And this is also why Adobe software is some of the most frequently-pirated software of all time. After all these years and all the other examples of the correct way to do this, they still refuse to see the light of “free for personal use” licensing to get more people trained on and in love with your software, so those that do go on to use it commercially will demand it and have their companies pay the license fees.
And as someone who pirates, I highly discourage pirating proprietary programs that save your data in their locked-in formats.
Your data is more important than to be locked into a data-roach-motel. The companies know this, and count on piracy. From there, the pirate user has MB's of content locked into something they cant convert out of. And then, it's pretty easy to force a sale, or worse yet, a rental.
With non-destructive editing capabilities that gets complicated rather quickly, because then the file format starts depending on the precise implementation of all the various available filters that can be applied.
