Premiere just keeps getting worse.
I honestly don't understand the people working at Adobe in charge of Premiere, and the ones in charge of all the products. Because they could have an NLE so good, so easy to use, with features that make it so fast to cut videos of all complexities, and some other great features for many other things. But instead they keep making it so unstable, year after year, that by now, it's the butt joke of the industry.
When it doesn't crash, it stalls endelessly, on both Mac and PC. I'm not going to say this to brag, but because it has a very good reason to be brought up. My work computer is a Mac Studio Ultra, an insanely fast machine with 64 GB fof RAM, 20 CPU cores, 48 GPU cores and an SSD that can copy in a second what was the full capacity of a hard drive 20 years ago. And, it really delivers. On everything, but Premiere, surprise, surprise. Always the party pooper that Premiere.
I open it and I start a very simple project, which doesn't have many files, and they are simple files, 1080p, not a high bitrate, and just some audio VO files. And a few minutes pass, and for this task I have to switch back and forth between Premiere and Powerpoint. Prior to this, I had been working in Powerpoint for hours, also app switching back and forth, without any problems. So suddenly I see that everything stalls. Then, after like a minute, I see my pointer teleport to a totally different part of the screen, and everything keeps being sluggish. So I close everything and I reboot.
All good for a while, until a few minutes after opening Premiere. Then it all goes to hell again. And I even noticed, if I open it, and then choose the Audio window layout, and add a filter to an audio track, it makes it sluggish almost right away. And when it's not sluggish, it still has a one second delay between you clicking your mouse, and that action happening. Then at some point it goes back to normal again, then later goes sluggish again. Also, I open the Activity Monitor, and I see that Premiere is using around 50% CPU, when it's in the background doing nothing at all. Nothing. No rendering, nothing. 50% CPU for being idle. As ridiculous as a car idling at 5000 RPM.
This is like a joke. At least in my case my company pays for my subscription, so I'm not paying for something so mediocre. But millions of people pay for it out of your own salary, like I did for years. And it's a lot of money per year. A lot. And if you pay for the suite and you never edit video, maybe you are exclusively a motion graphics artist, then OK, After Effects is a dinosaur but it's not so extremely unstable most of the time. It's usable. And its renders really fly on this machine.
But right now, if I had to pay Adobe CC out of my own pocket, I wouldn't do it. In 2015 I bought the Final Cut Pro X suite, which sadly these days is reduced to just FCP, Motion and Compressor. But they are all excellent products to this day, stable and fast as hell. And the best part is, I paid $400 back in 2015, and all these years, I still got all the updates for free. That's 7 years of free updates. With Adobe CC, you pay and you pay and you pay and the software keeps getting buggier and buggier.
But I'm far from being the only one saying this. There are tons of videos on YouTube talking about how buggy Premiere is, and those videos are nothing new, they've been popping up since 4 years ago at least.
A few weeks ago, I noticed something unbelievable. I opened Media Encoder on the Mac Studio, and noticed that everything that was HEVC/H.265, was missing. All the presets, the codec, all gone. So I open my personal Mac. Also, all gone. I think the version was 22.4, maybe I'm wrong. So I ask a few friends, and some of them tell me that they also see it gone, and others tell me that it's still there. All updated to the latest version back then.
Then today I open ME and there it is, back again. How does a whole codec and its presets disappear from some installations and not others? It's pathetic.
So why does Adobe keep doing this? If you evaluate Premiere feature wise, it's excellent. It has some ridiculous things, like being decades old and still not having a way to save a custom transition, when every other NLE has had it for decades. But OK, I can live with that. If it doesn't crash on me often, or it brings down a $5,000 state of the art computer to its knees.
So why doesn't the CEO and the Premiere team leader say "OK guys, enough is enough, we have to stop introducing all these cool features and spend a year making this the most stable NLE in the planet, because our reputation is on the floor and we need to recover from it."
And I bet they could, if they wanted. And when they start releasing updates, and Premiere starts being more and more solid, people are going to notice, and many of those who switched to other NLEs out of necessity, would come back.
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