I worked as a professional video editor until 2014. How much has changed since then?
Title.
This is my machine:
- OS: Windows 10
- Video editing software: Adobe Premiere
- Display (ED320QR S): 1920x1080 @ 144 Hz in 28" [External]
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G (8) @ 3.60 GHz
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 12GB [Discrete]
- Memory: 64 GiB (7%)
- 1TB NVME SSD (I can't get the info right now on Linux, but it's a very good SSD)
I am looking into getting back into video editing for my personal projects.
My program of choice was and is Adobe Premiere.
So, how much has changed since then, and what is the best way for me to get up to speed? Do my knowledge and assumptions from 2014 more or less translate to current versions of Adobe Premiere? Should I use some other program instead? Are there any courses, summaries, or cheat sheets you would recommend?
I should probably clarify that going back to editing is a source of distress for me, since it was something I was too emotionally invested in back then, leading to a significant burnout. So I would like to overcome some of that emotional fragility by mapping the terrain a little bit before going back to it.
Back in the day, I used to love the courses on lynda.com. Something along those lines might help alleviate some of that anxiety.
Thanks!
Main difference is that Davinci resolve made huge strides in marketshare. It did this in two ways
On the high end, it’s made by the same company that makes Blackmagic cameras, and thus professional productions using the cameras get better support for their special raw formats and other integrations.
On the low end, davinci resolve has a fully free version with no real gotchas. Obviously for beginners or YouTubers or whatever that’s an attractive opportunity when your choices were to pay adobe a subscription or buy a Mac. Davinci resolve is real, professional grade software used by some movie studios, so getting fully transferable skills with zero cost is attractive.
Davinci resolve is great, if you aren't already indoctrinated into the Adobe ecosystem I'd 100% recommend it. Probably the best pro-sumer editing software out there in terms of how many resources there are to learn it, especially since it's free! (Unless you need some specific features)
Davinci is my preferred editor personally, but I will say that it does indeed have one big gotcha on Linux specifically for the free version (aside from some frustration getting GPU acceleration to work that I had to go through).
The gotcha: It's missing a number of often-used/important (at least to some) codecs (and you can't add these a la carte- they require the Studio version on Linux)- such as decoding and encoding H.264 and H.265, so one has to be willing to deal with the selection of what is available, or use something like Handbrake as an extra conversion step.
As of July 2025- here's the support list across various operating systems (Linux starts on page 11)
Coming from Premiere, how much of a learning curve will I have with Davinci? Are those similar programs?
I started video editing professionally the same year you stopped. As someone who used (and still occasionally uses) Premiere, the transition will be easy and you will be amazed at how great Resolve is. If I remember correctly, you can even use the same keyboard shortcuts once you set it up.
It has a very capable audio production side and of course industry standard color grading side. The built-in FX/motion graphics engine (Fusion) functions very differently than After Effects and will be the steepest learning curve if you’re comparing the two.
I’ve been on a Mac so long that I don’t know how your graphics card will impact performance but Resolve is incredibly stable compared to Premiere.
I was a pretty advanced AE user until I Stopped (around the same time as Lou) and I always found myself wishing that I'd climbed another ladder.
I mean, it's a very versatile suite, but I always found the timeline and effects implementation and control to be so incredibly finnciky. Little tweaks, little settings, no bulk edits across plugins unless you wanted to code expressions.
I hope that there's a Canva for AE now. Take cumbersome old design suites and make them usable by people who didn't sink their requisite 10,000 Adobe hours into learning the damn thing.
That's what I want to see.
They say Resolve requires a powerful machine. I don't have one of those :P
As a high effort shitposter in group chats I find https://kdenlive.org/ to be intuitive and surprisingly sturdy. I’m also recommending it because you mentioned linux :)
Sorry I don’t have any other relevant information to add. I’m happy for you to be returning to a creative hobby, I hope it brings you joy.
