What editing software do YouTubers use?

Most YouTubers edit in one of four programs: Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, or CapCut. Gaming creators usually run two of them at once, one for the long-form video and one for the vertical clips, and increasingly bolt an AI tool onto the front to decide which moments are worth editing in the first place.

That second half is the part software roundups keep missing. Ask what editor a gaming YouTuber uses and you get a straight answer. Ask what happens to the six-hour Twitch VOD sitting on their drive and the answer stops being an app and starts being a pipeline.

This guide covers both. Five tools, what each one genuinely costs today, and a decision table you can actually pick from instead of a ranking.

Key Takeaways
– No serious gaming channel runs one editor. Long-form lives in Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut; Shorts live somewhere faster.
– Final Cut Pro is no longer a $299 one-time purchase only. Apple Creator Studio now bundles it with Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor and Pixelmator Pro for $12.99/month or $129/year.
– “CapCut is free” is half true. Its commercial-use licence is granted per asset, not per subscription tier, so a Pro plan does not make a non-commercial template safe for a monetised video.
– DaVinci Resolve’s free tier handles 8-bit footage up to 60fps at 3840×2160, which covers essentially all gameplay capture. Most creators never need the $299 Studio licence.
– Selection is the expensive step, not editing. A four-hour VOD costs four times what a one-hour VOD costs to review, while cutting a clip costs the same either way.

The five editors most YouTubers actually use

Adobe Premiere Pro

Premiere is the default answer for a reason. It handles long timelines without complaining, the After Effects handoff is a single right-click, and every freelance editor you might hire already knows it. Adobe lists the single-app plan from $22.99/month on the annual plan billed monthly, though the price varies by region and by how you commit, so check Adobe’s current plans page before budgeting.

The catch is that it is a subscription with no floor. Stop paying and you stop opening your project files.

DaVinci Resolve

Resolve is the strongest free offer in video, and it is not close. Blackmagic’s free version works with 8-bit formats up to 60fps at Ultra HD 3840×2160, includes HDR grading and multi-user collaboration, and carries most of the controls the paid version has. Gameplay capture is 8-bit at 1080p or 1440p in almost every case, which means the free tier covers the actual work.

Studio costs $299 as a one-time purchase and adds 10-bit formats, hardware-accelerated H.264 and H.265, the Neural Engine features and support up to 120fps. Buy it when your footage outgrows the free tier, not before.

The trade is the learning curve. Resolve’s page-based interface is a different mental model from a single-timeline editor, and week one is genuinely slower than week one in Premiere.

Not sure which clips are even worth cutting? Connect your channel and scan a stream →

Final Cut Pro

This is where most roundups are now out of date. Final Cut Pro has been a $299 one-time Mac App Store purchase for years, and it still is: $299.99 today. But Apple has since launched Apple Creator Studio, a subscription that bundles Final Cut Pro with Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor and Pixelmator Pro for $12.99/month or $129/year, with a 30-day trial.

For a creator who also needs an audio editor and a motion tool, that changes the arithmetic completely. Twelve months of Creator Studio costs $129 against $299 for Final Cut alone, and you get four more applications. The one-time licence still wins on a long enough horizon, and it still wins if you already own the rest. It is no longer the automatic answer.

Final Cut’s real advantage is speed on Apple silicon. Magnetic timeline scrubbing and background rendering make it the fastest of the three professional editors to get a rough cut out of, which matters when you publish on a schedule.

CapCut

CapCut is how most Shorts get made, and the reason is honest: it is fast, it runs on a phone, and its auto-captions are good enough to publish without correction.

The part worth reading carefully is the licensing. CapCut’s Materials Licence Agreement sorts its library content into Non-commercial Use, Dual Use and Commercial Use material, and only content expressly labelled for commercial use may go into brand or monetised work. That gate is attached to the asset, not to your subscription. Paying for Pro unlocks features; it does not reclassify a template or a track that CapCut labelled non-commercial.

If your channel is monetised, or you are heading there, this matters more than the price. Check the label on every template and every audio track you drop into a video, or use your own assets and treat CapCut purely as an editor.

Eklipse

Eklipse is not an editor and does not try to be. It sits in front of one.

Point it at a Twitch, Kick or YouTube channel and its AI highlight detection reads game events, on-screen markers and audio peaks across 3,000+ titles, then hands back a candidate list from a full VOD. The newer engine also picks up Just Chatting, IRL and podcast moments where nothing gets fragged at all. AI Edit takes it from there for the clips you keep: word-timed captions, a 9:16 reframe that tracks the crosshair, killfeed and facecam, dead-air removal, and export at up to 1080p with no watermark.

What it removes is the hour you spend scrubbing footage before you can start editing. What it does not remove is the editing.

What big gaming YouTubers actually run

Established gaming channels almost never standardise on one program. They separate the work by job, and the split is consistent enough to be predictable:

• Premiere Pro for the long-form video, because the project outlives the edit and someone else may have to open it.
• DaVinci Resolve when the budget is the constraint, and increasingly when it is not, because the colour tools are better.
• Final Cut Pro on Mac-only setups, where the render speed pays for itself weekly.
• CapCut for the vertical cut-downs, usually on a phone, usually the same day.
• An AI pass for the raw stream, because nobody watches back a six-hour broadcast twice.

