Why is there so little communication/cross-over between Adobe products?

[przone]

Video has BOOMED over the past 3 years.
I'm willing to bet that Premiere Pro etc have NOT seen the same explosion in sales.
Why?
The interface across Adobe products lacks harmony.
I have a small video and all I want to do is crop it and output the cropped area into a new video.
With Premiere Pro, you need a degree in cinematography.
Same operation on an iPhone etc?
2 seconds.
Crop to are and output - no need to worry about the exact size etc.
Also, having deep knowledge of one Adobe product (say, Photoshop) will do you NO GOOD when it comes to Premiere, Illustrator etc.
It really feels like a bunch of disparete products have been bolted together for £600 a year 😞

[R Neil Haugen]

Yes, Premiere Pro is a very complex app. It's designed for professionals who typically want manual control over everything. Premiere Elements on the other hand is built for "prosumer" use with more automated tools.

And those starting in video post production with Pr Pro get a shock, like you did.

But there are a number of us here most happy to help you get going. Ask questions and we'll answer them.

The reality is the number of daily users of PrPro has grown dramatically over the last few years.

To really learn Photoshop is quite a process. To learn Premiere is even more daunting. These are both professional apps without apology.

And ... as someone who came into video production from a long career as a professional stills photographer, I can guarantee that  video production and stills production are very different things, with very different needs, and very different processes.

For instance most Photoshop effects are naturally built to be applied to one image at a time, or at most, applied to a small batch.

Therefore the processing power requirements on the system aren't really a major concern in building the app or any effects.

For video, there's hundreds of images per minute, with varying framesize and locations on disk that are grabbed and shown simply by metadata. So the system load per effect is a crucial part of the building for each effect and the app itself.

Even effects that may "look" Iike the same thing have to be built entirely differently for Ps and Pr.

[przone]

I've been using it (on and off) for years Neil - but the lack of 'cross-over' between the packages still baffles me. You decide you want a 'piece of a video', so (Photoshop mindset) you crop it and now you have a new asset etc. The 'logic jumps' between products is enormous and completely unobvious. Had a look through the output options yesterday and noted that there wasn't one for Instagram. I don't use Instagram, but 1 billion people are using it for content creation - and there is a massive fortune being spent on creation/advertising around that. If less than 1% of that platform's users are using Premiere Pro, then (you would think) that is telling Adobe shareholders something. 
Video is a series of photos (plus some motion magic), so it's hard to understand why Adobe wouldn't make an effort to make its suite more 'suite like'.
It's easy to imagine Adobe's stock price tanking in the near future - as ChatGPT et al become better/more powerful/more widespread.
Simple commands with instant/powerful results?
The users will become 'abstracted' from the processes/programs/products - which will form a 'white box function'.
Let's 'meet' back here in 2033 and see how things have changed... it will be fun!
I'm copying this link into my diary - fingers crossed we're both still in good health by then 🙂

[R Neil Haugen]

It's fascinating to see the user speculation on how "Adobe" is going to tank because X.

The reality is that PrPro's user base has gone way the heck up over the last four years. Several million a day using it now.

And no, video is not just a series of photos and some magic ... it's a completely different process for creation, processing, and displaying than stills work. Having come from a long pro stills career and now near a decade in video and video post, they are very, very different beasts.

The user base for Photoshop and Premiere Pro spill over a little bit, but probably less than you think. And from what I can tell, is mostly Pr users making graphics items in Ps. For doing spot video, a bit here & there, Premiere Elements is both vastly easier to use and adequate to the task.

One can actually work with video in Photoshop directly. I've known a few Ps gurus who did their own social media vids, and did it in Ps. The complex app they knew, of course. Rather than learning another even more complex app.

Neil

[Ann Bens]

Premier is not an iphone or v.v.

Have you tried Auto Reframe?

[Warren Heaton]

The range of software and services provided by Adobe is indeed complex.  

A person with a deep knowledge of Adobe Photoshop certainly did not acquire that expertise within two minutes and understands that gaining a similar level of expertise with Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Animate, Audition, etc., etc. is likely to take an equivalent amount of time to learn those other applications.  That expert Photoshop user would have a head start in the other Adobe applications as they share similar functionality like Workspaces, Tools, Panels, Preferences, Libraries, Overflow Menus, and so forth.

The expert Photoshop user likely came to being so by having pursued professional training as a graphic designer.  So, the chosen field of study informed the use of Photoshop.  Being an expert in Premiere Pro could result from professional training as a cinematographer, but it's much more likely to come from professional training as a video editor.

Maybe the tricky thing is this:  how does the beginner navigate all of Adobe without training?

Hopefully, that person finds the Adobe Community Forums where there's no shortage of participants at every skill level ready to share their knowledge.  For example, someone looking to take a small video and just crop it and output the cropped area into a new video might get directed to Adobe Express which allows you to crop your video for free.

(For what it's worth, it's possible to export a cropped area of video into a new video with Photoshop.)

Anyone reading this post who is interested in learning more about whichever Adobe application they want to get better at, make note of how each application has a "Learn" option most frequently found on the corresponding Home screen.

Learn screens for Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop 2023, Adobe InDesign 2023, Adobe Illustrator 2023, Adobe Character Animator 2023, Adobe Audition 2023, Adobe Animate 2023, and Adobe After Effects 2023.