. Pros Clear, flexible interface. Lots of organizational tools.
Responsive speed. Ultimate power in video editing. Rich ecosystem of video production apps. Excellent stabilization.
Unlimited multi-cam angles. Cons No keyword tagging for media. Some techniques require additional applications such as After Effects or SpeedGrade. Bottom Line An expansive professional-level digital video editing program, Premiere Pro CC has everything today's pro video editor needs, particularly when it comes to collaboration. Pricing and System Requirements Premiere Pro is now only available by subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
The cross-platform program runs on macOS 10.10 through 10.12 and on Windows 7 through, with the 64-bit versions required. It also requires a minimum of 8GB of RAM (16GB recommended), and a 1,280-by-800 display. The program by itself costs $19.99 per month with an annual commitment or $29.99 month-to-month. You can also get it as part of the complete suite of Adobe professional applications for $49.99 per month ($74.99 month-to-month). There is a free 30-day trial option. Because Premiere is sold as a subscription, not only is the immediate dent on your pocketbook lessened (prior to the new pricing plan, it cost a cool $799.99), but the application is constantly updated with improvements and new capabilities. When you install Premiere, you also get Adobe Media Encoder, which converts output to a wide variety of formats for online and broadcast.
Interface Premiere Pro has a good-looking, flexible interface. The startup view helps you quickly get to projects you've been working on, begin new projects, or search Adobe Stock. The dark program window makes your clips the center of attention, and you can switch among functions like Assembly, Editing, Color, Effects, Audio, and Titles. You can edit these or create your own custom workspaces, and even pull off any of its panels and float them wherever you want on your display(s).
You can now create content bins based on search terms. By default, the editor uses a four-panel layout, with the source preview at top left, a project preview at top right, your project assets at lower-left, and the timeline tracks along the lower right.
You can add and remove control buttons to taste; Adobe has removed a bunch by default for a cleaner interface. Since many editors rely on keyboard shortcuts like J, K, and L for navigating through a project, fewer buttons and a cleaner screen make a lot of sense. It's a very flexible interface, and you can undock and drag around windows to your heart's content. When you hover the mouse over a clip in the source panel, it scrubs through the video. Premiere is now touch-friendly, letting you move clips and timeline elements around with a finger or tap buttons. You can also pinch-zoom the timeline or video preview window. You can even set in and out points with a tap on thumbnails in the source bin.
Final Cut supports the new Touch Bar, but I prefer the on-screen touch capability, since, unlike the Touch Bar, the touch screen doesn't require you to take your eyes off the screen and therefore your video project. When you click on a media thumbnail, you get a scrubber bar and can mark in and out points right there, before you insert the clip into your project. Premiere offers several ways to insert a clip into your sequence.
You can click the Insert or Overwrite buttons in the source preview monitor, or you can just drag the clip's thumbnail from the media browser onto the timeline or onto the preview monitor. Holding Command (or Ctrl on Windows) makes your clip overwrite the timeline contents. You can even drag files directly from the OS's file system into the project. The media browser also has tabs for Effects, Markers, and History, the last of which can be help you back to a good spot if you mess up.
Markers, too, have been improved, with the ability to attach notes and place multiple markers at the same time point. Markers can have durations in frame time codes, and the Markers tab shows you entries with all this for every marker in a clip or sequence. Clicking on a marker entry here jumps you right to its point in the movie. Any device that can create video footage is fair game for import to Premiere Pro. The software can capture from tape, with scene detection, shuttle transport, and time-code settings. It also imports raw file format from pro-level cameras like the Arri Alexa, Canon Cinema EOS C300, and Red Epic.
Resolutions of up to 8K are supported. And, of course, you can import video from smartphones and DSLRS, as well. For high-frame-rate video, the program lets you use proxy media for faster editing. Trimming Clips in Your Project Premiere Pro continues to offer the four edit types that sound like they belong at a waterpark—Roll, Ripple, Slip, and Slide—and adds a Regular Trim mode.
They're all clearly accessible at the left of the timeline. The cursor shape and color give visual cues about which kind of edit you're dealing with. A welcome new capability is that you can actually make edits while playback is rolling. In a nice touch, holding down the mouse button while moving a clip edit point (or double-clicking on an edit point) opens a view of both clips in the preview window. If you double click on the edit point it switches to Trim mode, which shows the outgoing and incoming frames, with buttons for moving back and forward by 1 frame or 5 and another to apply the default transition.
