Adobe Premiere Pro Cc Reviews
- Adobe Premiere Pro Cc Review. Msrp $19.99
- Adobe Premiere Pro Cc 2017 Review
- Adobe Premiere Pro Cc Reviews 2015
Adobe Premiere Pro is widely considered to be the gold standard of professional quality video editors. Its color, lighting, and audio adjustment tools blow its direct competition completely out of the water. If you’re in need of a tool to make your footage jump off the screen, look no further than Premiere Pro. Oct 30, 2018 A huge list of improvements that are bound to be of use to many, if not most, Premiere Pro editors. It’s always a pleasure to see how Adobe can make an editor’s life easier with each revision.
- Pros
Simple interface. Syncs projects across devices. Good color and title tools. Easy sharing to social networks.
- Cons
Short on video effects. Limited transitions. Requires subscription. Expensive if you're not already a CC subscriber. Can't specify output file format. Slow rendering. No storyboard templates.
- Bottom Line
Adobe's easy video editor syncs projects between desktop and mobile, and makes sharing to multiple social platforms a cinch. Still in its infancy, Rush is slow at rendering projects, lacks many standard video effects, and is pricey unless you're already a CC subscriber.
Everyone wants to be a social media star these days, and Adobe wants to help with a new video-editing app. Adobe Rush is a streamlined version of Adobe's Premiere video editing program intended to address those users' need for content velocity—frequent social posts to multiple outlets including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and of course YouTube. Rush reminds me a lot of the simplified version of Lightroom, Lightroom CC. Like Lightroom CC, Rush syncs your video projects to the cloud and offers mobile clients with all the same tools in a smaller interface.
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Rush will certainly appeal to nonprofessional video editors who don't want to tinker with Premiere Pro's multitude of panels and controls. However, it's slow to render video, and it lacks a lot of capabilities found in other software, such as green screen, multicam, motion tracking, freeze-frame, and more. Users may hesitate to pay a monthly fee for the privilege, when they could just use a free app like Apple iMovie, which has a lot of the same capabilities; though it is, of course, limited to Apple's ecosystem.
Pricing and Starting Up
You can get a standalone app subscription that includes all the Rush mobile and desktop apps for $9.99 per month. That means $120 per year, which is more than you'd pay for a permanent license for Adobe Premiere Elements ($99.99) PowerDirector ($99.99), Corel VideoStudio ($79.99), or Magix Movie Edit Pro ($69.99)—not to mention iMovie, which is free with Apple's computers.
Rush is, however, included with a full Creative Cloud subscription and Premiere Pro single app subscriptions. Full subscriptions cost $52.99 per month for individuals, while students and teachers pay only $19.99. Finally, there's a free Premiere Rush CC Starter Plan. This is a trial option that gives you all of Rush's features and unlimited project creation but limits you to exporting just three projects. The standard subscription comes with 100GB of cloud storage, upgradable to 10TB at extra cost.
The app runs on 64-bit Windows 7 through Windows 10, macOS Sierra (10.12) or later, and iOS 11 or later. An Android app is planned for next year.
Getting Started With Adobe Premiere Rush
After installation, you have to sign into your Adobe Creative Cloud account, so that your media can sync between devices. On the first run of the program, you're treated to a tutorial that shows tooltips pointing to the screen elements you'll be using. You start by entering a title for your project. Next, you select media for the project. It's added to your timeline in the order you select, unless it's audio. Then you just hit Create.
A Simple Interface
The Rush interface, as mentioned, looks a lot like that of Lightroom CC (not to be confused with Lightroom Classic). It's very easy on the eyes. Side panels hide themselves when you're not using them. Your source panel is on the left, and effects and adjustments are on the right. Of course, there are differences, since we're working with video. A nice touch is that when you hover the mouse pointer over a control a bit, an illustrated tooltip pops up telling you how to use the feature.
The Home screen is as simple as it gets, with large thumbnails for your projects and a big Create a New Project button, along with Help links. Though you almost don't need them to use the product, there are standard menu options across the top: File, Edit, Clip, Sequence, View, and Help. One option in Preferences (under the Edit menu) is useful: You can tell the program to prerender your video for smoother playback.
