If you had a Mac, I would recommend Final Cut Pro. It is only $300 and is used for thousands of professional projects every year. It is a great product. But personally, I hate it. I am not a Mac/Apple guy at all and I constantly get lost trying to navigate through things. I am an Android/PC guy.
I normally recommend Avid Media Composer when editing, but it can be very hardware demanding, especially the video card. So if you don’t have a high end video card and a lot of RAM, it is not necessarily the best route to go. If you do have the hardware, like in a gaming computer, the Avid workflow is excellent, fast, and very intuitive.
Adobe was bought out by Avid and has become the cheap version of their editing offerings. Think Pontiac to Cadillac as Premiere to Avid Media Composer. Adobe Premiere is a great platform and integrates with add on programs like photoshop, after effects, lightroom, etc. which are all Adobe products and can help you enhance your video project and make them really stand out. These programs do however require a large learning curve and a lot of time devoted to figuring out how all the programs affect each other. The other downside is if you have any footage that is 4K, you have to run it all through another downconverter in order to be able to edit it smoothly and then upconvert it back for export. **I am not familiar with the most updated version of Premiere as to whether or not they have fixed the coding to allow native 4K editing yet.
I shoot my footage using Yi4K+ cameras which use Sony UHD 4K codecs to record H.265 HEVC MP4 files. Unfortunately for me Avid does not like these files and won’t allow me to edit them in their native format, so I won’t spend the $1,200 for a perpetual license for it. So in my situation, Power Director 17 is what I use to edit 4K footage without having to do any conversions. The only downside I have that makes the process take a really long time is when I speed up clips for time-lapse and then have to render the clips after each edit in order for them to playback properly. Avid and Final Cut are really good at playing back clips with on-the-fly rendering, but this is what uses up all of the computing power if you don’t have a higher end machine.
I put this video together last week with Power Director. It took about 5 hours from start to finish and I had about 4.5 hours of footage to comb through. What I don’t like about PD is that pulling multiple clips from the same video file is not easy like it is in Avid and FCP. There is a multi-step process and it just makes it difficult when you have limited screen space like I do by working on a laptop.
All that being said, the biggest Pro’s for Power Director is the one time price, and native 4K editing of most files. The Cons are the non-intuitive interface for editing, and the elongated rendering times.
Pros for Adobe Premiere is the integration of add on programs to enhance the video with special effects and titling, etc. as well as ease of editing. The largest Cons for me is the lack of 4K native editing and the monthly cost.