OK - day 2 of playing with Davinci Resolve, and I'm sold. It's a steep learning curve, but after a day and a half, and a ton of referencing "how to" videos on Youtube, I think I've got the basics. Its super powerful, and it isn't obtrusive as far as ads or subscriptions go. At least not yet. Actually, I can't even tell what the benefit is for Davinci to give away this software. There was no hard upsell at sign-up. There was no entering of credit card info. I haven't received any spam emails. Just a straightforward sign-up (inputting of address and phone), and then download the software. No annoying pop-ups or anything.
The user experience is, as I say, a bit of a slog. The dashboard is a dense forest of options and smaller screens and confusing meters and gauges. I'm using a laptop, and many times I had trouble doing what I wanted to do because the dashboard was so confusing, or because the workspace on the dashboard was laid out in such a way that I hardly had any way to do what I wanted to do and then see the results.
I wanted to edit some photos and mpg files into a video, and put a backing track on it, and just doing these simple tasks required a bit of instruction and hand-holding. Then I got a bit ambitious and wanted to play with the audio, and that took me another hour or so to figure out. I got the video into pretty good shape last night, but then today I futzed around with it some more and inadvertently deleted half of the work I did yesterday. I thought I'd be clever and add in some text, and that screwed me up again. Then, I struggled to figure out how to publish it, which sent me back to Youtube to figure out. Eventually, I got what I wanted, and got pretty confident in the basics.
But I sense I really have just barely touched on the basics. It seems very powerful, and that makes me want to do even more exotic things with transitions and text and audio.
Zero stars for user interface, but five stars for the overall product.