A simplified timeline runs across the bottom, and editing buttons like scissors for splitting a clip, the garbage can icon for deleting, and track visibility controls are on the lower left side. Beneath the video preview are the standard Play/Pause, step by frame, or go to next edit point controls. You also see the time codes and frame numbers below the video preview. There's also a full-screen view button, and if you click on the video preview, handles appear for cropping and resizing—especially handy if you forget and shoot with your iPhone in portrait mode. The Transform button along the right adds even more options, like rotation, opacity, and edge feather.
The tracks remind me of those in iMovie and Final Cut Pro X (which Apple calls 'trackless'); they're free floating, rather than regimented into fixed tracks. You can drag multiple tracks above the top one. Though it's not called out as a feature in particular, combining this capability with the transform tools lets you do PiP effects with resizing and overlay effects with opacity. But you don't get an assortment of PiP presets like you do in PowerDirector.
As with most nonlinear video editing programs, you can drag clips to reposition them, and hide, mute, and lock tracks.
Few Transitions
There are only three transition types, and yes, they are the classic ones that most video producers approve of: Cross Dissolve, Dip to Black, and Dip to white. There are occasions, especially among YouTubers that want to dazzle you, when video producers want to do something more fun. Competitors like PowerDirector and even iMovie offers over 20 transitions, and some, like Premiere Elements and Pinnacle Studio, let you create your own custom transitions.
Customize Your Color
Getting the color language can be critical to creating an appealing digital movie or a viral social post. The better Hollywood movies have color languages all their own, to produce a unique emotional response. Rush offers 11 color style presets. Tapping the panel's Edit option lets you customize Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Temperature, Tint, Vibrance, and Saturation. An Advanced set of tools goes beyond that to let you add a Faded Film effect, Sharpening, and Vignette. Once you've got things to your taste, you can save these edits as a custom preset.
Staid Title Templates
There are 36 motion title templates to choose from, and editing them is WYSIWYG on the video preview. Once again, the choices are pretty staid, with none of the transparency or other effects I've been seeing in other consumer video editing software. Scoff if you will, but CyberLink reps told me that their users were asking for zany things like flames and electric currents coming off titles, so they added those effects to PowerDirector. To Rush's credit, though, it does let you edit the font, color, size, spacing, and opacity of the titles.
Audio Editing
You can show your clips' audio waveforms from a button in the lower-left toolbar, but you can't drag the waveforms up and down to raise and lower their volume, nor can you detach a clip's audio. You can, however adjust clip volume from the right-side Audio panel. This also provides and Auto duck option that lowers background music during talking in the movie. Adobe provides 10 prefab soundtracks to fit different moods, but it doesn't auto-fit them to your movie, as Pinnacle Studio can. You can also use your own music files.
Mobile Video Editing
The same guided tutorial takes you through the steps of creating a video on your iOS device. In fact, everything in the desktop is available in the mobile app, but with controls rearranged for small screen touch input. You can customize color settings, transitions, add titles, and work with audio. If you go back and forth between editing on different devices, you'll get a dialog offering to create a copy so that you don't lose edits.
Sharing and Output in Adobe Rush
The Share main tab is always at the ready, no matter what you're doing in the app. You can simply save to local storage, but the pre-configured social output options are where Rush shines. You can easily send your projects to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Adobe's own Behance community for creative professionals. I would like to see Vimeo added to this list, since that offers creators a way to charge money for their work, as well as of course Twitter. Another major limitation is that, while you can select frame rate and resolution (up to 2160p), you can't actually specify the file type or codec. Most consumer video editors let you do this. If you want to take your Rush project further, you can open it in Premiere Pro for full-power editing and output options.
What's Missing?
While you can do a lot of great editing easily with Rush, it doesn't provide a lot of the more-advanced effects that have been found in consumer video editors like PowerDirector for years: green screen, motion tracking, multicam, masking, and freeze-frame and other time manipulation. Adobe has noted that video speedup and slowdown capability is in the works for later updates.
Another missing piece that's especially relevant to a product targeting beginners is the lack of any storyboard templates like those in iMovie and PowerDirector. These show nonprofessionals how to structure their videos, rather than just giving them editing and enhancing tools.
Slow Rendering
Importing, adding, and scrubbing video in Rush was reasonably rapid on my test PC, an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K touch display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card. Rush uses proxy video files to make working with it snappy. The program wasn't completely stable, however, though an update improved that.
