Over my career I’ve cut client jobs with well over a dozen different linear and nonlinear editing systems and/or brands. I’ve been involved with Adobe Premiere/Premiere Pro as a user on and off since Premiere 5.5 (yes kids – before, Pro, CS, and CC). But I seriously jumped into regular use at the start of the Creative Cloud era, thanks to many of my clients’ shift away from Final Cut Pro. Some seriously gave FCPX a go, yet could never warm up to it. Others bailed right away. In any case, the market I work in and the nature of my clients dictate a fluency in Premiere Pro. While I routinely bounce between Final Cut Pro X, Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, and Premiere Pro, the latter is my main axe at the day job.
Before I proceed, let me stop and acknowledge those readers who are now screaming, “But Premiere always crashes!” I certainly don’t want to belittle anyone’s bad experiences with an app; however in my experience, Premiere Pro has been just as stable as the others. All software crashes on occasion and usually at the most inopportune time. Nevertheless, I currently manage about a dozen Mac workstations between home and work, which are exposed to our regular pool of freelance editors. Over the course of the past three to four years, Premiere Pro (as well as the other Creative Cloud applications) has performed solidly for us across a wide range of commercial, corporate, and entertainment projects. Realistically, if our experiences were as bad as many others proclaim, we would certainly have shifted to some other editing software!
Stability questions aside, why do so many professional editors prefer Adobe Premiere Pro given the choices available? The Final Cut Pro X fans will point to Premiere’s similarities with Final Cut Pro 7, thus providing a comfort zone. The less benevolent FCPX fanboys like to think these editors are set in their ways and resistant to change. Yet many Premiere Pro users have gone through several software or system changes in their careers and are no strangers to a learning curve. Some have even worked with Final Cut Pro X, but find Premiere Pro to be a better fit. Whatever the reason, the following is a short list (in no order of importance) of why Premiere Pro becomes such a good option for many editors, given the available alternatives.
Responsive interface – I find the Premiere Pro user interface to be the most responsive application of any of the NLEs. I’m not talking about media handling, but rather the time between clicking on something or commanding a function and having that action occur. For example, in my Final Cut Pro X experience – which is an otherwise fast application – it feels slower for this type of response time. When I click to select a clip in the timeline, it takes a fraction of a second to respond. The same action is nearly instant in Premiere Pro. The reason seems to be that FCPX is constantly writing each action to the Library in a “constant save” mode. I have seen such differences across multiple Macs and hard drive types over the eight years since its introduction with very little improvement. Not a deal-breaker, but meanwhile, Premiere Pro has continued to become more responsive in the same period.
Customizable user interface – Users first exposed to Premiere Pro’s interface may feel it’s very complex. The truth is that you can completely customize the look, style, and complexity of the interface by re-arranging the stacked, tabbed, or floating panels. Make it as minimalistic or complex as you need and save these as workspaces. It’s not just the ability to show/hide panels, but unlike other NLEs, it’s the complete control over their size and location.
Media Browser – Premiere Pro includes a built in Media Browser panel that enables the immediate review and import of clips external to your project. It’s not just a view of folders in a clip name or thumbnail format to be imported. Media Browser offers the same scrubbing capabilities as for clips in a bin. Furthermore, the editor can directly edit clips to the timeline from the Media Browser, which then automatically also imports that clip into the project in a one-step process. You could start with a completely blank project (no imported media clips) and work directly between the Media Browser and the timeline if you wanted to.
Bins – Editors rely on bins for the organization of raw media. It’s the first level of project organization. FCPX went deep down this hole with Events and Keywords. Premiere Pro uses a more traditional approach and features three primary modes – list, thumbnail, and freeform. List and thumbnail are obvious, but what needs to be reiterated is that the thumbnail view enables Adobe’s hover scrubbing. While not as fluid as FCPX’s skimming, it’s a quick way to see what a clip contains. But more importantly, the thumbnails are completely resizable. If you want to see a few very large thumbnails in the bin, simply crank up the slider. The newest is a freeform view – something Avid editors know well. This removes the grid arrangement of the bin view and allows the editor to rearrange the position of clips within the panel for that bin. This is how many editors like to work, because it gives them visual cues about how material is organized, much like a storyboard.
Versatile media and project locations – Since Premiere Pro treats all of your external storage as available media locations (without the need for a structured MediaFiles folder or Library file), this gives the editor a better handle on controlling where media should be located. Of course, this puts the responsibility for proper media management on the user, without the application playing nanny. The big plus is that projects can be organized within a siloed folder structure on your hard drive. One main folder for each job, with subfolders for associated video clips, graphics, audio, and Premiere Pro project files. Once you are done, simply archive the job folder and everything is there. Or… If a completely different organizational structure better fits your needs – no sweat. Premiere Pro makes it just as easy.
