Adobe Premiere Pro earns its status as industry-standard video editing software thanks to its familiar nonlinear editing interface, excellent performance, unmatched ecosystem of tools, and powerful capabilities. The massive application benefits from straightforward import and export experiences, while AI-powered auto-captioning, text-based video editing, and many other features keep it on the cutting edge. Premiere Pro earns our Editors’ Choice award for professional-level video editing software. If video editing is more of a hobby for you, check out our Editors’ Choice winner at the enthusiast level, the feature-packed CyberLink PowerDirector.
How Much Does Adobe Premiere Pro Cost?
Premiere Pro is available by subscription only. It costs $22.99 per month with an annual commitment or $263.88 per year up front. A month-to-month option with no commitment goes for $34.49 per month. A free trial lasts just seven days.
You can also get Premiere Pro as part of the complete suite of Adobe Creative Cloud professional applications that includes After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, and the rest. That costs $59.99 per month with an annual commitment, $659.88 per year upfront, or $89.99 on a month-to-month basis with no commitment. Business customers pay more for either package, at $37.99 per person per month for the single app or $89.99 for the whole suite. The Business version adds enhanced support, management features, and collaboration options. Education users pay less, starting at $19.99 per month for the whole suite for the first year and then $34.99 per month after that.
Premiere’s subscription pricing means the immediate dent in your pocketbook isn’t as noticeable compared with when you had to plunk down $1,000 all at once to buy a perpetual license. A subscription model also means that the app gets regular updates with improvements and new features.
For comparison, Final Cut Pro carries a one-time cost of $299. DaVinci Resolve charges $295, though you should first try its very capable free version. The nonprofessional programs for consumers who enjoy creating dazzling videos without the steep learning curves hover around $99 for a one-off purchase. That’s what you pay for Adobe Premiere Elements. Pinnacle Studio Ultimate goes for $129.99, while CyberLink PowerDirector Ultimate costs $139.99 one-time or $74.99 per year for a subscription. A less-expensive tier of editors runs about $70 outright, including Corel VideoStudio Pro and Filmora.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Can Your PC Run Premiere Pro?
Premiere Pro runs on macOS 10.15 or later and Windows 10 (64-bit) version 22H2 or Windows 11. On Windows, it requires an Intel 6th-generation or newer CPU or an AMD Ryzen 1000 Series or newer, 8GB of RAM (16GB recommended), and a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel display. On Apple computers, Premiere Pro requires macOS 12 or later and an Intel 6th-generation or newer CPU but also supports Apple silicon natively.
When you install Premiere, you also get Adobe Media Encoder, which converts output to common formats for online and broadcast. It also enables batch processing and lets you keep editing during rendering processes.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
What’s New in Premiere Pro?
Adobe updates Premiere Pro every month or two with new tools, interface changes, and performance improvements. The biggest new announcements involve generative AI tools that can extend clips and insert or remove objects. Some of these are still in beta. Here’s a list of the important recent feature updates available for Premiere Pro:
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Audio auto-tagging and enhanced speech. Premiere Pro can detect and tag ambient audio, dialogue, music, and special effects. The app surfaces relevant controls for these sound types in the Essential Sound panel. The AI-powered Enhance Speech tool automatically cleans up unwanted audio noise.
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Automatic transcription and text-based editing. Premiere Pro can transcribe spoken audio in your clips and lets you edit—that is, split, merge, move, or delete—segments of video based on the transcription.
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Background auto-save. You can set Premiere Pro to auto-save in increments down to a minute. This works in the background without interrupting your work. A Dashboard for background processes shows your saves and other activities. A new Recovery Mode lets you restore your project after a program crash or revert to a previous project state.
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Color manager. You can see and adjust color spaces for input, working, and display color spaces all in one tab under the Lumetri Color panel.
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Free stock audio. Previously, Premiere Pro inexplicably didn’t offer any stock sound effects, only background music. In the latest update, you now have many choices, like a car door slamming,
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Hardware acceleration for more video formats. This includes Sony (XAVC-L, XAVC H-I, XAVC H-L), Canon (XF-AVC L, XF-HEVC L), and Panasonic (AVC LongG).