I couldn't build the exact rendering test project I use for video software with Rush, since it doesn't include all the transition types I use, but I used the same clips with the available transitions. Nor does Rush let you specify output attributes like bitrate or codec, so I chose the closest one, 1080p Full HD at 29.97 fps.
Even without the fancy transitions, the resulting render time trailed most of the consumer video apps I've tested. The test project (whose duration is just under 5 minutes) took 8:02 (min:sec) to render in Rush. That compares with 6:21 for Adobe Premiere Elements, 4:20 for Corel VideoStudio, and 1:54 for Pinnacle Studio, and 1:29 for PowerDirector. To be fair, Adobe noted in its blog post about Rush that they were working on the program's performance.
Has Potential, But No Need to Rush
Rush doesn't do anything new. It just makes doing things you could already do simpler and more streamlined. If you're looking for software that supports every new video technology that comes down the pike, you'd do well to look at CyberLink's PowerDirector. Even Adobe Premiere Elements, Pinnacle Studio, and Corel VideoStudio are better suited to enthusiasts who want to add the latest effects. Rush is more about what its name indicates: Getting that post or vlog out fast!
Rush can definitely produce presentable videos. It's also expensive (unless you're already paying for a Creative Cloud subscription) and is the slowest performer on our rendering test. For almost the same functionality, look to iMovie, PCMag's Editors' Choice for video editing on macOS and iOS. For lots more editing power, rendering speed, and effects, check out our Editors' Choice video editing software for Windows, PowerDirector.
Adobe Premiere Rush CC
Bottom Line: Adobe's easy video editor syncs projects between desktop and mobile, and makes sharing to multiple social platforms a cinch. Still in its infancy, Rush is slow at rendering projects, lacks many standard video effects, and is pricey unless you're already a CC subscriber.
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- Grading tools right inside Premiere Pro
- Morph Edit helps trimming interviews without jump cuts
- Lots of workflow and collaboration enhancements
Cons
- No killer feature to entice people away from competitors
Key Specifications
- Review Price: £17.15
- Only available via Creative Cloud subscription
- Color workspace with Lumetri Looks and grading
- New Morph Edit transition
- Enhanced collaboration tools
- Further improved workflow and format support
Adobe Premiere Pro Cc Review. Msrp $19.99
What is Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015?
Premiere Pro CC 2015 is the most recent update to Adobe’s flagship non-linear video editing package. Now that the software is exclusively available via the Creative Cloud service, updates are more incremental and there is less hoopla when a major new release arrives.
There have been a few sub-versions since I reviewed the first version of Premiere Pro CC, including improvements to the first release, and three iterations of the 2014 version. Here, I take a look at what’s new in the 2015.0.2 release, aka 9.0.2.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 – Morph Cut and Colour Workflows
There aren’t a whole lot of new effects in this version of Premiere Pro, but one in particular is garnering a fair bit of interest. The Morph Cut transition is designed for those times when you’ve shot a talking head but only have one usable camera angle, and not much B-roll for cutaways. So when it’s necessary to reduce the interview length, you either end up with a jump cut or have to use a cross dissolve that is almost as bad.
Enter the Morph Cut. This analyses the background, so it can figure out which bit of the frame is the talking head, then blends the two clips together so there is a seamless flow from one section to the next. I tried this on a corporate video with a well lit, contrasting background and the result was surprisingly good, although there was some spurious mouth motion along the way. This didn’t look out of place, and I can safely say I will be using this transition in interview work from now on.
Another significant area of enhancement is colour. Adobe acquired IRIDAS’s excellent SpeedGrade around four years ago, and it has been part of the Creative Cloud offering since with CS6. However, for lots of jobs SpeedGrade is overkill, especially for a quick bit of grading. So Adobe has brought technologies from SpeedGrade and Lightroom into Premiere Pro. This is provided via a new Lumetri colour workspace.
This isn’t so much a new filter effect but a whole toolbox inside Premiere Pro. The end results are still applied via the Lumetri colour filter, which has existed in some form since Premiere Pro CC first arrived. But there are now windows for Lumetri Scopes and Color adjustments. The Color workspace preset rearranges the Premiere Pro interface so the Lumetri Color settings window is on the right and the Scopes window is on the left.
You don’t get sophisticated functions from SpeedGrade like the colour matching ability (which is a quite astounding feature). But you do get a whole bunch of Look presets; the ability to import external looks and LUTs in most of the popular formats; a selection of adjustments including sharpening, fading, vibrance and saturation; and tint colour wheels for shadows and highlights. So quite powerful grading is available without the need to leave the Premiere Pro interface, which will definitely make proper grading even more popular than it has already become.
