In 2023 I made a video called “Goodbye, Premiere Pro: Why Video Editors Are Leaving For DaVinci Resolve,” and it set off a bit of a firestorm online, because it resonated with a lot of people.
Within a day or two I had people from Adobe themselves reaching out to me, which led to me getting invited out to their headquarters in San Francisco about a month later, along with a lot of other creators, to give them direct feedback about what they were doing wrong and how they could improve. I was really honest with them about the bugs, the crashes and the annoyances editors were dealing with. And thankfully, they listened and took a lot of notes.
But here we are about two years later, and I think it’s time for an update. So let’s talk about three things. What Adobe is doing right, what Adobe is doing wrong, and what Adobe is doing that is just downright confusing.
What Adobe Is Doing RIGHT With Premiere Pro
Two years ago Adobe recognized that Premiere Pro was starting to lag behind the competition from DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut, and I truly believe they made a genuine effort to improve their standing in the community. I got to speak to numerous engineers and employees directly, sometimes literally reading complaint comments off of YouTube to them so they could see the concerns of real editors.
They told me over and over that they were listening. And while they’re a publicly traded company and cannot come right out in a press release and say hey, we know we’re falling behind our competition and we’re going to fix all the bugs and crashes, look at their blog posts through 2023. Every new version was described as faster than ever before and the most reliable version of Premiere Pro yet. That is corporate speak doing everything it can to tell you they were improving as fast as they could.
And I’ll give Adobe credit. From what I could see, that was not just lip service.
Take one of the biggest complaints filmmakers have had for years: colors in your exported video looking different from the preview. I remember telling members of the Premiere Pro team about this at NAB way back in 2019. They knew, and they shipped a fix, but it always felt like a band aid and plenty of editors told me it never fully solved it. Then in late 2023 Adobe quietly released an update that actually fixes it and lets you change the setting so your exported colors match what you saw in the preview. If you’re fighting washed out exports, I have a full walkthrough of that here.
It took four years from my first complaint. But that is proof Adobe has been listening and fixing long standing bugs. They’ve also built real lines of communication with community leaders and keep running calls where they actually ask how they’re doing. I’m genuinely pleased about that.
What Adobe Is Doing WRONG With Premiere Pro
If I had to summarize how things are going in 2025 in one word, it would be this: distracted.
Adobe had been focused on stability and bug fixes. Then in mid 2023, everything changed, and honestly everything across the whole tech industry changed. AI happened.
Literally the week after Adobe flew me out to San Francisco to talk about how focused they were on stability and reliability, they released their first Firefly image generation model. And that was just the start. Like every other tech company, they are very clearly trying to shoehorn AI into every single product they make. And if they’re anything like the rest of the industry, and they are, I’d bet the product teams inside Adobe are rewarded for including AI and punished for not.
Which means there is pressure to add AI features to Premiere Pro even if it comes at the expense of editing speed, render speed and stability.
And here’s the truth. Two years after Adobe committed to making Premiere Pro faster and more stable, if you build an identical project in Premiere Pro and in DaVinci Resolve with the exact same clips and hit render, the odds are Resolve still finishes significantly faster. The footage also plays back more smoothly on the timeline, especially 4K 60 and 120 frames per second clips, which a ton of us are shooting now because so many cameras can do it.
Why is Premiere Pro still the slowest performing editor two years later? It’s simple. They’re distracted. Instead of grinding on speed and stability to keep up with the competition, the majority of their time and focus is going to chasing AI features while the rest of the program stays slow with inconsistent playback and render times.
Don’t get me wrong, new AI tools like Generative Extend are cool. But they are very much still in beta, and at the time of recording they’re limited to 1080p at 24 frames per second, dramatically lower than what most filmmakers are working in. These tools they’re pouring time into are extremely limited right now.
If we as editors had a choice between Adobe spending a ton of time on flashy AI effects or making the software as fast to edit and render as Resolve and Final Cut, I’m betting we’d all pick option two. It feels like Adobe chose to chase shareholder value by cramming AI into everything, because the execs think AI, that’ll make our stock price go up, while they’re still behind on the basics.
