Price
Adobe Premiere Pro requires a Creative Cloud subscription. You have three main options: an annual plan you pay up front ($263.88), an annual plan you pay monthly ($22.99 per month), or a month-to-month plan ($34.49 per month). Adobe also offers more affordable plans for students and pricier ones for businesses. If you want the entire Creative Cloud suite, which includes Audition, Photoshop, Illustrator, and a raft of other Adobe creative software, you need to pay $59.99 per month. The subscription model not only gets you program updates, which Adobe delivers semiannually, but also 100GB of cloud storage for syncing media. Any of these plans entitles you to activate the software on just two computers.
A perpetual license for Final Cut Pro costs $299.99. It works out to be cheaper than Premiere Pro after just a year and a half, and you still get feature updates. Final Cut Pro is available from the Mac App Store, which eases the process of downloading updates and lets you install the program on multiple computers as long as you sign into the same Apple account.
Winner: Apple Final Cut Pro
Platform Support and System Requirements
Premiere Pro runs on both Windows and macOS. The online user guide states that it is the company’s policy “to support the current and the most recent previous version of each operating system.” For the moment, that means Windows 10 (64-bit) version 22H2 (or later) or Windows 11 with:
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An Intel 6th-generation or AMD Ryzen 1000 Series CPU or newer
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8GB of RAM (it recommends 16GB or more)
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2GB of graphics memory
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8GB of hard drive space
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A 1,920-by-1,080-pixel display
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A sound card compatible with the ASIO protocol or Microsoft Windows Driver Model
On macOS, you need version 12 or later with:
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An Intel 6th-generation or newer CPU
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8GB of RAM (it recommends 16GB or more)
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8GB of hard drive space
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A 1,280-by-800-pixel display (it recommends a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels or higher)
Premiere Pro runs on Apple silicon–based Macs natively.
As you might expect, Final Cut Pro runs only on Macs. It requires macOS 14.6 or later, 8GB of RAM (it recommends 16GB), and a Metal-capable graphics card for Intel-based computers. For VR headset support, you also need SteamVR. Final Cut Pro runs smoothly on Apple silicon–based Macs as a native application.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Ease of Use
Premiere Pro stays true to the tradition of high-end, professional-level software. Ease of use and simplicity of interface are not paramount among its goals. That said, there’s no reason that a determined amateur with time to devote to learning the software couldn’t use it. Adobe has other products more appropriate for hobbyists, including Premiere Elements.
Apple makes the upgrade path from its consumer-level video editor, iMovie, very smooth. The latest version of Final Cut on the desktop also makes it easy to import projects you started on an iPhone or iPad.
Winner: Apple Final Cut Pro
Timeline
Premiere Pro uses a traditional nonlinear editor (NLE) timeline with tracks and track heads. It calls your timeline content a sequence, and you can create nested sequences, subsequences, and subclips to keep everything organized. The timeline has tabs for multiple sequences, which can be helpful if you’re working with nested sequences. Longtime video editors are likely more comfortable with this setup than with Apple’s more inventive trackless Magnetic Timeline.
Timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Adobe’s system also fits with some pro workflows in which the tracks are in an expected arrangement. It works differently from consumer video editing apps, however, because it automatically separates a clip’s audio track from its video. The timeline is very scalable and offers the usual razor, ripple, roll, slip, and slide tools. The interface is extremely configurable, letting you undock any and all panels. You can show or hide FX badges, keyframes, thumbnails, and waveforms. You get seven preconfigured workspaces (including Assembly, Editing, Color, and Titles) compared with Final Cut’s mere three.
Trackless timeline in Apple Final Cut Pro (Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Apple’s innovative trackless Magnetic Timeline is easier on the eyes than the traditional timeline interface, and it offers several editing advantages, such as connected Auditions, clips, and roles (descriptive labels such as Dialog, Effects, Music, Titles, and Video). Auditions let you designate optional clips or takes for a spot in your movie, and you can group clips into compound clips—roughly the equivalent of Premiere’s Nested Sequences. Instead of tracks, Final Cut Pro uses lanes, with a primary storyline that everything else attaches to. This makes keeping everything in sync easier than in Premiere.
