DaVinci Resolve. Proper video editing, VFX, and colour grading software as used on stuff you've seen in the cinema and on telly.

Free, if you don't want the clever "neural engine" stuff or >4k timelines.

Oh, you do want that? That'll be 300 quid then, and it's yours for life. They have never even charged for the updates, either.

Of course, they make their money on cameras and control surfaces.

DaVinci and Ableton are both good examples to me. I love Ableton and use it a ton, but man does it crash almost every session for me. I finally but the bullet and bought Resolve to use some of its non free effects and have already run into a number of bugs. I’m still very grateful I have access to that level of software, but it does feel like things being 90% complete at best is the standard these days.

What bugs are you running into with Resolve? There are certainly a few things you need to be a little careful of.

One is my fusion page always going back to a clip I’ve never opened in fusion. The bigger one is an insane rendering time that grows endlessly on a small clip (36+ hour estimated time before I finally cancelled it) that otherwise only takes a few minutes to render and display inside the program itself.

You need to make sure the play head is over the clip you've selected. I don't know why.

The insane rendering time one is weird, but it only seems to show up in the Windows version. Apparently it's something to do with having one dodgy frame in the clip. I suspect it's something to do with sources encoded in h.264, but I'd expect that to affect the Mac port as well. Linux doesn't seem to be affected.

You can try doing "render in place" for the affected clip, which seems to help.

Yeah, my playhead is over the clip. It still keeps going back to a clip I never opened in fusion.

Re: render in place, I'll try your approach next time I run into it. Thanks.

> I love Ableton and use it a ton, but man does it crash almost every session for me.

Is that when using a plugin window or using the Ableton UI itself?

I can only recall plugins crashing for me... Always worth checking for updates with the vendors.

DaVinci recently also added hardware acceleration to the free version for .h265, which was previously only available in the paid version.

here.. more free software which rocks:

OBS Screen Recorder, Obsidian Mind Mapping Software, Mock Mechanic (free engineering sandbox), Ranstads Circuit Modelling JS site, Inkscape - getting better and better

The load speed on Sublime Text is worth the price alone.