I Tried Adobe Premiere Pro for 30 Days: Here is What Happened

TL;DR: I edited 14 hours of source footage across 9 client deliverables in Adobe Premiere Pro 25 between March 14 and April 14, 2026 on a MacBook Pro M3 Max. Premiere is still the editor with the deepest ecosystem (Frame.io, Audition, After Effects, Photoshop) and the workflow that wins for teams. Render times trail DaVinci Resolve by 20 to 35 percent on the same hardware. The subscription cost is real: $22.99 per month adds up. Worth it for editors who work with other editors and use After Effects daily. Skip it if you work solo and never need the round-trip to other Adobe apps.

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How We Tested

Hardware: MacBook Pro M3 Max with 36 GB unified memory, 1 TB internal SSD, plus a Samsung T7 1 TB external for media. Footage: Sony FX3 at 4K 60p (XAVC-S Intra, 240 Mbps) for primary, and a Pixel 8 Pro at 4K 30p for B-roll. Audio recorded on a Rode Wireless Pro pair. 14 hours of source, 187 clips, 9 deliverables. Test window: March 14 to April 14, 2026. Tracked five things: time to first edit per project, render times at three presets, plug-in compatibility (I have 7 paid plug-ins), crash count, and a daily 1 to 10 frustration score. Tools used: a stopwatch app for render timing, iStat Menus for GPU and CPU utilisation, Activity Monitor for memory, and a Notion log for friction notes. Comparison reference: DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 and Final Cut Pro 11 on the same machine for 3 of the 9 projects. I have used Premiere on and off since 2014; not new to the software, but reset my preferences to defaults for the test.

First Hour and First Week

Premiere Pro 25 launches in about 8 seconds on my M3 Max from cold cache. New Project, set scratch disks (this still matters; the default location is your home folder and will eat your boot SSD if you forget). Set project sequence to 4K 60p UHD. Import the day-one clips. The Media Browser panel is the right way to import; do not drag-drop from Finder unless you want Premiere to copy files into the project folder. Day-one timeline scrubbing on 4K Intra-encoded footage at 240 Mbps without proxies played at about 22 fps; with the default GPU acceleration enabled (Mercury Playback Engine, Metal renderer on M3) the scrubbing dropped frames during cuts. Generated proxies in ProRes 422 Proxy at quarter resolution for all clips. Took 38 minutes on the 14 hours of source. After proxies, scrubbing was a smooth 60 fps and the editor felt like the editor I remember. Lesson learned and re-learned: proxies first on any high-bitrate 4K project.

Frame.io changed my workflow in week one. We send drafts to a client based 4,000 miles away. Frame.io review-and-approve is now built into Premiere via the integrated panel. I exported a draft on March 18, sent the Frame.io link, the client left 11 timecoded comments. Pulled those back into Premiere via the Frame.io panel, addressed each in line, marked resolved. The full round-trip took 90 minutes on my side and felt like working in the same room. Three years ago this would have been email plus screen recordings plus copy-paste timecodes. Frame.io is genuinely the best of Adobe's recent acquisitions. There is a free tier (5 projects) bundled with any Creative Cloud subscription, and paid tiers if you exceed that. Day 3 surprise: After Effects round-trip. Dynamic Link to an After Effects composition still renders live in the Premiere timeline. This was rough on slower hardware in 2018; on M3 it is smooth. We did three motion-graphic title cards via After Effects compositions linked to the Premiere timeline. Worked without crashes.

Daily Use

Editing flow is fast once you have proxies. The Source Monitor and Program Monitor pair is the model every editor since has copied. JKL playback, ripple-delete, slip and slide tools all respond instantly. Multi-cam is solid; I cut a 3-camera podcast episode in week 2 and audio sync via in-clip waveform comparison worked first try. Lumetri Color is good but not as good as DaVinci Resolve's Color page. Building a film LUT in Lumetri took me 35 minutes and required two third-party plug-ins (FilmConvert Nitrate and a curve preset I bought years ago). The same look in DaVinci took 25 minutes and zero plug-ins. So if colour grading is central to your work, you would prefer Resolve. For colour as an after-thought to the edit, Lumetri is fine. Audio mixing in Premiere is workable; the Essential Sound panel does basic ducking, normalisation and noise reduction in 3 clicks. For real audio post, I round-tripped one project to Adobe Audition which is included in the All Apps plan. The Audition workflow is good but requires another launch and another window.