Final Cut Pro’s interface is less configurable than Premiere’s. You can’t split panels off into windows, except for the Preview window, which is very spare in the control department—the only options are Play and Pause. Premiere offers a lot more here, with buttons for Export Frame, Extract, Go to In, Go to Previous Edit Point, Lift, and Step Back. As mentioned, Final Cut offers just three prebuilt workspaces (Color & Effects, Default, and Organize).
Winner: Tie
Like a traditional NLE, Premiere Pro lets you store related media in bins, which are similar to folders. As with folders, you can have bins within bins. You can also apply color labels to assets, but not keyword tags. The Libraries panel lets you share assets among other Adobe applications, such as After Effects and Photoshop.
Roles in Final Cut Pro (Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Apple’s program organizes your media through events, keyword tagging, libraries, and roles. The library is the overarching container that includes your projects, events, and clips, and it keeps track of all your edits and options. You can also manage storage targets and perform batch clip renaming.
Winner: Apple Final Cut Pro
Premiere Pro works with pretty much any media format of any level of professionalism, as well as media type for which you installed codecs on your computer. That even includes Apple ProRes. The software supports working with native (raw) camera formats, including those for ARRI, Canon, Panasonic, RED, and Sony. There’s not much video you can create or import that Premiere can’t handle. It even supports XML documents you export from Final Cut Pro.
Final Cut Pro works with the HEVC codec that many 4K video cameras and Apple’s iPhones use. Like Premiere Pro, Final Cut supports native formats from all the major video camera makers, including ARRI, Canon, Panasonic, RED, and Sony, as well as many video-capable still cameras. It, too, handles XML file imports and exports.
Winner: Tie
After Effects, Premiere’s stablemate in the Creative Cloud ecosystem, is the industry-standard motion graphics tool. It dovetails smoothly with Premiere Pro but is more difficult to master than Apple Motion, which now has many of the same capabilities. Regardless, After Effects is the tool to learn if you want to pursue professional video editing as a career. The app costs $263.88 per year.
Apple Motion is also a powerful tool for creating effects, titles, and transitions. It supports custom templates, logical layers, and a rich plug-in ecosystem. Motion is probably a better fit if you use Final Cut Pro as your primary editor. Even if you don’t, it’s just a one-time, $49.99 purchase.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Generative AI Features
The latest generative AI feature to land in Adobe’s video software is Generative Extend, which creates extra video frames (including 4K) from the surrounding content for cases in which a clip isn’t quite long enough to fit the rest of your timeline. Other Premiere Pro features include AI speech-to-text with automatic translation, color management that recognizes raw and log footage and automatically color-corrects it, and Media Intelligence, which recognizes clip contents to help you find them.
Generative Extend in Premiere Pro (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Apple’s pro video editor is playing catch-up with Premiere Pro. It now includes auto-captioning from speech in videos, but still lacks both text-based editing and video generation capabilities. It does, however, integrate with macOS’s Image Playground to generate cartoon-like still images, for what that’s worth. Magnetic Mask (apply effects just to fine-tuned masked areas) and Scene Removal round out some of the other recent AI tools in the app.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Premiere Pro includes the Lumetri Color tools. These are pro-level color grading features that were formerly part of the standalone SpeedGrade application. The Lumetri tools support 3D lookup tables (LUTs) for powerful and customizable looks. The tools offer a remarkable amount of color manipulation, along with a great selection of film and HDR looks. You can adjust black point, contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, and white balance—all of which you can activate with keyframes. Faded Film, Saturation, Sharpen, and Vibrance adjustment presets are also available. Most impressive are the Color Wheel and Curves options. The Lumetri Scope view is also especially cool; it shows the current frame’s proportional use of red, green, and blue. As mentioned, Premiere Pro includes a dedicated workspace for color editing.
