Adobe today released Premiere Rush CC, a new cross-platform video application for iOS, Mac and Windows that’s designed to dramatically simplify the editorial process, from assembling clips into a sequence to sharing a finished video on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Adobe’s own Behance.
I test-drove Premiere Rush for a few days before the official release, and it has to be said — this is an incredibly slick and surprisingly powerful application. It’s designed from scratch for use on smaller touchscreens, and it does the job, but I found the editing experience to be especially comfortable and speedy on my 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The only slowdown came when I exported a nine-minute video in HD, which took a little more than four minutes. YouTubers and other social media stars who acquire video footage directly to their iPhones or iPads will likely be wowed by the combination of speed and portability.
As for pro video editors, well, Rush isn’t going to replace the full-featured NLE, with its handy mouse-clicks, keyboard shortcuts, and creative flexibility. But for certain jobs — particularly anything where it makes sense to capture, edit, and upload video on a mobile device rather than bringing a pro camera or PC into the equation — Rush is probably the best, fastest way to get it done.
You start working in Rush by creating a new project. If you’re on your iPhone or iPad, this probably means selecting video from your Camera Roll folder, but you can also access assets that have been uploaded to your Creative Cloud account or Dropbox. Select video clips in the order that you want them to appear in your assembly, and they will be dropped onto the timeline in that sequence. Simple transitions can be applied from shot to shot — right now they’re limited to cross-dissolve, dip to white and dip to black, but it seems likely that (for better or worse) wipes and other graphical options will be added in future versions.
The timeline is gapless, meaning you can simply drag on transition points to shorten a clip — your timeline will collapse to close up the gap rather than leaving any empty space on that track. You can also drag a clip up from the timeline to pop it off of one track and add it to a new second track above. A Color panel is built in, offering 11 one-click options for primary color correction along with a reasonably broad set of controls and the ability to create your own presets.
The volume of individual audio clips can be adjusted right from the timeline, allowing users to balance the mix between stacked clips or drop one soundtrack out altogether. Rush has some other audio tricks up its sleeve, like the ability to distinguish between dialogue tracks and music tracks and the option to enable an auto-ducking feature to drop the music when someone is talking. Rush does a pretty good job of this — probably good enough, in most cases, thanks to Adobe Sensei technology borrowed from the powerful Audition CC — though pro editors may still be itching to tweak the mix manually.
Where Rush becomes really powerful, though, is in its integration with its big brother, Premiere Pro CC. I was fooling around with some vacation footage and experimenting with different title styles (yes, Rush includes a full-fledged titler) and I was surprised to see that my own Premiere Motion Graphics Templates, aka .mogrts, were available to drag onto my timeline, complete with keyframed animations and layered shapes, text and images. (This applies only to .mogrts created in Premiere Pro, by the way; more elaborate After Effects .mogrts are not yet supported.) That means you can have an artist create elaborate motion graphics on the desktop and save them in a CC library to be re-used on the fly in projects created and published by a non-artist and/or non-editor on somebody’s phone. Fancy templates are also available for purchase through Adobe Stock.
Just a word of caution, though: support for .mogrts still feels a little unstable. When I closed a project on my iPad Pro and then opened it in Adobe Rush on a desktop PC, an image from one of my templates had disappeared, replaced by a colored rectangle with an exclamation point in the middle of it. Back on the iPad it still displayed correctly and rendered properly in an export. There was another issue with a font replacement in my text that seemed to sort itself out after a couple of roundtrips between PC and iPad. To be safe, it may pay off to restrict your templates to typefaces included in Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit).
If you already subscribe to Premiere Pro CC you get Premiere Rush CC for free; it’s included with individual app or full Creative Cloud subscriptions. Alternately, it’s available as an individual subscription for $9.99/month. Paid subscriptions include 100 GB of cloud storage, upgradeable to 10 TB, along with access to Adobe Fonts and Adobe Portfolio. A free “starter” plan is available, limited to three exports and just 2 GB of cloud storage, if you want to try it out.
Premiere Rush CC is available now for iOS, Mac OS and Windows; look for an Android version in 2019.
