New IB Epistemology Video, DaVinci Resolve, and The Adobe Post

Hello all,
Last October, my father (known to Zoom Times as the Grand Emperor of the Zoomlian Empire), a Theory of Knowledge teacher, learned that his school wanted a short video from each teacher in his program introducing prospective students to the program's various subjects. Having noticed that he has a video creator in the house and having a creative concept in mind, he approached me with an atypical script and asked about directing and editing the short film. As it turned out, I'd just recently acquired the video editor DaVinci Resolve and had been looking to test it out, and this helped me grab the basics of the program pretty quickly!

This is mostly video editing (done completely in Resolve), although I did use After Effects for two shots, one compositing-focused and the other motion graphics-focused. I couldn't find any stock music that fit the tone my dad was looking for, but Lei Hart's "It's About Time" track worked perfectly, so I got permission and added that. Resolve took a bit of getting used to, although I'm sure I'm missing a few hotkeys that will help; the biggest thing I'll need to remember is the fact that it uses two screens for the core video editing--one for fine-tuning single clips and another for the full editing view (there are other screens, but they don't concern video editing as much). I'm definitely looking forward to having more!

Now then, on to... The Adobe Post™.
Up to now, I've edited nearly all of my video projects in Adobe Premiere Pro, and that's not a bad thing in itself--it's an industry level program at a relatively affordable price. Still, though, as others in digital art spaces have noted, some of Adobe's tactics have been kind of non-consumer-friendly. The subscription-based pricing model comes with the convenience of free upgrades, though over $50/month is a lot to sustain if one doesn't have a stable income, and another source of annoyance came from their dropping support for Encore, perhaps the best Blu-ray authoring tool on the market without an enormous (think $20K+) price tag. Recently, though, I learned they're adding a "Prepare as N/FT" option to Photoshop; this technology is helping some artists, but in addition to the environmental issues from some implementations, it can make art theft far easier--their Content Credentials system will help reduce illegal doubles of existing N/FTs, but for independent artists who don't use them, having the option straight in Photoshop makes it pretty easy to steal art. (There's apparently a small host of issues with it, fundamental pyramid schemes among them, but I'll spare everyone the pain of reading an essay about it here.)

Adobe has felt a little weird for me for a while, though it's tricky to switch from them because their stuff is still really good. Some alternatives like Gimp have gained traction, but I've found the latter's relative lack of nondestructive editing capabilities (so far) to prove unrealistic for major projects. I'm probably going to stick with After Effects for a while more, as I've found it very hard to replace (I'll have to learn far more about Resolve's built-in Fusion compositor first), but I think I'm going to try stretching my self-teaching muscles some for the other apps. If anyone's wondering, here's a list of Adobe alternatives by Twitter user XdanielArt (always happy to see a nod or two to Blender there!).