Lumetri Color Scope in Premiere Pro (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
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To compete with Adobe’s impressive Lumetri Color tools, Final Cut has a Color Wheel tool that’s impressive in its own right. Color Wheels show a puck in the middle that lets you move an image toward green, blue, or red; the result appears to the side of the wheel. You can also adjust brightness and saturation with the wheels, separately control everything (with the Master wheel), or adjust just shadows, midtones, or highlights. It’s a remarkably powerful and intuitive set of tools. If wheels are not to your taste, the Color Board option shows a simple linear view of your color settings.
Color wheels in Final Cut Pro (Credit: Apple/PCMag)
The Color Curves tool lets you use multiple control points to adjust each of the three primary colors for very specific points on the brightness scale. Luma, RGB Parade, and Vectorscope monitors give you incredible insight into your movie’s color usage. You can even edit a single color value using a dropper. Final Cut now supports color LUTs from camera manufacturers such as ARRI, Canon, Red, and Sony, as well as custom LUTs for effects. You can combine these effects with others in a stacked arrangement. Color scopes adapt to HDR editing, as do the color editing tools. Supported formats include Rec. 2020 HLG and Rec. 2020 PQ for HDR10 output.
Winner: Tie
Titles and Text
Premiere offers Photoshop-like control over title text formatting, with a vast number of adjustments and fonts such as kerning, leading, rotation, shadow, stroking, and tracking, just to name a few. But for 3D manipulation, you need to head to After Effects.
Text-based editing in Premiere Pro (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
For captions, Premiere Pro is a hard act to follow: It not only creates captions from spoken words in your video, but, as mentioned, it also lets you edit based on the captions. As a result, you can take out ums and uhs in the video simply by removing the text from the caption. Premiere can then automatically translate the captions into 27 international languages and display multiple language tracks at once.
Final Cut Pro includes strong 3D title editing with keyframe motion options. You get lots of control over title overlays, with dozens of animation templates. You edit text and position and size the titles right in the video preview; there’s no need for an external title editor.
3D Titles in Final Cut Pro (Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Final Cut Pro’s 3D Titles offer eight basic templates and four more cinematic ones, including a cool 3D Earth choice for sci-fi projects. There are 20 font presets, but you can use any style and size you like. Materials such as concrete, fabric, and plastic give your titles any texture you desire. You also get a bunch of lighting options. For maximum control, you can edit the 3D titles in Motion. Extrude 2D titles into 3D by tapping the 3D Text option in the Text Inspector, and you can then position and rotate the text to taste on three axes. Apple’s software can now automatically transcribe spoken words in clips to text captions, but Premiere Pro goes way beyond that, identifying separate speakers, translating, and allowing text-based timeline editing.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
360-Degree VR Editing Support
Premiere Pro lets you play 360-degree VR footage and change the field of view and angle. You can watch 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 a head-mounted display’s view.
You can’t use Premiere Pro (or Final Cut Pro) to edit 360-degree footage unless you stitch it into equirectangular format. Corel VideoStudio, CyberLink PowerDirector, and Pinnacle Studio can all open 360-degree footage without this conversion. You can’t see the spherical view alongside the flattened view in Premiere like in those apps, but you can easily toggle between them if you add the VR button to the preview window. Helpfully, Premiere lets you tag a video as VR so that Facebook or YouTube can tell it’s 360-degree content.
Recommended by Our Editors
Apple’s pro video editor now has better 360-degree features, including support for Apple’s VisionPro and the HTC Vive (sorry Meta Quest users). It offers 360-degree titles, some effects, and a nifty Patch tool that removes the camera and tripod from your movie. With the standalone Compressor app ($49.99), you can share 360-degree video directly to Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube. You also get stabilization for 360-degree video.
Winner: Tie
Audio Editing
Premiere Pro’s Audio Mixer shows balance, mute/solo, clipping indicator, pan, volume unit (VU) meter controls for all timeline tracks. You can use it to make adjustments as the project plays. The app automatically creates new tracks when you drop an audio clip in the timeline, and you can specify types, such as 5.1, adaptive, mono, standard (which can contain a combination of mono and stereo files), and stereo. Double-clicking the VU meters or panning dials returns their levels to zero. The audio meters next to Premiere’s timeline are resizable and let you solo any track. The program also supports hardware controllers and third-party VSP plug-ins. If you have Adobe Audition, you can round-trip your audio between that and Premiere Pro for advanced techniques such as adaptive noise reduction, automatic click removal, compression, parametric EQ, and studio reverb.