The bug that ate my Sunday. On March 30, working on a 4K HDR project that included a few HDR PNG assets in the title sequence, Premiere crashed every time I clicked the title clip. Three times in 20 minutes. Auto-save kept my work to within 5 minutes of progress. The fix was buried in a community thread: a known incompatibility between Premiere 25.0.2 and certain 10-bit HDR PNG imports. Workaround was to re-export the PNGs as 16-bit TIFF in Photoshop, which broke nothing visually. Filed a bug report; Adobe replied 22 hours later acknowledging it was on their radar. Lost about 3 hours that Sunday. Not Premiere's fault that PNG handling is fiddly, but the crash-on-click behaviour is poor. Two other crashes across the 30 days: one when I dragged 18 clips at once into a sequence (Premiere hung for 40 seconds then crashed), one during a long Frame.io comment sync (recovered cleanly on relaunch). Crash count is acceptable for a tool of this complexity but not great.

  • Win: Frame.io review-and-approve workflow is the killer feature for client work
  • Win: After Effects Dynamic Link is genuinely smooth on M3 hardware
  • Win: multi-camera editing and audio sync are reliable and fast
  • Gripe: render times trail DaVinci Resolve by 20 to 35 percent on Apple Silicon
  • Gripe: HDR PNG handling caused a crash-on-click bug that ate 3 hours

Performance and Cost

Render benchmarks on a 12-minute 4K H.264 deliverable at 16 Mbps target, with proxies enabled. Adobe Premiere Pro 25: 6 minutes 04 seconds. DaVinci Resolve Studio 19: 4 minutes 12 seconds. Final Cut Pro 11: 3 minutes 38 seconds. Same project at 4K 60p ProRes 422 master: Premiere 11 minutes 12 seconds, Resolve 6 minutes 28 seconds, Final Cut 5 minutes 45 seconds. Premiere is the slowest of the three on Apple Silicon. On Windows with a fast NVIDIA card it would close the gap but I did not test that. Cost. Adobe offers Premiere Pro single-app at $22.99 per month annual ($34.49 monthly) or as part of the All Apps Creative Cloud bundle at $59.99 per month. The All Apps bundle gives you After Effects, Photoshop, Lightroom, Audition and InDesign as well. For a working video editor, the All Apps bundle is usually the right call. Annual all-in: Premiere single-app $275.88 per year, All Apps $719.88 per year. Compare DaVinci Resolve Studio at $295 one time (no subscription) or Final Cut Pro at $299.99 one time (Mac only). Over 3 years: Premiere single-app $827, All Apps $2,160, Resolve $295, Final Cut $299.99. The subscription math gets uglier the longer you stay.

Editor Render time (12-min 4K H.264) Render time (4K ProRes master) 3-year cost
Adobe Premiere Pro 25 (single-app) 6 min 04 s 11 min 12 s $827.64
Adobe All Apps (Premiere + AE + Ps + Ad) Same as above Same as above $2,159.64
DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 4 min 12 s 6 min 28 s $295 one time
Final Cut Pro 11 3 min 38 s 5 min 45 s $299.99 one time

Pros and Cons

  • Pro: Frame.io review-and-approve is the best client workflow in any editor in 2026
  • Pro: After Effects Dynamic Link is smooth and unlocks motion graphics in line
  • Pro: ecosystem depth (Audition, Photoshop, Bridge, Lightroom) is unmatched
  • Pro: multi-cam, audio sync, and standard editing operations are reliable
  • Con: render times trail DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro on Apple Silicon
  • Con: subscription cost stacks against one-time-license competitors
  • Con: HDR and edge-case format handling causes occasional crashes
  • Con: Lumetri colour is good but not great; Resolve still leads colour grading

Who This Is For

Pick Premiere Pro if you do client work that benefits from Frame.io review-and-approve. Pick it if you use After Effects daily and want the live Dynamic Link round-trip. Pick it if you work in a team where other editors are already on Premiere; project file exchange between editors is easier inside a single ecosystem. Pick the All Apps bundle if you also do Photoshop or design work; the math gets close to free at that point. Skip Premiere if you work solo, never round-trip to other Adobe apps, and care about render speed; DaVinci Resolve Studio is faster and a one-time $295. Skip Premiere if you work primarily in colour-critical narrative; Resolve's Color page is in another league. Skip Premiere if you are on Linux; it does not run there at all. Skip Premiere if subscription dread is a real thing for you and you have not used Adobe in years; the cost adds up and the lock-in is real.

Frame.io alone earned the Adobe subscription back for client work. The rest of the ecosystem is the bonus that keeps the subscription paid.

Bottom Line

Thirty days in, Premiere Pro is still the right tool for client work where Frame.io review and Dynamic Link to After Effects matter. The render speed gap behind DaVinci Resolve is real but not show-stopping. The subscription cost is the part to think hardest about. If your editing volume is low (under 4 deliverables a month) the per-deliverable cost on Premiere is hard to justify against Resolve. If your volume is high and your workflow uses Frame.io plus After Effects, Premiere is the right tool. I will keep the single-app subscription through 2026 because I work with two co-editors who use it, and I will revisit when one of us has reason to test a switch. Got a workflow I have not covered? Drop me a note. I will share the proxies preset and the Frame.io setup that worked for a remote client review on a 4,000-mile time zone gap.