. Final Cut Pro is a one time purchase. In the long term, FCP will probably save lots of money.
And another very highly regarded freebie is DaVinci Resolve. They have free and paid versions:
Have you tried Adobe’s Premiere Pro tutorials page?
There’s also a version of Premiere (Premiere Elements) that is aimed at home users.
I switched from Adobe Premiere Elements to the free version of DaVinci Resolve a few years ago. The free version does what I need.
Echoing what others have said, Final Cut Pro X and Premiere and daVinci Resolve are all pro editors and each considerably extends what you can do over iMovie. They’re all great, Final Cut is my goto.
If you’re looking for something in between you might consider Filmora from Wondershare, it’s very approachable but can do a good deal more than iMovie. It has both a subscription and a perpetual license option. You can use it for free but it exports with a watermark and the upselling will irritate. The developer has gone all in on AI and I’ve yet to evaluate that. My students enjoy it, I find it generally good, recommended.
$300 for Final Cut Pro is a bit out of my range now. I’d need to prove to myself (and my wife!) that I’d get my money’s worth out if.
I didn’t know about Premiere Elements. I’ll take a look.
Tommy Weir - can you give me an idea about the ease - or difficulty - of FCP? One thing I like about it is that it’s part of the Apple family.
If you are familiar with iMovie then FCP will have some immediate ease of use. The approach to software design Apple took, having advanced features only become visible when sought or needed, is something which separates it from Premiere Pro, where features are all there. This suits some, not others, but does mean that onboarding from iMovie is relatively easy. There’s a ton of stuff online regarding training, for structured courses Ripple Training is recommended, Larry Jordan a veteran, some decent stuff on LinkedIn Learning too. And while you can scour YouTube for help as needed, I recommend training, it will certainly deepen use and reveal those advanced features and what you can do with them.
But it sounds to me that you don’t have pro requirements, that it is not for work, but nonetheless you enjoy editing and would like to do more. A bridge application to the pro tier might be a better choice, like Premiere Elements or Filmora or DaVinci free tier, certainly cheaper too. I would download and trail, see what you think.
There’s good information here. Thank you.