Two channels with identical output can look completely different underneath. One might cut a twenty-minute video in Resolve and hand the timestamps to an editor who makes Shorts in CapCut. Another might do everything in Premiere and run the VOD through a detection pass to build the shortlist first. Same result, same publishing cadence, different stack.

What none of them do is open a four-hour recording and start watching from the beginning.

The stack livestream editors use

If your source footage is a live broadcast rather than a scripted recording, the pipeline matters more than the editor. This is the part the generic roundups skip entirely, because they assume you are starting from a clean 4K file.

A working stream-to-Shorts pipeline runs like this:

1. Stream on Twitch or Kick. The VOD is the raw material, not the deliverable.
2. Mark the good moments while they happen. A /marker in chat, a Stream Deck button, or a mod dropping timestamps in Discord. Anything that means somebody noticed it live.
3. Run a detection pass over the whole VOD to catch what nobody flagged. You are building a shortlist, not a finished video.
4. Polish the survivors in Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut. Usually five to fifteen minutes each.
5. Publish the vertical cuts to Shorts, TikTok and Reels, and keep the long-form edit on its own schedule.

The economics are the whole argument. Reviewing footage scales with stream length; every other step scales with clip count. Trimming a clip costs the same whether it came out of a one-hour stream or a six-hour one. So the only step worth automating is the one that gets more expensive the longer you stream.

That is the correct way to read every AI editing tool on this list. It is not there to edit better than you. It is there to stop you paying the review tax twice a week.

Running long streams and posting almost none of them? Scan your last VOD and see what it finds →

Which editing software is right for you

Pick by how you make content, not by which program has the longest feature list.

Two rules cover most of the remaining cases. If you have never opened an editor, start with the free one and upgrade when a specific limitation blocks you. If you are already publishing weekly and struggling, the fix is almost never a different editor.

We go deeper on the professional end of this list in our guide to what software professionals use for video editing, and on the vertical side in the best editing software for short vertical videos.

Do you actually need AI editing?

Sometimes. It depends entirely on which part of your process hurts.

Where AI genuinely helps:

• Finding highlights in long footage. This is the strongest case by a wide margin, and it gets stronger the longer your recordings are.
• Captions. Word-timed auto-captions are accurate enough to publish with a quick read-through, and manual captioning is miserable work.
• Vertical reframing. Tracking the action across a 16:9 to 9:16 crop is mechanical, repetitive and easy to get wrong by hand.
• Batch output. Producing fifteen variants of the same clip for different platforms is a job for a machine.

Where traditional editors are still required:

• Story structure. Pacing a twenty-minute video is a judgement call, and no tool makes it for you.
• Motion graphics. Custom overlays, lower thirds and transitions live in After Effects or Motion.
• Audio mixing. Ducking game audio under commentary properly is craft work.
• Colour grading. Matching a facecam to gameplay footage takes a human eye and Resolve’s colour page.

One limitation worth knowing before you trust any AI editor with a gaming VOD: tools built on transcription score speech. A silent clutch round, where nobody says anything because everyone is concentrating, is invisible to them. Detection built for gameplay has to read game events and audio spikes instead of just words. Check which one you are buying.

For a closer look at that category, we compared the options in our roundup of AI video editors for streamers.

FAQ

What editing software do most YouTubers use?
Adobe Premiere Pro is the most common choice for long-form YouTube video, with DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro close behind. For Shorts and vertical content, CapCut dominates. Most creators use at least two.

Is DaVinci Resolve better than Premiere Pro?
For colour grading, yes. For collaboration and integration with other Adobe tools, no. Resolve’s free tier makes it the better starting point for anyone not already paying for Creative Cloud; Premiere is easier to hire an editor for.

Do gaming YouTubers use CapCut?
Widely, but usually for vertical clips rather than main-channel videos. If your channel is monetised, check the licence label on any CapCut template or audio track you use, because commercial rights are granted per asset rather than by subscription tier.

What is the best free editing software for YouTube?
DaVinci Resolve. Its free version supports 8-bit footage up to 60fps at 3840×2160 and includes HDR grading, which covers virtually all gameplay capture. CapCut is the better free option if you are editing on a phone.

Can AI replace video editing?
No. AI is good at finding moments, captioning them and reframing them for vertical feeds. Story structure, motion graphics, audio mixing and colour grading are still human work. The realistic gain is removing the hours you spend reviewing footage, not the editing itself.

Where to start

The honest summary: pick one long-form editor and stay in it long enough to get fast, then solve the Shorts problem separately.

If you are on Windows and starting from nothing, install DaVinci Resolve. If you are on a Mac, try Final Cut through Creator Studio’s trial before committing to either price. If you already publish weekly and the bottleneck is that your VODs never become clips, the missing piece is not another editor.

That last case is the one Eklipse was built for. Connect a Twitch, Kick or YouTube channel, let the detection pass turn a full broadcast into a shortlist, and spend your editing time on the clips that survive it.

Connect your channel and scan your first VOD →