Adobe Premiere Pro Cc 2017 Review
Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 – Workspaces and Collaboration
Although Premiere Pro has had customisable workspaces for a while, with 2015 there is now a whole selection of these, the Color option being just one. There are also Assembly, Editing, Effects, Audio, and Metalogging layouts. All can be reconfigured and saved, and you can create your own as well. The Welcome screen you see when you first load the software has had a makeover, too, although you probably won’t be spending a lot of time looking at that.
Collaborative working and the cloud are increasingly in vogue, and Adobe has been developing tools to leverage this for a few years now. More links with these facilities are now built into Premiere Pro CC. You don’t get the full range of what can be stored in the Creative Cloud Libraries within Premiere Pro CC, however. Video assets aren’t included, just Lumetri Looks, graphics, character styles and colours. You can create libraries of assets, synchronise them via Creative Cloud, and share them with collaborators so they appear right inside their own copy of Premiere Pro and can be used on their projects.
There is direct support for the Adobe Premiere Clip smartphone app, which lets you grab footage, perform some simple editing, and then sync to your Creative Cloud space. The footage and project file will then appear on your desktop system and can be edited further there. Dragging the XML file created to Premiere Pro CC imports the project and all associated clips. There’s a direct link to the Adobe Stock service, too, and Adobe Anywhere collaboration system, although this requires an Enterprise-level account with associated server software.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 – Sundry New Features
One of the big strengths of all of Adobe’s applications is their ability to exchange content without the need to render out. This has been further improved between Premiere Pro CC 2015 and Audition. You can now export to Audition with preview video streamed directly from the Premiere Pro engine via Dynamic Link, rather than having to wait for a preview render.
A small but potentially handy new feature is the Time Tuner facility in Adobe Media Encoder. In a broadcast environment where video sequences have to be a precise length, instead of re-editing a sequence manually to fit, this facility allows you to trim or add up to 10% to the duration automatically, by adding or removing frames at points of less action. I tried this with a corporate video that I recently completed, and export took much longer. I also found some very strange behaviour, with audio speeding up and disappearing entirely. So whilst this is a nice idea, it seems to need a bit more work before you can rely on it in a production environment.
There are plenty of smaller enhancements, too. You can now move the anchor point in the Program Monitor simply by dragging it. Items can be hidden in the Project panel, for a less cluttered listing. You can also sort clips via XMP data. If you load a sequence into the Source window and alter the in and out points, you can now create a subsequence directly from that. None of this is earth-shattering, but potentially useful at some point.
Every new version of a video editing application will include expanded file format support, because new formats seem to be arriving faster than PPI claims spam. In this version, there’s Avid’s DNxHD with compressed alpha (although the main format has been supported for ages), Canon XF-AVC (as used by the Canon XC10), Apple ProRes 4444XQ, JPEG 2000 MXF Op1a, and Panasonic 4K_HS.
The support for digital cinema formats has been enhanced as well. You can now gain access to the source settings for RED, ARRI, CinemaDNG, DPX, and Sony F65 files, allowing you to adjust how these are interpreted. This is controlled via the Master tab in the Effect Control panel. In the other direction, at long last Dolby 5.1 export is also supported, and you can export AAF files directly from Premiere Pro, with a reference video mixdown included and linked to automatically.
Should I buy Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015?
If you have a Creative Cloud subscription, you will already have Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015, or at least the option to install it as part of your monthly payment. Conversely, there is no killer new feature here that will specifically lure users of other editing packages over who haven’t been persuaded before. The new built-in grading toolset comes close, and the Morph Cut transition is a very welcome enhancement too, but on their own they are unlikely to sway your opinion.
However, Premiere Pro CC is already a pretty persuasive package. One of its biggest strengths remains the way it integrates with other Adobe applications, so you can (for example) export audio directly into Audition for powerful enhancement, and import title sequences directly from After Effects without having to render them out. Those who are serious about their video editing always have a favourite, from which it’s hard to convince them to change. But Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 remains a serious contender with even more powerful features for the professional video editor.
Verdict
Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 brings capable grading into the app itself, plus a host of small but useful enhancements.
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Adobe Premiere Pro Cc Reviews 2015
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