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Interface updates. Premiere Pro’s latest interface mode, called Darkest, is gentler on the eyes than the existing Dark mode, which uses shades of dark gray. The software also adopts updated fonts for better clarity and rounded audio and video clip corners for a smoother look.
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Motion graphic template views. Prepackaged animation templates from After Effects are available for Premiere Pro and are more discoverable in a list with checkboxes. The Essential Graphics panel is gone (you use the Properties panel for many of its functions), and there’s a new panel called Graphics Templates.
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New Project panel improvements. This lets you add media (or not) at project creation, choose a storage location, pick a template, and set project settings.
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Productions. Premiere Pro uses a three-level nested hierarchy system for editing. Productions comprise sets of projects. You can move or copy media between projects within productions via drag and drop.
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Save projects as templates. Saving a project as a template is efficient when you need to retain assets, branding, and colors across multiple projects.
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Updated Properties panel. This panel is context-sensitive, changing the audio, graphics, text, and video adjustment tools it presents based on what you’re doing. You can now change properties for multiple selected clips simultaneously.
Premiere Pro’s Interface
Premiere Pro has an attractive, flexible interface, and I’m a fan of Adobe’s simplifying changes over the years. The startup view helps you quickly get to recent projects, start new projects, or search for Adobe Stock footage. The dark program window makes your clips the center of attention. It now has just three main modes (in addition to the Home screen): Import, Edit, and Export. A button or menu choice in Edit mode has a good selection of workspace layouts for Assembly, Editing, Color, Export, and more. You can pull off any of the panels and float them wherever you want on your display(s). It’s also possible to create content bins based on search terms.
One thing missing from the editing interface is a permanent search box for finding commands, content, or help; other major apps, including Adobe’s Photoshop, include this. The Home screen has a search box, but its results are sometimes unhelpful.
By default, the editor uses a four-panel layout, with the source preview at the top left, a project preview at the top right, your project assets at the lower left, and the timeline tracks along the lower right. You can add and remove control buttons to taste; Adobe has removed a bunch of elements over the years 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. Here’s another helpful feature: When you hover the mouse over a clip in the source panel, it scrubs through the video.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Premiere Pro is touch-screen-friendly, letting you move clips and timeline elements around with a finger or by tapping 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.
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 gives you 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 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 help you get back to a good spot if you mess up. Markers, too, feature improvements, 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 for every marker in a clip or sequence. Clicking on a marker entry 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. The software supports resolutions of up to 8K. Of course, you can import video from smartphones and DSLRs. For high-frame-rate video, the program lets you use proxy media for faster editing.
You can apply color labels to your clip or open the Metadata panel to view and apply tons of XMP information about a clip, but there’s no simple keyword tagging capability. Productions, Projects, Sequences, Libraries, and Bins are available to organize your media.
If you’re moving up from the consumer-level Adobe Premiere Elements, you can import your projects, especially since they use the same .PREL file format. But you still might lose some effects, even things like image filters and motion tracking. A project consists of one or more sequences, which in turn contain your clips. Recent updates add new sequence templates for HDR, high-resolution, and social video.
Trimming Project Clips
Premiere Pro has four edit types that sound like they belong at a waterpark—Ripple. Roll, Slide, and Slip—along with a Razor tool for splitting clips and a Rate Stretch tool for speeding up or slowing down a clip to fill a specific length of time. They’re all easily accessible at the left of the timeline. The cursor shape and color give visual cues about which kind of edit you’re dealing with. One welcome capability is that you can make edits while playback is rolling.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
With the Ripple and Rolling edit tools, 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—a helpful touch. 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 one frame or five and another to apply the default transition.
As with Adobe Photoshop image layers, layer support in Premiere Pro lets you apply adjustments. These 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 on your timeline and start applying effects.