As with image layers, layer support in Premiere Pro lets you apply adjustments. These will affect all tracks below them. You create a new adjustment layer by right-clicking in the project panel. Then you drag it onto a clip your timeline, and start applying effects. Transitions and Effects If you've been reading my recent reviews of enthusiast-level video editing software, you may be surprised to learn that Premiere Pro includes just 38 transition options by default (you can of course install plugins for more). This is because in the pro community, most of those hundreds of transitions offered by the likes of are considered tacky—if pros want to do fancy transitions, they build their own striking, custom ones in After Effects or buy polished premade ones via third-party plug-ins. Otherwise, all the video effects you'd expect are present—keying, lighting, colorizing, and transforming.
You can apply an effect just by double clicking. A search box makes it easy to find the effect or transition you need. The Warp Stabilize feature, brought over from After Effects, is very effective at smoothing out bumpy video. But it takes a while, analyzing one frame at a time.
You can adjust the amount of cropping, tweak the percent smoothness, and make the borders auto-scale. But the long wait pays off. The result was very noticeably smoother than in Final Cut Pro X in my testing. Collaboration New collaboration features rank high in the list of new features in Premiere Pro.
Creative Cloud Libraries let you store and organize assets online, and the beta Team Projects feature lets editors and motion graphics artists using After Effects collaborate in real time. The Teams features are only available for business-level accounts, which cost $29.99 per user per month. Any Premiere user can sync settings to Creative Cloud, for editing from different PCs and locations. This also means that editors can go to any machine running Premiere and see their environment tweaks duplicated by signing into the cloud. The program, however, couldn't open my Samsung Gear 360 footage unless it was already converted to equirectangular format. Corel VideoStudio, CyberLink PowerDirector, and Pinnacle Studio can all open the footage without this conversion.
You can't see the spherical view alongside the flattened view as you can in those apps, either, but you can easily toggle back and forth between these views if you add the VR button to the preview window. Helpfully, the tool lets you tag a video as VR, so that Facebook or YouTube can tell it's 360-degree content. Multi-Camera Angle Editing Multi-cam in Premiere can now accommodate an unlimited number of angles, limited only by your system capabilities. Final Cut Pro X lets you work with only 64 angles, though most projects won't need more. In Premiere, you select your clips and choose Create Multi-Camera Source Sequence from the right-click or Clip menus, and then choose a syncing method. The program now does a good job of syncing clips based on their audio, which is helpful for DSLR-shot clips, since they have no time codes. As in Final Cut, a Multi-Camera Monitor lets you record angle changes as the composite video plays, either by simply clicking on the angle's tile or corresponding number.
You can then adjust the cuts with the normal editing tools. Color Adjustments and Effects The Lumetri Color Tools in Premiere brings the program up to the status of Photoshop for video. These tools offer a remarkable amount of color manipulation, along with a great selection of film and HDR looks.
You can adjust white balance, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and black point—all of which can be activated with keyframes. Saturation, Vibrance, Faded Film, and Sharpen adjustments are also available.
But the curves and color wheel options are truly impressive. There's also a very cool Lumetri Scope view, which shows the current frame's proportional use of red, green, and blue. You can opt to apply any of these effects only in masked areas, which you can create from polygons or by using a pen tool.
For motion, tracking, however, you need to look to After Effects, so those masks won't automatically track, say, a face. I miss Final Cut Pro X's automatic color-matching feature, which gives contiguous scenes consistency.
Again, the recommended way to deal with this is to use fellow Creative Cloud programs After Effects or SpeedGrade. Audio Editing Premiere Pro's Audio Mixer shows pan, balance, VU meters, clipping indicators, and mute/solo for all timeline tracks. You can use it to make adjustments as the project plays. New tracks are automatically created when you drop an audio clip in the timeline, and you can specify types like Standard (which can contain a combination of mono and stereo files), mono, stereo, 5.1 and adaptive. Double-clicking the VU meters or panning dials returns their levels to zero.
The audio meters next to your timeline are resizable and let you solo any track. The program also supports hardware controllers and third-party VSP plugins. If you have Adobe Audition installed, you can roundtrip your audio between that and Premiere for advanced techniques such as Adaptive Noise Reduction, Parametric EQ, Automatic Click Removal, Studio Reverb, and compression.
Titles and Captions As you might expect, Premiere Pro offers a wealth of text options for titles and captions. It can import XML or SRT files. For titles you get a great selection of fonts, including Adobe Typekit fonts. You can choose leading and kerning, rolling, crawling, rotation, opacity, texture, and more. As in Photoshop, you can apply strokes and shadows to any font. Advanced text animation, however, once again falls to After Effects.