I tried kdenlive many times. It always crashed very quickly on my machine. Maybe that is because my graphics card is old and unsupported by NVIDIA. But I can certainly give it another shot, thanks! ;)
Oh noooo! I forget about the nvidia linux troubles every time, my bad. I’m crossing my fingers it Just Works™️ if you try it again!
2060 is still supported on Linux - you just can't use the very latest proprietary driver, which is 595 I believe. 580 should still work and is still under active development.
If you're opposed to using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, Nouveau should still have support. I don't know if all the features necessary for kdenlive are present in Nouveau though.
I've personally not had any Nvidia issues on Arch, Debian, or Fedora. I currently use a GTX970 on Debian for video transcoding and the 580 driver still works on it, but ymmv. Happy to help if you have questions :)
FWIW I make all my karaoke videos on kdenlive and it has worked perfectly. Better in every version, in fact - so it might crash less now! Also on Windows 10, I've had a nvidia card and changed to AMD earlier this year; both work fine. Have you set up kdenlive to use hardware acceleration in the editor environment?
From my admittedly limited but non-zero knowledge, while kdenlive is powerful and works great, strictly speaking, Premiere is just a more complete tool for complex videos. I would also check out Resolve as others suggested. I've tried other free video editors in the past at a time I was having a spot of trouble with kdenlive, and it turned out kdenlive was strictly better than everything else.
Another high-effort shitposter here. KDenlive is good for free software, but it has some extremely rough edges that appear in the weirdest of places. "Sturdy" isn't a word I'd use to describe it, either; I had it crash just from scrubbing through a video, or adding in a few solid-colour frames. I also had to work around it due to odd audio playback/rendering glitches.
I don't think I was trying to do anything "extreme" with it, either.
That being said, if something quick and dirty needs to be done with video, I'd still recommend it.
Current video editor here. I've been dabbling since ~2010, went pro in 2018. Two big advances come to mind when I think about what's changed:
The obvious one is hardware acceleration. In 2014 I used to dream about a computer that could edit FHD video without stuttering, and today my Mac Studio has built in ProRes hardware acceleration. Pretty great. Your rig can probably handle most 4K video without breaking too much of a sweat.
The less obvious one is auto-transcripts. In just the past couple years, ML-powered transcription has become so good that I can't imagine cutting docs without it. Premiere's built-in text-based workflow is really good, and it's one of the extremely few advantages I'd give Premiere over my preferred NLE, DaVinci Resolve.
Maybe that can be my bonus 3rd thing — Around 2014, Resolve was great for color grading and not much else. Today, it's a fully featured post-production suite, combining FCP's ease of use with Premiere's robust feature set. Give it a shot! It's free ;)
Similarly to Windows itself, Adobe doesn't really mess with Premiere's design for backwards compatability reasons. Another change since 2014 is the explosion of free YouTube tutorials on Premiere, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding dozens of learning resources.
But honestly, since you said video editing was a source of burnout in the past, maybe you shouldn't overthink it. Find a tiny project you can finish quickly and just have fun!
Thanks!
I am actually considering just installing Premiere 2014 to ease into it, since it is the last one I used. I just watched a video about current Premiere, and I don't know what to think about the integration of AI in every program. That gives me a lot of anxiety. And the things I'll edit are so simple, I don't need AI.
Davinci Resolve is a valid free (as in beer) alternative if you don't want to pay an Adobe subscription. I made this with it. I also edited about 1 hour of multicam interview and it was fine.
It’s the same as it was 12 years ago, just with more buttons to get in the way/help out (depending how you like to work). They’ve added a ton of new features like dialogue enhancement and transcriptions, but it’s still 90% the same program it was in 2014.
Adobe is the standard for all but the highest end production these days.
Random development in the past few weeks: some VFX people (behind the Corridor Crew YouTube channel) built a machine learning based chromakey tool solves a lot of pain points and made it open source. It's only been a few weeks and the hardware requirements have dropped and people are integrating it with DaVinci Resolve.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Ploi723hg4