TechRadar Verdict
Adobe Premiere Rush is a reliable, multi-platform video editing software, with some nice improvements since we last looked at it. It’s still occasionally rough around the edges. You won't cut an Academy Award-winning feature on the editing app, but if you’re looking for a simple tool to quickly build an edit, it might well be worth a look.
Pros
- +
Easy to use
- +
Useful new tools
- +
Welcome enhancements
- +
Multi-platform
Cons
- -
Some occasional glitches
- -
Not all tools available on all platforms
- -
Need a Creative Cloud subscription
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Premiere Rush is Adobe’s lightweight mobile video editor, designed for quick and easy edits on the go.
Aiming to be one of the best video editing apps in the app store, with its broad appeal and cross-platform versatility, Premiere Rush sports a nice, clean interface with very simple editing features. A snappy clipper that's perfect for making short videos for social media, Rush is available on desktops and mobile devices, so you don’t even need the best video editing computer to cut captivating clips. All you need is your Creative Cloud account, which lets you work across devices.
We were suitably impressed with Rush during our last review, but has the video editing app got any better with the latest update, version 2.0?
Better performance
If you own an Apple product, you’ll be pleased with the under-the-hood enhancements. According to Adobe, the editing app has been optimized to deliver better battery life and faster exports on iOS - even up to seven times faster on an iPhone 12 Pro, which is not to be sniffed at.
The big news for those working on Macs, is that Premiere Rush offers support for Apple’s M1 CPUs since April 2021.
Adobe claims that this brings improved performance for playback, editing, and exports compared to Intel-based Macs. So, that’s pretty much everything, across the board.
Android users haven’t been left out of the loop, with added support for the Samsung Note 20/20+, although to be fair, that doesn’t sound as exciting as the changes on the competing platform.
Other improvements that won’t be seen by all but will be appreciated by many, is translation software support for additional languages. As of December 2021, Premiere Rush now includes Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål and Czech for their mobile version, and Norwegian Bokmål and Ukrainian for the desktop edition.
This brings the total number of supported languages to 17 and 20 for desktop and mobile respectively. Although, it’s a puzzle to us why there is a discrepancy between the mobile and desktop versions.
Simpler search
With most updates, Premiere Rush receives a regular influx of additional royalty-free music samples and sound effects, and loops with most updates.
With so many new additions it would be impossible to find what you’re looking for, so we’re very glad they also introduced a very welcomed search field to narrow down your options by typing a series of keywords (and hard to believe this wasn’t part of the video editing app before). This feature has also been included in the Graphics section.
Enhanced tools
All of these changes are good to have, but they’re mostly happening in the background. Most users may not even realize if something has been improved.
What’s easy to see are the new enhancements to the tools.
Some are subtle, yet useful, like the new ‘Go to Start’ and ‘Go to End’ buttons for the Pan and Zoom effect. You can still tap or click on the ‘Start’ and ‘End’ boxes to resize and reposition them, but if they are very close to each other, or even overlapping, it could be tricky sometimes to select the right one. With the introduction of these buttons, this is no longer an issue. It’s so subtle you might not even notice it at first, but it’s there if you need it.
More noticeable are the new color presets. Check the ‘Color’ section and you’ll be graced with almost 40 different thumbnails you can select to alter the look of your clip. Only one can be applied at a time, and you still have the usual manual controls to alter a clip exactly as you need to.
Watch out for a couple of cool additions.
For one, you can create your own presets. Always a bonus for those who like to get their hands dirty delving into the intricacies of color manipulation. Premiere Rush helps you apply the same changes to other clips without having to manually tweak every single parameter each time.
However, there’s an even better and quicker way to do this, thanks to the new ‘Apply to All’ button. As the name suggests, this applies color edits from the selected clip to all those currently present in your edit. A fantastic time-saver.
Another fun, and surprisingly often used, ability is the inclusion of a flip tool. You’ll find the ‘Horizontal Flip’ and ‘Vertical Flip’ buttons in the ‘Crop & Rotate’ section, and you can apply them to anything in your sequence, be it a video clip, image, sticker or overlay (yes, even text boxes).
Device-specific tools
Being a multi-platform software, it makes sense that Premiere Rush’s tools are the same, no matter which device you’re working on. But that’s not the case for every feature. For instance, you get a contextual menu to edit clips in your timeline, but only on an iOS device.
This is a very useful feature: tap on a clip and an orange overlay appears giving you various options: split the clip at the playhead, duplicate it, or delete it. If audio is attached to a selected video clip, you gain the ability to separate it from the video.
Why it’s missing in other versions is a mystery (and a frustrating one, at that). However, not being present on other devices isn’t a major deal-breaker, and we hope to see it migrate over at some point in the future.
For now, at least, iOS owners get preferential treatment.
Final verdict
As you can see, these aren’t major changes that radically alter the way this software works, but they are all welcome improvements designed to make a simple app better than it used to be.
It’s not the perfect video editing app. We did encounter some odd glitches, like being unable to select a clip, as we were somehow still being locked in the settings of a different one.
By and large, though, this latest version makes Premiere Rush even better at what it does. It’s not as powerful or feature-rich as consumer-level editor Premiere Elements or Premiere Pro - our choice of best video editing software. But at least it's nowhere as Adobe Express Video, an overly simplistic take on that can't compete with even the best free video editing software.
But if you’re looking for something to cut an edit quickly, while effortlessly moving from one device to another, and you have a Creative Cloud account, it might well be worth giving Premiere Rush a look.
