Best analysis about Premiere Pro from a new user

[Yannick5FBB]

To everybody who uses PP and thinking about using it:

(this is an objective analysis not with a bias, a clear view on what to expect) I never write comments about any product but now I wanted to do my best and spend time and think hard about what and how to write

I use PP since 2 months on a 24/7 basis. Long days.

But you would expect that working with a professional product would be good and easy.

So editing (I mostly do cut and paste and a bit of colour correction and a bit of green key, but no difficult stuff) is ok. 

BUT THEN.

Ok, It looks like rendering big pieces (I have an rtx  3070 card) is impossible. (I render h,264 and just hd.

So I try to find the sweet spot (that I don't have to try 10 times for rendering before it works AMAZING YOU DO THESAME THING, EVEN RESTARTING PC AND ANYTHING ELSE, AND SOMETIMES IT DOOESN'T WORK, THE NEXT TIME IT WORKS) and I render pieces and then again drop them into  the timeline after eachother and render a bigger longer piece...... but it gets harder and exporting is a lucky shot...... restarting pc and thesame settings and it rendering fails and 5 times later it MAGICALLY WORKS.

A real professional product. Enough ssd free space, anything, anything is done to make it possible and the right hardware..... but the software is like...... bad, really bad.

And the bigger, longer it gets, the more difficult. You read forum with advice and you try and try but it all comes down to 1 point: the "professional product" is unprofessional. A pure pure pure joke.

I have no idea how you, professional people can keep working with this.

Sometimes I get an error, sometimes not. And when not an error and when PP says it is all ok..... still have to play the file as there is still a 50/50  chance it is not ok. Amazing. I have no words for this.

And trust me, I tried it all. You can change settings and maybe it will work. The next time maybe not, for 5 times in a row. And then the other setting could work. Don't try 10 different settings. It's all a perfect crazy vicious circle.

I have no words for it how this is possible.

Don't think that I am asking to much of this product, rendering normal hd. And once the file gets bigger, let's say above 25/30 gigs...... you can try and try and try and try to render and hope AND PRAY the thing works once in a while. 

And the best part is: you have to wait and retry and wait and retry...... I am trying to render for 4 days now and I do exactly thesame routine and it worked ONCE!!!!!! Each render is about 2 hours..... 

Do you at Adobe really know yourself how your product works?????????? 

[Andy 1968]

We don't really know anything about your system or what codec you are editing. Below is a demonstration of what Premiere Pro can do on a decent system and also an older and weaker system. Premiere Pro can be problematic but rather than write a review wouldn't it be better to ask for help? 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L-erwmRxAU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFDt-G-dMOU

[Ann Bens]

You forgot to mention your hardware specs and what kind of footage is used.

Highly compressed footage is a challenge.

Might want to consider transcoding or using proxies.

FAQ: Which Format Should I Choose For Proxies? - Adobe Support Community - 4788720

[R Neil Haugen]

This is an app designed with the expectation of being used by professionals for pro-level work. As with any of the others like unto this ... Resolve, Avid, whatnot ... it is both complex and complicated.

To learn to use this massive app requires a fair amount of time and I recommend a subscription to perhaps the LinkedInLearning (formerly lynda.com) service, and spending a couple months with hours a day going through several of their PrPro classes, including downloading the media provided and working along with the training tutorials. Getting used to doing things like this ... and learning how to "think" in the app ... get you a long way quicker than anything else short of working under an experienced editor.

The pro level apps do not have the level of auto-for-you options that the prosumer ones do. There are typically at least five ways to accomplish near anything in them, and every user does things differently.

Resolve does have a very complete manual, which runs to several thousand pages of pdf. And when new users complain about the complexity or the puzzlement how one is to accomplish X action, a very common reply is ... "read the manual!". Or ... "that's on page 1537 near the bottom if you'd actually like, read the manual ... "

PrPro doesn't have nearly as awesome a manual, but they have improved it much in the last couple years. It's available through the Help section in the About tab as always.

And ... posting questions here, with your media and computer spects, effects used, and what is happening will normally get some help from the whole group of peer users here like myself. Some like "RJL190365" are amazing experts in say the H.264/5 encoding issues. He can explain why X CPU does so much better than Y CPU, and how other things feed into the problem.

Ann Bens is pretty widely experienced about the app in general ... and the other regulars all have areas they are pretty knowledeable in. My areas are general base troubleshooting and in-depth in color/color management.

And ... do feel free to gritch and vent here! We all do at times. I've posted some epic rants about decisions I did NOT agree with. Just be respectful and always understand ... everyone uses these apps differently. What seems a stupid process to you will be the perfect process for someone else.

So for any suggestion any of us can make, there will be someone who legitamately disagrees. Because for the way they work, the suggestion would not be an improvement. But still ... make suggestions.

Neil

[Warren Heaton]

Probably the best bit of information that anyone new to video editing can absorb:  Use an editing CODEC, not a delivery CODEC.