Why I’m Dumping Adobe Premiere Pro
“Get Premiere dude,” my very video-savvy friend suggested as we chatted about making videos for my podcast. I followed his advice and it’s been a headache for 9 months.
The propaganda campaign for Premiere started about a year ago. I recorded 3 video interviews in a television studio and wanted to view them on my own computer, but iMovie wouldn’t open the files. iMovie was the free video editing software that came standard on my Mac. I mentioned this to a friend, a video professional, making a living on his video skills in Hollywood. He casually mentioned that if I had Premiere, his program of choice, I could view the files. The seed was planted.
I wanted to see the files, but I didn’t need to see them. These videos had to be high quality products and I hired a professional editor to meet these high standards. iMovie was working just fine for the casual stuff that I edited myself.
Yes, I would need this software to create excellent videos of my podcast interviews. This must be the only way.
A month went by and I started making videos every day. Another Hollywood-editor-friend pointed out some things I could do to spice up my videos, if only I had Premiere Pro. “Get Premiere dude,” he suggested and then he began to tell me about the exciting options I would have. Plug-ins, effects, and animations began to swirl in my mind’s eye. My friend declared that Premiere was the industry standard and I needed it. Yes, I would need this software to create excellent videos of my podcast interviews. This must be the only way.
I bought into the myth and signed up with Adobe. The first video I loaded appeared only in green. I spent hours troubleshooting. The interface was so cumbersome that I didn’t want to experiment and risk irreversible damage to the work I had accomplished up to that point. My videos got worse, not better.
Mysterious errors continued to crop up. There is an entire language to the Premiere troubleshooting message boards. The moderators can only offer educated guesses, because the product is so complex that they can’t be sure of the right solution, if any exists.
For example, I’ve recently uploaded a video from Premiere to YouTube to find that it started with 3 seconds of black screen. This was not my intent, but Premiere defaults to open with black unless you line up everything in the sequence to the zero mark. iMovie on the other hand, starts the sequence at zero by default, no weird blackness there. I went to Premiere, moved the sequence up 3 seconds, then tried to upload it to YouTube. The video encoded to 89%, the bar on screen telling me that there were only 44 seconds remaining, then time began to bend. 44 seconds became 48 (see below), 53, and so on. After a few minutes I canceled and tried again, must’ve been a glitch in the matrix. Two restarts and 3 hours of trying everything in the message boards (which propose tasks so complicated that they refer to other message boards) and the video still will not upload. It continues to stick at 44 seconds, then go backwards. No solution. Where do you go with a software that can’t answer you in the customer support system?
for someone running a small business, unnecessary overhead is death.
Finally, this program costs money, and it’s a monthly subscription that never ends. So, I’m paying to use a software that is extremely complex and unreliable, because… why? Because it’s considered the industry standard? Because I got caught up in the hype from my friends? Because I like the way it sounds when people ask me about my videos? These are awful reasons. And for someone running a small business, unnecessary overhead is death.
To be fair, here are some reasons to use Premiere Pro
1. If you are a professional who requires it
2. If there are features that make your life better. I do find that some projects with simultaneous cameras are quicker to edit on the Premiere timeline.
3. If you have skills that mesh nicely with Premiere, such as After Effects
4. If you already have the Adobe Creative Cloud, so Premiere is essentially free
5. If you like troubleshooting and nerd-speak message board hunting as your project deadlines loom
These reasons don’t match up for me. So I’m dumping Premiere. But first, I need to get this video encoded. Does anybody know what to do with (see below) this error? I think it’s relevant to the upload problem. Help!