Transitions, Effects, and Warp Stabilize
Enthusiast-level video editors tend to have a huge number of transitions, so it might surprise you that the professional-grade Premiere Pro includes just 47 (you can install plug-ins for more). Many professionals find a lot of transitions tacky, so when they want to add a fancy transition, they build one in After Effects or buy polished ones from third parties.
Aside from having a small number of transitions, Premiere Pro has all the video effects you’d expect—colorizing, keying, lighting, 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 (originally from After Effects) is very effective at smoothing out bumpy video. This feature now works quicker than before. In testing, it got through a 1:33 (min:sec) clip from a moving tram in 2:38, smoothing out all but the biggest shakes. You can adjust the amount of cropping, make the borders auto-scale, and tweak the smoothness percentage. A cool option is No Motion, compared with the default Smooth Motion. Using it with Stabilize Only (as opposed to adding Crop, Autoscale, or Synthesize Edges) resulted in a weird (and unusable) zooming in and out with rotation in my test, so be careful with the settings you use. The result with default settings is noticeably smoother than with Final Cut Pro X in testing.
Premiere Pro Collaboration
Premiere Pro lets you use Creative Cloud Libraries to store and organize assets online, and the Team Projects feature lets editors and motion graphics artists using After Effects collaborate in real time. When you create a project, you simply choose Team Project and designate team members. When you’re happy with an edit, tap the Publish button so the other members see it. Any Premiere user can sync settings to Creative Cloud, enabling editing from different PCs and locations.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
These collaboration features also mean you can go to any machine running Premiere and see your workspace when you sign in. Getting this kind of collaboration and workflow capability in Final Cut Pro requires third-party extensions. Similarly, consumer-targeted products like PowerDirector don’t have any collaboration features to speak of. Premiere Pro also has a Share button for Team projects, which lets you invite collaborators to your project via email.
Frame.io Integration
Adobe acquired Frame.io in 2021, and Premiere Pro subscribers now get a Frame.io account with 100GB of online storage for five projects. That’s separate from the 100GB of Creative Cloud storage. Adobe no longer includes a Frame.io panel, but you can install the Frame.io add-on extension to get that panel for sharing project assets and collaborative commenting.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
The user comments in Adobe’s plug-in marketplace aren’t positive about the change because the extension requires opening a browser rather than working inside Premiere. It also requires a version 4 frame.io subscription, meaning people with version 3 subscriptions can’t use it. The upgrade process isn’t as simple as it might be, either (you have to wait for an email from frame.io for it to be finalized).
In its favor, the new version of the service adds features like connected comments, metadata, and user permissions. You can attach comments to specific timecodes in the sequence, which is a big help to editors. You can’t simply log in to your frame.io account with your Adobe account through Creative Cloud, however. Adobe has put the inbuilt frame.io panel back in the beta version of Premiere Pro, which will hopefully resolve some of the issues.
Auto Reframe
A good chunk of today’s video content ends up on social media, which means different aspect ratio formats. Auto Reframe uses Adobe’s Sensei AI technology to identify what’s important in the frame and then crop to 16:9, square, vertical, or custom aspect ratios to match the output device or service. You can use the tool on individual clips or entire sequences.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
You can either drag the video effect onto a clip or choose Auto Reframe from the Sequence menu. Then, you can choose the output aspect ratio, motion tracking, and whether you want clip nesting.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Vimeo, as well as broadcast outlets, all have different spec requirements, so the feature saves video producers the work of having to custom edit for each. At the very least, Auto Reframe gives producers a starting point; its Nested option means you can adjust what it creates to taste.
Apple has a similar tool in Final Cut Pro called Smart Conform. It’s nearly identical to Auto Reframe. Smart Conform also bases the crop on your project aspect ratio setting rather than creating new aspect ratio versions to taste. One thing I prefer about Final Cut’s feature is that it lets you see how the effect worked by showing the full frame outside the automatically cropped area.
