Review: Adobe Premiere Rush

Color controls are fabulous. You can choose between a number of filter presets (Cinematic, Film, Noir) or adjust the intensity, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, temperature, tint, vibrance, saturation, and sharpening, and add a vignette effect with feathering. Though you can’t copy and paste color adjustments from one clip to another, you can save a custom preset which is almost as convenient. The bottom line is that you get almost as much control in Rush as you do in Premiere Pro, absent the scopes, of course.

Audio controls are equally fabulous. You can record audio directly to the timeline or add music and other clips. Rush automatically detects whether the audio is voice, music, or other, with different adjustments available for each. With all types of audios, you can enable Auto Volume which normalizes the volume for all clips added to the project. For voice, you can select Balance Sound to normalize the volume within the clip. You can also Reduce Background Noise, Reduce Echo, and elect to Enhance Speech, which seems to apply a touch of audio compression to make the voice more distinct. I tried reducing echo and enhancing speech in my test project which worked very well.

For music, you can elect to Auto Duck for dialogue, which you can see working on the Garage audio track in Figure 4 (below).

Figure 4. Audio controls include ducking for dialogue and vocal enhancement.

Transform controls are extensive if a bit clunky, primarily because you can’t manually position the picture-in-picture video when editing with a smartphone, you have to use numerical controls (you can manually drag the clips in the computer version). Still, you get pixel-accurate scaling, cropping, positioning, and feathering controls, enabling effects like those shown in Figure 5 (below). Other adjustments include simple transitions and clip speed adjustments.

Figure 5. Transform controls over the picture-in-picture

Even better, if you want to perfect your clip on the desktop, you simply run Rush on your computer and if you’ve saved the project to the Adobe Creative Cloud, it’s there waiting for you (Figure 6, below). But, don’t feel that you have to; though it will be faster and easier to edit on the desktop, you have most of the same functionality on your mobile device. Between the precision color adjustments, the functional audio features, and the MOGRT titles, you can produce very high-quality and professional-looking output on any compatible smartphone or tablet.

Figure 6. Editing the same project in the desktop version of Premiere Rush

Once you’re done, you can render a local video file using simple templates and automatically upload the file to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Adobe Behance. I tested with a 2.5-minute project, adding titles, a bit of color correction, and some audio effects, and it took only 90 seconds to render on my iPhone. If I can find adequate bandwidth in Las Vegas for uploading, which is always a challenge, my NAB interviews this year will be coming to you from my iPhone, courtesy of Adobe Rush.

Adobe lets you try Premiere Rush via a starter plan that includes both desktop and mobile apps and the ability to create unlimited projects and export up to three. Otherwise, Premiere Rush is included free with the Creative Cloud, Premiere Pro single app, or available for $9.99/month to individuals, $19.99/month to teams, and $29.99/month to enterprise customers.