Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro, commonly known as Premiere Pro or just Premiere, is Adobe's flagship NLE professional video editor.

It is often compared to Vegas for its similar range of features. While Vegas is more commonly used for individual producers / smaller teams due to its easier learning curve and cheaper price, Premiere is more often seen in larger, professional environments. This nature makes it less commonly seen in tennis (notably due to how much harder it is to pirate than Vegas), but it still gets favorable use throughout.

Premiere is available as a monthly purchase as of all Creative Cloud releases, either individually or with other CC products. As of this writing, it is 22.99 USD a month.

https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere.html

The Premiere Pro logo used from the mid 2010's until 2020.

Usage

Compatible Systems

Premiere Pro, like almost all other Adobe software, is made primarily for use with Windows and Mac. However, versions as new as CC 2024 have been able to be run on Linux using Wine.

Workspaces

Like Vegas, Premiere has many modular windows that make up the workspace. Premiere comes with presets for said workspaces, which are the following (as of 2022):

• Essentials - this is the default workspace.
• Vertical
• Assembly
• Learning
• Color
• Effects - this one focuses on adding visual effects to videos, which is ideally the best for tennis.
• Audio
• Captions and Graphics
• Review
• Libraries
• All Panels
• Metalogging
• Production

You can also make your own presets, for whatever you want!

The Timeline

Cutting Footage

To cut a piece of footage, press the C key to enter Cut mode, then click where you want to cut. The V key returns you to standard cursor mode.

Dynamic Linking

The entire modern Adobe Creative Cloud suite comes with a feature called dynamic linking - which lets files of certain types work in tandem across multiple programs. Most commonly, this is done between Premiere and After Effects to copy a sequence from Premiere's timeline into After Effects. You then edit the sequence there, then save the AE project file. When you go back into premiere, it will automatically update with the changes you've made!

Dynamic Linking is also used with Adobe Media Encoder to import sequences for rendering. Most of the time this isn't necessary, but for certain filetypes that premiere cannot natively render to, this is necessary. It also, in some cases, can be more stable for larger projects (or at least tell you when and where something went wrong, which Premiere doesn't do.)

Comparisons to other editors

Advantages

• Drag and drop moving of video frames in the preview.
• One of the better programs for Masking.
• Timelines can be pre-composed (instead of nested) to save space.
• Effects are split into folders, making them easier to find.

Disadvantages

• Premiere does not support 3D Source Alpha or any true equivalent. The best you can get is the "Basic 3D" plugin, however this is a pseudo 3D effect that cannot interact with other layers.
• Significantly less VST and audio effect support, and many of the built-in ones pale into comparison to Vegas equivalents. No vibrato, and a laughable pitch shift.
• Only solid color media generators, must use After Effects to build them.
• Effects do not have thumbnail previews.

Notable Versions

The current naming standard of Premiere versions is based on their year of release. For example, all versions from 2025 are 25.X. While you can keep a downloaded version forever (assuming you continue to pay for a license), installers are only legitimately available up to the start of the previous year.

Premiere 4.2

This was the only version compatible with IRIX machines.

Adobe Premiere Elements

Adobe sells a stripped-down version of Premiere called Premiere Elements. This has much less features than Premiere Pro (notably the lack of many common tennis techniques like reversing and plugin support). The amount of layers are also much fewer.

As of 2025, Elements is a perpetual license similar to that of Pro - a controversial move as it had been seen as a way to permanently own Premiere legally since the perpetual Creative Cloud system began in 2013. It is still much cheaper than a CC subscription, however, currently coming in at 99$ US for three years.

Adobe Premiere Rush

Premiere Rush is a much simpler and quicker to use video editor that is once again, a heavily stripped down version of premiere. It is designed mainly for social media posting, like Instagram. It also has a free version!