It’s been a blast to create Premiere Pro and filmmaking tutorials and creative vlogs on my YouTube channel for beginners, pros and everyone in between. I’ve used Premiere Pro for as long as I’ve been editing videos because it works the way I think. It’s intuitive and I love the integration with the other Adobe applications, like After Effects, Audition and Photoshop.
I edit on a Windows computer with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 and an AMD Radeon RX 580 with 8GB of memory. It’s a solid mid-range system on which I can edit my 4k projects with ease. Working on this system also means that I benefited from two important Premiere Pro updates this year: hardware-accelerated encoding for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, released in May, and now hardware-accelerated decoding, which I review in this video:
Depending on my schedule and brand partnerships, I produce between 2 to 5 videos a week. I need my workflow, from creating a project to exporting the video, to be very efficient. Premiere Pro offers a lot of different options and features that help speed up these tasks.
I shoot all my videos on a Sony a7iii and a6600. This means that, like most creators these days, I’m working in H.264. I like this compressed format because the files are smaller while maintaining high quality. But, of course, that compression means that the computer needs to do more work to “unpack” the video for playback or “re-pack” it for export. Premiere Pro does this really well, but with this year’s hardware acceleration updates, my GPU now does the heavy lifting. This means that my timeline is way more responsive when I’m editing, the playback is a lot smoother, and projects export faster.
If there is one thing I truly believe, it is that one of our superpowers as human beings is telling stories. In my videos, I provide tips and tutorials that help people use Premiere Pro so that they can tell their stories. I strive to do this in a very accessible, easy-to-understand manner while maintaining a level of entertainment.
Editing for YouTube is interesting: the storytelling needs to move fast. One of the most important metrics is “Average View Duration,” which is an important factor in my editing decisions. I find I need to make sure there’s something to grab your attention every 5 to 8 seconds – whether it’s a cut, a quick zoom in, a joke, an introduction of a new character, or a just a glitch. I used these little accent moments like punctuation, to support the flow of my stories.
Premiere Pro has always been really stable for me, but I’ve been loving the performance and workflow improvements. Hardware acceleration makes a big difference in my day-to-day. When I finish an edit, the job is not finished: I still have to do things like designing a thumbnail and creating promo cut downs, so faster exports helped my workflow (and my life). Auto Reframe was a game-changer for me as an online creator. It is an incredibly smart and efficient feature that saves me a lot of time when I create promos for my videos.
Speaking of stability, I am religious about keeping my drivers up to date. In the last few years of using Premiere Pro on a daily basis, it has crashed only a handful of times. If you’re experiencing crashes, there’s a good chance it has to do with drivers. So, a little tip: keep your drivers updated. Some people are scared of updating “before the app is ready” but Adobe does a lot of beta testing. I personally have never had issues with new updates. If you don’t update, you won’t be able to benefit from the impressive performance improvements, like hardware decoding.
Feel free to check out my channel sometime – I would love to see you there!
Learn more about the latest updates for the Adobe Creative Cloud video applications: http://adobe.ly/max2020video