360-Degree VR Video
Premiere Pro lets you view 360-degree VR footage and change the field of view and angle. You can view this content in anaglyphic form, which is a fancy way of saying you can see it in 3D using standard red-and-blue glasses. You can also have your video track the view of a head-mounted display.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
The program, however, couldn’t open my Samsung Gear 360 stereoscopic footage unless I converted it to an equirectangular format (this is the only VR format Premiere supports). 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, Adobe’s tool lets you tag a video as VR so that Facebook or YouTube properly recognize it.
Multi-Camera Angle Editing
Multicam in Premiere Pro can 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 does a good job of syncing clips based on their audio, which is helpful for DSLR-shot clips that 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 the corresponding number. You can then adjust the cuts with the normal editing tools. Adobe adds a new option for multicam editing preference: Ripple trim adds edits to keep both sides of trim in sync.
Color Adjustments and Effects
The Lumetri Color manager in Premiere Pro brings the program in line with Photoshop for video. These tools give you a remarkable amount of color manipulation, along with a great selection of film and HDR looks. Black point, contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, and white balance adjustments are available—all of which you can activate with keyframes. It includes Faded Film, Saturation, Sharpen, and Vibrance adjustments, too. The curves and color wheel options are impressive and include a Color Match feature with face detection and comparison views. There’s also a very cool Lumetri Scope view, which shows the current frame’s proportional use of red, green, and blue.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
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.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Auto Color is something we’ve seen in photo editing software for many years, but Adobe claims the tool analyzes an entire clip using its patented Sensei AI technology to improve contrast, exposure, and white balance. Unfortunately, it works only on a per-clip basis; it would be nice if you could apply it to your whole sequence, that is, the group of clips and overlays that comprise your digital movie. The above screenshot shows what adjustments Auto Color made, which you can then turn to your taste. In testing on several clips, this tool improved both the color and the lighting in testing with several clips but occasionally pumped up saturation too much. Unfortunately, Premiere lacks video noise reduction features like those in CyberLink PowerDirector and DaVinci Resolve.
Audio Editing
Premiere Pro’s Audio Mixer shows balance, pan and VU meters, clipping indicators, and mute/solo controls for all timeline tracks. You can use it to make adjustments as the project plays. Premiere Pro automatically creates new tracks 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, Automatic Click Removal, compression, Parametric EQ, and Studio Reverb.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
For background music, you get a large selection of clips from Adobe Stock (some of which are free). A relatively new Free switch lets you see only those clips you don’t need to pay for. The program now has a full selection of sound effects, such as car door slams, crowd cheers, and explosions. You find these within the Essential Sound panel, which also lets you designate your audio tracks as Ambience, Dialog, Music, or SFX—either manually or via the AI-powered Auto Detect tool.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Switch to the Browse tab to find audio stock, which you can filter by mood or search by term. None of these auto-fits your project length automatically, but you can use the Remix trimming tool to do that. Professionals will likely have a full Creative Cloud subscription, which lets them get sounds through Adobe Audition. The SFX clips include detailed options—not just “car door slam,” for example, but specific options like a 1941 Cadillac or 1975 Ford F150 Pickup.
The recent Enhance Speech tool does a remarkable job of removing background noise when you are editing a piece shot in a noisy environment. PCMag video producer Weston Almond says it’s “like magic.” Essential Sound provides another very useful capability: auto-ducking for ambient sounds, which pulls back background noise during dialog or sound effects.
Titles and Captions
As you might expect, Premiere Pro has a wealth of text options for titles and captions. It can import SRT or XML files. For titles, you get a great selection of fonts, including Adobe TypeKit fonts. You can set crawling, leading and kerning, opacity, rolling, rotation, texture, and more. As in Photoshop, you can apply strokes and shadows to any font. Stroke styles let those with very particular typographic needs choose the type of caps the strokes have, including bevel, miter, and round. Advanced text animation, however, once again falls to After Effects. For comparison, enthusiast-level programs like PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio build in a good selection of title animations.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Automatic Transcriptions
One of the cooler recent features in Premiere Pro is Transcribe Sequence. This feature uses speech recognition technology to produce a text panel from spoken words in the sequence. It can impressively separate multiple named speakers. You can then jump to the place in the timeline by tapping on words in the panel, and pauses are marked with […], letting you find and remove them easily. The panel lets you edit the text and combine or separate text blocks, and its CC button automatically creates a caption track using the transcription.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
The caption editing panel lets you redistribute words among the captions, each of which becomes a separate timeline clip. You can split or merge caption clips and edit the style of all the separate caption clips at once. The next step is to export to an SRT or text file or burn the captions into your video project.
