NLE Review: Adobe Premiere Pro CC

PVC by Scott Simmons

How do you begin to thoroughly review an NLE as deep and feature rich as something like PPro?

If you follow what has been going on in the world of non-linear editing tools for the past few years you know that Adobe has been working very hard to make Premiere Pro a viable option for every aspect of editorial and post-production. The Adobe Premiere Pro team has been asking questions, listening to editors and improving their product with release after release pretty much ever since CS4 came along. I’m happy to report that with Adobe Premiere Pro CC the tool really has arrived.

It’s hard to talk about PPro CC without talking about Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service and the fact you can no longer pay one lump sum for a specific Adobe suite of tools. You now have to pay monthly. That’s not what this article is about so you’ll have to look elsewhere for that debate. Though I will say I do wish there was a video tools only option that was a bit cheaper. So much of the Creative Cloud toolset I will never ever ever never use. It sucks I still have to pay for it.

What follows is not a CC new features review. While it’s hard to review a big update like the CC update without discussing new features (and features that are still missing) I tried to approached this review so that someone who is new to Adobe Premiere Pro could appreciate it as well. There’s some long-standing issues still present in PPro CC and those are discussed. There’s also some things that were fixed and/or modified before the CC release and those are discussed as well. And while this is a long review a tool that’s as feature rich and in-depth as an NLE like PPro can never be completely covered feature-for-feature in a several thousand word review.

Interface

One of the most important things about any NLE is the interface and PPro CC seems to complete an interface makeover that began a few versions ago. Most all of the knobs, dials, buttons and dead spaces have finally been eliminated to streamline the tool into something that feels good to spend many hours working in. Customizability is important to CC and you can see that all around the Source / Record monitors down to the much cleaner timeline. read more...