Adobe Premiere

Why do so many editors stay with Premiere? Because the whole job happens in one place. You cut on a proper timeline, fix the colour, clean up the sound, add titles and export, all in the same app.

The newer AI tools are the practical kind. Text-Based Editing writes out what was said, and you build a rough cut by copying and pasting sentences. If you edit interviews, that saves a lot of scrubbing.

Search works on meaning now, too. Type "dog running on a beach" and it finds the clip, even if you never labelled it.

It also sits inside the rest of Adobe. Frame.io for getting feedback comes with the plan, and it works closely with After Effects and Photoshop if you have those.

And the phone app is free. No watermark, 4K exports, as many as you like.

You can't own it. Premiere on the desktop is subscription only, and Adobe's own FAQ says there's no version to buy outright.

The $22.99 price comes with a string, too. It's an annual plan billed monthly, so you're signing up for a year.

The trial is short. Seven days, and it rolls into a paid plan unless you cancel in time. Put a reminder in your calendar the day you start!

Then there's the learning. This is a professional tool with panels everywhere. The founders of one video startup wrote on Hacker News that they kept having to look up how to do simple edits in it.

The free phone app has rough edges as well. App Store reviewers mention exports that freeze part-way and a timeline that jumps back to the start. And its generative AI costs credits, and only works on iPhone for now.

Start with what's free. The phone app costs nothing, and if you only make short videos for social, it might be all you need.

Premiere on its own is $22.99 a month on an annual plan billed monthly. That covers the desktop app, Frame.io, 100GB of cloud storage and 25 generative credits a month. Teams pay $37.99 a person.

Need Photoshop and After Effects as well? Creative Cloud Pro is $69.99 a month for 20-plus apps. If you'd end up with two or three Adobe apps anyway, price that up first.

Students and teachers do best. They get Creative Cloud Pro, Premiere included, for $19.99 a month in the first year and $39.99 after that.

There's a small safety net on the trial. Adobe's trial page says that once the 7 days are up, you still have 14 days to cancel for a full refund.

One thing to know first. The App Store score belongs to the free phone app, not the desktop one. It has 4.8 from about 26,000 ratings.

People like that it's free and still feels like a real editor. The complaints are bugs: frozen exports, a timeline that jumps back to the beginning, and no easy way to reach support.

For the desktop app we read Hacker News. Nobody there doubts it can do the job. When a new browser-based editor was posted, one reply simply asked whether it matched Premiere and Final Cut.

The arguing is about money and habit. One commenter said they'd take Apple's $12.99 bundle over Premiere at $22.99. Another made the opposite point: once your hands know the shortcuts, switching is a hard sell.