Multiple open sequences/timelines – One big feature that brings editors to Premiere Pro instead of Media Composer or Final Cut Pro X is the ability work with multiple, open sequences in the timeline panel and easily edit between them. Thanks to the UI structure of Premiere Pro, editors can also have multiple stacked timeline panels open in their workspace – the so-called “pancake timeline” mode. Open a “KEM roll” (selects sequence) in one panel and your working sequence in another. Then edit between the two timeline panels without ever needing to go back-and-forth between bins and the timeline.
Multiple open projects/collaboration – Premiere Pro’s collaboration capabilities (working with multiple editors on one job) are not as robust as with Avid Media Composer. That being said, Premiere’s structure does enable a level of versatility not possible in the Avid environment – so it’s a trade-off. With Premiere project locking, the first editor to open a project has read/write control, while additional editors to open one of those open projects can access the files in a read-only mode. Clips and sequences can be pulled (copied/imported) from a read-only project into your own active project. The two will then be independent of each other. This is further enhanced by the fact that Premiere offers standard “save as” computer functions. If Editor #1 wants to offload part of the work to Editor #2, simply saving the project as a new file permits Editor #2 to work in their own active version of the project with complete read/write control.
Mixed frame rates and sizes – Premiere Pro projects can freely mix media and timelines with different sizes, aspect ratios and frame rates. It’s not the only NLE to do that, but some applications still start by having the project file based on a specific sequence format. Everything in the project must conform or be modified to those settings. Both solutions are viable, but Premiere’s open approach is more versatile for editors working in the hodgepodge that is today’s media landscape.
Audio mixing – While all NLEs offer decent audio mixing capabilities, Premiere Pro offers more refined mixing functions, including track automation, submaster tracks, proper loudness measurement, and AU, VST, and VST3 plug-in support. FCPX attempts to offer a trackless mixing model using audio roles, but the mixing routine breaks done pretty quickly when you get to a complex scenario, often requiring multiple levels of compound clips (nested sequences). None of that is needed in Premiere Pro. In addition, Creative Cloud subscribers also have access to Adobe Audition, a full-fledged DAW application. Premiere Pro sequences can be sent directly to Audition for more advanced mixing, plus additional Audition-specific tools, like Loudness Match and Music Remix. Adobe markets these as powered by Adobe Sensei (Adobe’s banded artificial intelligence). Loudness Match analyzes an audio clip and intelligently rises the gain of the quieter sections. Traditional loudness controls raise or lower the entire clip by a fixed amount. Music Remix doesn’t actually remix a track. Instead, it automatically edits a track based on a target length. Set a desired duration and Audition will determine the correct music edit points to get close to that target. You can use the default or set it to favor shorter sections, which will result in more edit points.
Interoperability – Most professional editors do not work within a single software ecosystem. You often have to work with After Effects and Photoshop files. Needless to say, Premiere Pro features excellent interoperability with the other Adobe applications, whether or not you use the Dynamic Link function. In addition, there’s the outside world. You may send out to a Pro Tools mixer for a final mix. Or a Resolve colorist for grading. Built-in list/file export formats make this easy without the requirement for third-party applications to facilitate such roundtrips.
Built-in tools that enhance editing – This could be a rather long list, but I’ll limit myself to a few functions. The first one I use a lot is the Replace command. This appears to be the best and easiest to use of all the apps. I can easily replace clips on the timeline from the source clips loaded into the viewer or directly from any clip in a bin. No drag-and-drop required. The second very useful operation is built-in masking and tracking for nearly every video filter and color correction layer. This is right at your fingertips in the Effects Control panel without requiring any extra steps or added plug-ins. Need more? Bounce out to After Effects with its more advanced tools, including the bundled Mocha tracker.
Proxy workflow – Premiere Pro includes a built-in Proxy workflow, which permits low-res edit proxies to be created externally and attached, or created within the application itself. In addition, working with proxies in not an all-or-nothing feature. You can toggle between proxies and high-res master clips, but you can also work with a mixture of proxies and high-res files. In other words, not all of your clips have to be transcoded into proxies to gain the benefit of a proxy workflow. Premiere takes care of tracking the various clip sizes and making sure that the correct size is displayed. It also calculates the size shift between proxy frame sizes and larger high-res frame sizes to keep the toggle between these two seamless.
Relinking – Lastly, Premiere Pro can work with media on any of the available attached drives; therefore, it’s got to be able to quickly relink these files if you move locations. I tend to work in a siloed folder structure, where everything I need for a project is contained within a job folder and its subfolders. These folders are often moved to other drives (for instance, if I need to travel with a project) or archived to an external drive and later restored. It’s critical that a project easily find and relink to the correct media files. Generally, as long as files stay in the same relative folder paths – in relation to the location of the project files on the drive – then Premiere can easily find all the necessary offline media files once a project is moved from its original location. This is true whether you move to a different drive with a different volume name or whether you move the entire job folder up or down a level within the drive’s folder hierarchy. Media relinking is either automatic or worst case, requires one dialogue box for the editor to point Premiere to the new path for the first file. From there, Premiere Pro will locate all of the other files. I find this process to be the fastest and least onerous relink operation of all the NLEs.
©2019 Oliver Peters
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