Audio editing is a strength of Final Cut Pro. It can automatically fix hum, noise, and peaks, or you can manually take care of these problems. Over 1,300 royalty-free sound effects are available, as are a long list of plug-ins. One impressive trick is the ability to match separately recorded tracks. For example, if you shoot HD footage with a DSLR and record sound simultaneously on another recorder, the Match Audio feature aligns the sound source (Premiere Pro has a similar feature). Support for Apple Logic Pro plug-ins gives you even more powerful sound editing options. Finally, you get a surround-sound mixer to animate or locate 5.1 audio, as well as either a 10- or 31-band equalizer.
Winner: Tie
Export Options
Premiere Pro offers more export formats than you are ever likely to need. You get even more options via the Media Encoder app, which can target Blu-ray, DVD, Facebook, Twitter, or Vimeo formats. 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. Adobe’s updated Export interface mode makes the process simpler yet more powerful; it lets you choose multiple social targets.
Final Cut Pro’s output options are comparatively limited unless you add the companion application, Apple Compressor. The base app can, however, export to XML and produce HDR, wide-color-space output including Rec. 2020 Hybrid Log Gamma and Rec. 2020 HDR10. Compressor adds the ability to customize output settings and perform batch output jobs. It also adds support for Blu-ray and DVD menus and chapter themes. You can even package movies in the format necessary for iTunes.
Winner: Tie
Performance and Render Time
Like most modern video editors, Premiere Pro uses proxy views of your video content to speed up apparent performance, and I didn’t encounter any lag while testing normal editing operations. The software takes advantage of graphics CUDA and OpenCL hardware acceleration and multicore CPUs with its Adobe Mercury Playback Engine. Premiere Pro locks the app during exporting by default, though you can get around this behavior by choosing Queue in the Export dialog via the Media Encoder app.
One of the primary goals of Final Cut Pro is to take advantage of 64-bit processing and the newer Apple silicon chips. Conveniently, exporting in Final Cut happens in the background, so you can continue working in the program.
I test export time by creating a 5-minute movie consisting of four clips of mixed types with a standard set of transitions. My test media files include some 8K and more 4K source clips. I render it to H.264 1080p, 60fps, using H.264 High Profile. The audio is AAC 192Kbps. For testing, I use a MacBook Air with an M1 processor and 8GB of RAM running macOS Sequoia. It’s on the low end of power for video editing, so it shows differences more distinctly than more expensive hardware. Premiere Pro easily bested Final Cut Pro. The former completed the task in 170 seconds, while the latter required 205 seconds.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Complementary Apps
Adobe maintains a large ecosystem of creative apps and services to support Premiere Pro. Aside from the Creative Cloud apps that work smoothly with Premiere, including After Effects, Audition, and Photoshop, Adobe offers the Premiere Rush mobile app, from which you can import projects. Adobe Express and Firefly, both of which you get with a Premiere subscription, include powerful AI video generation capabilities. Another app, Adobe Capture, lets you snap images for use as colors, shapes, and textures in Premiere Pro.
Adobe’s support for Frame.io collaboration and cloud storage is important for professional use. Other lesser-known Creative Cloud apps include Adobe Character Animator, a nifty app that produces animations based on live actors’ faces and body movements, and Animate, which does the same for illustrations. You can bring both types of projects into Premiere Pro.
Finally, the Adobe Stock integration comes in handy for those times you need B-roll or other stock media. Unfortunately, Stock is not part of a Premiere Pro subscription; plans start at $29.99 per month.
It’s a snap to import projects from iMovie on an iPhone or iPad into the pro editor, as mentioned. And that goes for the newer Final Cut Camera app, available on iPhone and iPad. The Final Cut iPad app ($4.99 per month) allows multicam shooting, as does the Camera app. The already-mentioned Motion and Compressor sibling applications, along with Apple’s high-end sound editor, Logic Pro, extend the program’s capabilities, but that collection of apps can’t compete with Premiere Pro’s.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