By comparison, enthusiast-level programs like PowerDirector and offer a good selection of title animations right in the video editor. Ancillary Apps One of Premiere's strong points is the way it works with other Adobe CC apps. In particular, video editors commonly need to create assets in Photoshop and After Effects.
You can move content between the apps in its native format without the need for any type of conversion, through the Adobe Dynamic Link menu choice. This lets your project interact with After Effects, Audition (for sound), Encore, Media Encoder, Prelude (for media ingest), SpeedGrade (for color grading), and Story (script development). Apple's Final Cut cannot equal this spectrum of production tools. In addition to Adobe's own apps that help extend Premiere Pro, all the major industry giants—such as GenArts, NewBlue, and Red Giant—offer plug-ins. Mobile apps get in on the act, too. With, you can start projects on your smartphone and finish them in Premiere. I tried the app on my iPhone, and it's an appealing little video editor even for those without Premiere on the desktop.
The app lets you join clips, adjust lighting, add fades, and include a background soundtrack. I only wish it let you rotate video, since we humans are so prone to holding our phones in portrait orientation while shooting.
I suppose most pro-level projects edited with Premiere Pro won't have this concern, but you never know when you're going to want to incorporate something that wasn't shot with professional production in mind. When I chose Send to Premiere Pro CC on the mobile app, my desktop received notifications about it, and the movie and all component clips arrived in my Creative Cloud folder. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't appear in the Creative Cloud synced files panel in the Welcome screen. Instead, you have to choose Convert Premiere Clip project from the File menu. After I did this, the project looked great inside the editor, complete with applied effects. Output and Performance.
When you're done editing your movie, Premiere's Export option offers most formats you'd ever want, and for more output options you can use the Adobe Encoder, which can target Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, DVD, Blu-ray, and loads of devices. Encoder lets you batch encode to target multiple devices in a single job, such as mobile phones, iPads, and HDTVs. Premiere also can output media using H.265 and the Rec. 2020 color space, as can Final Cut. Final Cut, however, requires you to buy the separate Compressor 4 for $49.99 for this functionality. Premiere Pro takes advantage of 64-bit CPUs and multiple cores.
I tested on a recent iMac running, a 2.5GHz Core i5 machine with 4GB RAM and a 512MB AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics card—not the ultimate power video editing workstation, but well within the program's stated requirements, and had I used a blazing fast machine it would have been harder to see performance differences. I also tested on my trusty 4K touchscreen-equipped Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Home and loaded with 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card. On the Mac, I sometimes encountered delays in operation, making it hard to get to the point I wanted in the project. I could still get the playback to stutter with composited effects.
The program didn't crash on the PC the way it used to, and the way Final Cut still sometimes does. Premiere now periodically auto-saves your work, in case you forget to. A rendering test of a 4-minute project consisting of two 4K and two HD clips, with various transitions applied, to H.264 at 1080p30 took Premiere Pro 6 minutes and 2 seconds. The same test took Final Cut Pro 7:15 to render. The difference surprised me, as a few years ago, when I ran the same comparison the results were reversed.
On the PC (using a different set of clips), Premiere Pro took 3 minutes 50 seconds, which isn't bad, though high-end prosumer software from CyberLink and Corel was a bit quicker: PowerDirector took 2:34 and Pinnacle Studio took 1:56 for the same set of clips. Worthy of the Red Carpet. There's no denying that Premiere Pro CC can do everything the professional video editor needs, and Adobe's pro video editing software takes the lead when it comes to collaboration features. Its close integration with After Effects, Photoshop, and the whole CC suite are definite boons, too. It's a massive program with an enormous set of capabilities that even a lengthy a review like this can hardly do justice.
With its massive toolset and rich ecosystem, Adobe Premiere Pro CC earns an Editors' Choice award for professional video editing software. Apple Final Cut Pro X's interface is more innovative in some ways and the product adds some very helpful tools like Roles, Auditions, and Clip Connections, making it co-winner in the category.
Description. Adobe Premiere Pro software is a revolutionary nonlinear video editing application. Powerful real-time video and audio editing tools give you precise control over virtually every aspect of your production. Built for the exceptional performance of Microsoft Windows XP systems, Adobe Premiere Pro takes video production to an entirely new level. Take advantage of multiple, nestable timelines to experiment more freely and manage complex projects more efficiently.
How To Install Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
Use color correction tools to adjust hue, saturation, and lightness for highlights, midtones, and shadows; replace a color throughout a clip with a single selection; and more.