What Adobe Is Doing That Is Downright Confusing
After a couple of years of them developing this stuff, we can see that Firefly AI for photos is genuinely impressive. I love using it in Photoshop. But generating AI video costs dramatically more in computer power and time, and that has led Adobe to, inexplicably, want to charge you even more for it.
For context, Adobe raised Creative Cloud All Apps to an eye watering $60 per month, or $660 per year, in late 2023, and made roughly $21 billion as a company in 2024.
And yet here they are introducing AI video generation in early 2025, and that insane amount of money is not enough. Even with a Creative Cloud subscription, your access is extremely limited, because Adobe wants you to pay more.
In Adobe’s own words, an All Apps plan gets you a whopping two video generations. Two. You’re paying sixty bucks a month and you can make two AI generated videos. That’s it.
Want more? Adobe would like another $10 per month for Firefly Standard or $30 per month for Firefly Pro. And even the Pro plan only gets you 70 videos. Oh, and that’s early access pricing, which I assume means it goes up. They’ve also added a Firefly Premium plan at $200 per month for 500 videos.
If you’re keeping track, that is a little less than a third of the cost of an entire year of Creative Cloud, for one month of access to a generative video tool. And these videos are 1080p, 24 frames per second, and five seconds long.
That is quite a high cost for such a literally low quality product. And when you remember that these tools hallucinate constantly, meaning you regenerate the same clip over and over to get something usable, the number of credits Adobe hands you is shockingly low.
To be absolutely clear, one side note: Generative Extend inside Premiere Pro is in beta at the time of making this, and as far as I know you can use it an unlimited number of times without paying anything on top of Creative Cloud. Whether it stays that way once it leaves beta, or whether Adobe starts requiring a Firefly add on to keep using it, remains to be seen. I wouldn’t put it past them.
Now Compare That To The Competition
This is a big part of why that 2023 video struck such a chord, and here in 2025 a lot more editors have made the switch.
Blackmagic keeps adding very cool AI powered tools to Resolve, and they have not charged a cent more for any of them. You pay a $295 one time fee for Resolve Studio, or you use the free version, which lacks a lot of the AI tools but is still a fast and very capable program.
So Adobe’s competition from Blackmagic and Apple is arguably faster to edit and render on than Premiere Pro in 2025, and costs $295 once for Resolve Studio, or the price of Final Cut Pro, or nothing at all for base Resolve. Compare that to $60 per month and you have paid more than their competition after five months. Not even half a year. And then if you want the fancy generative video tools, they want another $10 to $30 on top of that, monthly.
Is there any wonder editors keep switching away? If you’re weighing it up, I compared the two head to head here.
Where Is Premiere Pro Headed Now?
Adobe started to change for the better in early 2023. I really do believe they want to improve Premiere Pro. But they have also become incredibly distracted by AI, at exactly the moment when the rest of us wanted them focused on stability, speed and reliability.
Personally, I’m still making Premiere Pro tutorials. I’m not giving up on the program, because I know how many people out there use it and appreciate those tutorials, and who knows, maybe Adobe keeps improving it. We can hope, if they’re not too distracted.
But at the same time, I don’t have the loyalty to Premiere Pro that I once did. I know how to use DaVinci Resolve now, and I’m working on learning Final Cut too, because I don’t want to be committed to just one editor.
I want to hear where you stand. Are you still on Premiere Pro? Have you thought about switching to Resolve? Already switched and love it? Or are you over here going I use Final Cut, no complaints? Let me know in the comments.
And while you’re down there, my free Edit Videos Like A Pro guide covers the biggest tips I have for you as an editor, and it doesn’t matter one bit which of the three you use. And if you want to go further than a guide, I’ve got full courses on both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, because whichever one you land on, the fastest way through it is somebody walking you through the entire workflow instead of you hunting down forty different tutorials.