Genuine Feedback from a Long-Time Premiere Pro User

[Jerry23300790jgby]

This isn't meant to be criticism for the sake of it, but rather honest feedback from someone who's been using Premiere Pro for a years.

At this point, it’s clear that Premiere is falling behind when it comes to advanced editing capabilities. Adobe has been in the game for a long time, yet software like DaVinci Resolve has not only caught up but surpassed Premiere in several areas — from color grading to stability, performance, and even pricing.

Hoping that meaningful improvements would come with each update. But every release seems to bring minor changes, more bugs, and crashes, rather than addressing long-requested features. The much-anticipated rotoscope tool was announced long ago, and still nothing. No significant updates to color grading, masking, tracking, or even performance — all things that modern editors rely it  lacks, as editing nowadays has been upgraded.

Meanwhile, even platforms like CapCut are innovating at a faster pace and has much better features. It’s frustrating to pay a monthly subscription only to feel like you're stuck using outdated tools.

Most of my colleagues have already migrated to DaVinci Resolve. I stayed and kept using premiere pro hoping that good feature will come — but with every time there is disappointment , it's harder to justify. Even major YouTubers and professionals have openly voiced their disappointment and made the switch. Switch wasn't easy but I feel everyone were forced when they had no options.

If Adobe doesn’t seriously upgrade Premiere Pro — or even consider rewriting it from the ground up — I’m afraid more users will leave. This is genuine feedback, not out of hate, but from someone who wants to see Premiere Pro be what it should be.

Please, Adobe: listen to your community and bring this software up to the level we know you're capable of.

[richardw58268709]

Well I am not a long time user of Premiere, but I am of the other software in Adobe's creative catalogue. Indeed I have been around since Aldus Pagemaker became Adobe Pagemaker in 1994.

When I occassionally delve into video editing I am often surprised with how badly the different programs actually work together, like key commands and different ways users have to navigate doing exactly the same task. Like moving panels around. Some consistiency would be nice. 

This morning I came across an almost laughable inconsistiency. In 2025 Premiere can't seem to deal with imorting scaleable vector graphics. I tried to import a navive .ai file and would you believe I can't scale it without it being an absolute dogs dinner. I googled it and watched some videos and then discovered that you can either scale your graphic and bring it in as a bitmap image (so there is no observable loss of quality) or you can click on the graphic and open it in After Effects and... Oh please this is not acceptable. At this point I am at a loss to why I bother with Adobe. They spend development budget on AI tools which are destroying their own user base and industry. So far so that I am coming to the point where I simply cannot justify the increasing annual subscription costs.

But I guess ultimately that's why company's like Adobe become obselete, they stop caring about their users and are more interested in their shareholders. It's just a shame that no one from Adobe will care to reply to our messages of concern.

[Jerry23300790jgby]

I feel that the correct point, no matter how many cristiscism they get i feel same they don't care at all, not at all only matter of time it sinks and people will stop using it, frustation level gets higher because of their crash, bugs and outdated tools, imagine even capcut has roto while priemere pro lacks so many things now it has become simple editing tools. It's better for them to sell it to Blackmagic at least they are doing better, so expensive monthly subscription and all we get is crash, error, priemre is not responding, so many errors everywhere. feels like I everyone is sick of them and even people who don't want to shift are forced to shift in Davinci and heard it's far more better. No matter how much we yap they won't fix anything

[R Neil Haugen]

First, thanks for posting ... I really wish more users posted here, especially with comments/requests/ideas for different behaviors. The more comments, the better! And as we all work differently, that is needed from more users.

So keep posting, keep pushing, keep suggesting ... I certainly do.

For me ... I'm a long-time worker in both Premiere and Resolve. I work for/with/teach pro colorist, btw.

Every one of us works differently ... period. One of the main joys of NAB every year for me are the aisle-way discussions. There are so many different was to do everything in any of these apps, it's fascinating.

And one user's absolute delight will be another user's biggest pain point. Guaranteed.

The main thing I always have to say is all these apps are simply fancy hammers. Use what works for you and get on with Life. And get the work out for the nice people what pays your bills.

And yes, I've put in many requests for changes, in both Premiere and Resolve, and upvoted a ton. Maybe more than the vast majority of people, as in general I always prefer giving more options for different users and workflows, because we all work differently.

Does Premiere have problems, both illogical behaviors and bugs here and there, especially for some hardware and/or media/workflow combinations? Yup, no question there.

That said, I know and work with a number of the major folks in colorist circles, mostly total Resolve users, and they all have long lists of illogical/buggy behaviors that have been in Resolve for five or more major versions.

Add to that, Resolve's once highly-touted "rock solid" capabilities are realistically a thing of the past. Why? I think two things.

1) BlackMagic works Resolve totally as a loss-leader, to get people into their hardware ecosystem.

2) They are also trying to mimic the Adobe dream of being one solution to all workflows/media/hardware/users across everything out there. That seems to have inhrent issues with getting buggy or unexpected behavior.

Personally, I've got enough BM kit to have extra Studio licenses in a drawer. Now, I love my BM cameras. But their desktop panels .... well, every panel only works on one page in Resolve.

So a color panel only does color, the Editing panel the Edit page, Fairlight panels (bloody expensive things!) only work the Fairlight audio page.

So to have panels for those things, which greatly speeds your workflow, you have to have at least one panel for every page. How do you have desktop for all that? 

In contrast ... in Premiere, my Tangent Elements panel with all those balls, rings, knobs & buttons ... can be mapped to about anything. Color, of course ... and I've got mine set so that in the Wheels mode the balls/rings are color Wheels, but the knobs are controls from the Basic & Creative tabs. Most everything available in one "place".

But it can also be remapped to rotate/size/position any screen element ... clips/graphics/masks you name it. It's an awesome audio mixer too!

What about in Resolve? They do allow the ... very limited ... use of an Elements panel, of course, on the color page only. Users cannot remap panels in Resolve. Half the Elements panel is blank at any time, the menu system is weird and limited ... and it literally was made back about R12 and by staff comments will never be updated. None of the new tools show up in it.

To replace the functionality of that Elements panel in Resolve, I'd need five different panels, at a cost north of $7500 last I checked, but I'd still not have everything available.

I have nine custom workspaces in Premiere, but of course, users do not customize workspaces in Resolve. You can open or close a couple things per 'panel', but that's it.

Now ... I have good friends that think Resolve is the most intuitive UI ever. Which is cool and groovy, and I'm happy for them. For me ... after a decade of work ... I still struggle at times to remember where they've buried some of the context menus. And oh, right, you can't change color management from the page/panel showing all the sequences, you have to go back to what, the Media page I think it is, to change a sequence's color space/settings. Whatever that is, it's a pain to me.

So that's to say that we all work and see things differently. Use what works for you, again.