Text-Based Editing
An extension of this auto-transcription capability is the option to edit based on the transcripts. You can select text in the transcription panel and move or delete it, and Premiere Pro adjusts the video clip accordingly. The program lets you automatically highlight filler words (um, ah) or pauses and then delete them all at once, which can be a huge convenience for interviews or expository videos. One issue I have is that the skips are abrupt. It would be good for Adobe to include an improved version of the Morph Cut transition (similar to Final Cut Pro’s excellent Flow transition) in the Text-based Editing interface. Unfortunately, Morph Cut caused artifacts in my video.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
DaVinci Resolve now offers text-based editing capabilities, though Apple has yet to announce them for Final Cut Pro as of this writing.
Output and Performance
A clear Export mode button lives at the top of the editing interface, in addition to the Quick Share button at the top right. The simplified Export interface in Premiere doesn’t mean you can’t go into every little detail about the file you need to render. You now see a list of common output targets along the left—Media File, YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook—along with Adobe’s own Behance and Creative Cloud online services. Importantly, you can export to as many as you want with one press of the Export button by toggling all those you want. You can also send your rendering job to Adobe Encoder if you want to batch render and get back to editing in Premiere Pro without waiting for the export to finish.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
The categories in the middle section of the interview (in the above screenshot) all allow for fine-tuning, thanks to drop-down arrows. For example, click on Video here, and you can set not only the frame size, frame rate, and aspect ratio but also the bit rate, color space, and time interpolation. For the rest of us, the new interface thankfully hides those brain-hurting settings.
Premiere Pro gives you most formats you want, and for more output options, Adobe Encoder can target Blu-ray, DVD, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and many other devices. Encoder lets you batch encode to target multiple devices in a single job, such as mobile phones, iPads, and HDTVs. Premiere can also output media using H.265 and the Rec. 2020 color space, as can Final Cut. However, Final Cut requires you to buy the separate Compressor 4 add-on ($49.99) for this functionality.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
The Quick Export option lets you tap the share icon at the top right, and you can produce the project with minimal fuss using a choice of seven preset formats: Match Source—Adaptive High, Medium, or Low Bitrate; 4K, 1080p, 720p, and 480p.
Render Speed Testing
Premiere Pro takes advantage of 64-bit CPUs and multiple cores. For render speed testing, I have each program I test join seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p up to 8K. I then apply cross-dissolve transitions between them and note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 and 192Kbps audio at a bitrate of 16Mbps. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I run this test on a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
Premiere Pro sits near the top of the leaderboard, with an impressive time of just 35 seconds. Premiere periodically auto-saves your work, in case you forget to save explicitly. If you do encounter a crash, it presents you with a Reopen button in a red warning message upon restart.
Verdict: Worthy of the Red Carpet
Adobe Premiere Pro does everything that professional video editors need. It takes the lead when it comes to collaboration, and its close integration with the Creative Cloud suite is a definite boon. Premier Pro’s rendering speed is also among the fastest. Its organization of an enormous set of capabilities into an elegant design makes it an Editors’ Choice winner for professional video editing. Enthusiasts, meanwhile, should look to the more affordable CyberLink PowerDirector, which earns an exceptional five-star rating.
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The Bottom Line
Adobe Premiere Pro is an expansive, professional-level video editing program with top-notch editing tools, swift rendering speeds, useful collaboration features, and a well-designed interface.
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About Michael Muchmore
Lead Software Analyst
