Diving into Adobe’s cloud-based, edit-anywhere video app, Premiere Rush CC | Computing

Adobe has officially announced Adobe Premiere Rush CC, a cloud-first, cross-platform video editing app for Windows, MacOS, and iOS (with Android soon to follow).

The app, which is free to download and try, is Adobe’s next step toward its ongoing efforts to move creativity to the cloud and make content and creation accessible across devices, with an extra emphasis on sharing it across social media.

Ahead of the announcement on stage at Adobe MAX 2018, we were able to take it for a spin. Below are some of our thoughts on Adobe’s first iteration of Adobe Premiere Rush CC — essentially a distilled cloud-centric version of its more robust video editing program, Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

The first thing that stuck out with Adobe Premiere Rush CC was its onboarding process. Adobe has done a fantastic job creating a means of familiarizing users with the app. Using stock footage and onscreen prompts, Adobe walks through the process of creating a project, importing footage, editing footage, and sharing.

Even if you’re familiar with Adobe’s other Creative Clouds app, the onboarding process is a great starting point. If you get the gist of it though, there is an easy out to skip the intro.

Once familiarized with the app, it’s just a matter of getting content into a project to edit. Importing media — videos, photos, and audio — is as simple as selecting it from the provided media browser. Content can be added from local storage, such as on your computer’s hard drive or an external hard drive, as well as from cloud services, including Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Apple’s iCloud Drive.

Importing went quick on both an iPhone XS and first-generation iPad Pro, even with large 4K video files. Once content is imported into Adobe Premiere Rush CC, you can start editing while it seamlessly syncs in the background to your Creative Cloud account. This made it easy to keep the focus on editing, with the confidence that the content would be accessible on other devices should we choose to edit elsewhere.

As for the available editing tools, Adobe provides almost everything you could ask for in a consumer-centric app: multi-timeline video and audio editing, title screens, transitions, presets, basic color adjustment tools, audio processing, and transform tools.

As to be expected for a consumer app, none of the controls offer the fine-tuned adjustments you’d find in Adobe’s professional Premiere Pro CC app. There are only three transitions to choose from, there’s no key-framing for edits and effects, and overall, it’d be nice to see a few more options and capabilities throughout the editing and settings modules. However, you can open Premiere Rush CC files in Premiere Pro CC, which means pro users can start a project in Rush and fine-tune it later in Premiere Pro.

That said, for a 1.0 product, it’s incredibly proficient for what it is. We used it on a MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone XS, and on each device, the same tools were available and the content never seemed to struggle to render in real time, even when multiple effects were added.

If you’ve ever used Adobe Premiere Pro, you’ll know how difficult it can be to export content. Adobe Premiere Rush CC manages to take away all of the unnecessary commotion and keep it simple.

Adobe is promoting Premiere Rush as a video editor designed for social media, so there are multiple means of sharing your content online. At launch, it offers support for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Adobe’s Behance, as well as Twitter, Vimeo, and Snapchat. Having these integrations out of the gate means you won’t have to worry about saving files on various devices and uploading them one-by-one — you can post all your content straight from the app with minimal effort.

Wrapping up, Adobe Premiere Rush CC is a brilliant dilution of the most important features from Adobe’s full-fledged video editing app, Adobe Premiere Pro. On both desktop and mobile the app feels snappy and responsive. The interface takes a little getting used to, especially if you haven’t used Adobe’s other cross-platform CC apps, but the onboarding process does a great job to lower the barrier to entry.

Put simply, Adobe Premiere Rush CC is to Adobe Premiere Pro CC what Adobe Lightroom CC is to Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. It’s a great mobile-first app that seamlessly keeps your content across devices and makes it easy to create and share content across social on the go without all of the unnecessary fluff.

Adobe Premiere Rush is available on Windows, MacOS, and iOS, however there are system requirements you’ll need to meet. The Android version is due out in 2019. While it’s free to download and try, you will be limited to exporting three projects before you have to shell out some money.

Adobe Premiere Rush CC is available for $10 per month to individuals, $20 per month to teams, and $30 per month to enterprise customers. It’s also available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers with the All Apps, Student, and Premiere Pro CC single app plans. It includes 100GB of Creative Cloud storage space with the option to upgrade up to 10TB of cloud storage.