Pros & Cons
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- Clear, simple interface
- Quick performance
- Seamless Premiere Pro project compatibility
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- Few transitions and effects
- Can’t choose export file type and codec
- No green screen or freeze frame features
- Limited audio capabilities
- No AI helper tools
Adobe Premiere Rush Specs
| Number of Video Tracks | 7 |
| Supports 4K XAVC-S Format |
Within Adobe's lineup of video editing software, Premiere Rush targets vloggers and social video creators. As the name suggests, Rush aims to get you from shooting to editing to sharing fast. Its simple interface, snappy performance, and straightforward workflow all lend themselves well to that goal. However, Rush heavily restricts export options and doesn't include nearly as many effects (AI or otherwise) as alternatives. Because Adobe also hasn't updated it with new features since 2021 and recently discontinued a cloud syncing feature it uses, we've dropped its rating by half a point since our last review. More capable mobile video editing apps, such as CapCut and Splice, are available for around the same price, and you should upgrade to our Editors' Choice winner, CyberLink PowerDirector, if you prefer to edit on the desktop.
Pricing and Subscription
Rush doesn’t require a full Adobe Creative Cloud or even a Premiere Pro subscription, though you get it if you have either. In fact, you can use Rush for free on mobile with feature limitations. Using Rush on the desktop requires a subscription. The cheapest way to get Rush is via the $9.99-per-month Adobe Express subscription, which gets you 100GB of cloud storage and the Express app, which itself has some video editing capabilities.
The app is available for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Unfortunately, it’s not a store app for either desktop platform, which would ease installation and updates. I had to install Rush via the Creative Cloud desktop app on Windows, but was able to download the program's DMG file on macOS. Adobe lists the system requirements for Rush on its site but hasn't updated them since 2022. The good news is that the page confirms support for Apple silicon-based Macs.
For comparison, CyberLink PowerDirector for mobile costs $34.99 per year (the desktop version goes for $64.99 per year). A very limited version of CapCut is free, but you otherwise pay $89.99 per year for its full features. Splice is in the same boat; its Pro level costs $89.99 per year.
Interface and Ease of Use
The phrase easy video editing has long seemed an oxymoron to me. In my experience, most of the tools that promise no-effort video editing produce unimpressive, imperfect results. Rush doesn’t take all the effort out of creating high-impact social videos, but it does give you the tools you need in a simple, clear package.
The simplicity starts with creating a new project: You get going by tapping the plus sign. Then, if you’re on mobile, you choose whether you want to start shooting video or select clips from your camera roll for the new project. Rush supports most major file formats but doesn’t let you edit 360-degree VR footage. As you tap on clip thumbnails to add them to the project, the app overlays them with a big number (1, 2, 3, etc.) to show their position in your movie. You can create a project from clips on your desktop computer, but the real selling point of Rush is the option to start on your smartphone and proceed from there.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)The camera interface on mobile is excellent, with a welcome choice between automatic and manual settings. You can set both lighting and focus to either automatic or manual control, as well as choose the resolution and frame rate. As with most specialized camera apps, Rush lets you tap the screen to indicate which parts of the frame should determine focus and exposure.
Choose from four aspect ratios for your project: 16:9 horizontal or vertical, 4:5 vertical, and square. You can pick the aspect ratio at the start if you’re working with existing content from the gear icon in the import page. Otherwise, you have to set it within the editing interface via the overlapping rectangles icon. If you tap the preview button in the source panel, you can trim the clip, even using the traditional I and O keyboard shortcuts on the desktop.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)Auto Reframe (available with the paid version) attempts to keep what’s important in frame if, for example, you shot in landscape, but your output is vertical or square. For one test project with existing clips from my phone, Rush didn't rotate the images as expected, sometimes stretching them. If you roll video via the app itself, this is never a problem. Clipchamp and iMovie make it simple to rotate a video from vertical to horizontal with a twist gesture.
On the desktop, you can move the timeline with the mouse wheel and expand or contract it with Alt-mouse wheel, but you can’t move forward and back with the arrow keys. You can start and stop playback with the space bar or the J, K, and L keys (back, pause/play, forward). When you hover the mouse cursor over most buttons, a helpful box pops into view explaining what it does and how to use it. The interface is not particularly customizable, but you can make the video preview window bigger or smaller relative to the timeline.
The timeline features one main video track, with the ability to add three overlay tracks above and three audio tracks below. You can hide the trackhead controls, which makes the interface resemble Apple iMovie's and Final Cut Pro’s trackless timeline. It took me a little while to figure out that I could drag clips or images above the main track to create picture-in-picture overlays. Splice's interface is a bit more enjoyable to use.
Polishing and Perfecting Your Video
As with any video editing app, you can trim and split the clips, apply simple transitions, add graphics with text, apply color effects and lighting adjustments, edit the sound, change the video speed, and crop and rotate. You can do all of this in either the mobile or desktop app, though the larger workspace of the desktop is more suitable for this kind of work.
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(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)The Color panel includes 35 presets similar to Instagram filters. A slider for each lets you control its strength. Apple iMovie includes more drastic and fun filter options, as well as themes and trailer templates—all of which Adobe Rush doesn’t match. Rush lets you adjust color parameters, contrast, exposure, highlights, and shadows—just like in a photo editing application. Faded Film, Sharpening, and Vignetting tools round out the image processing tools.
Transitions
You don’t get a ton of transitions with Rush—none of the fun, crazy ones you see in most consumer video editing applications. Its collection of 16 choices includes dissolves, pushes, slides, and wipes. I wish that the app made it clearer when you successfully drag and drop one of these to a clip intersection, however. You can change the duration of a transition but not apply one across all the clips in your timeline at once.
Titles
Title options are decent. You access titles from the top button on the right panel, called Graphics (Transition Graphics and Overlays are also here). The titling feature lets you use a WYSIWYG editor to position and resize the text in the frame. You get a large selection of fonts, and a color picker lets you customize the hue and tint to your heart’s content. Many of the templates include animation, giving your titles extra life. Working with text is one of the tasks that’s much easier on the desktop than on a phone, but Rush makes the experience possible (and tolerable) on mobile.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)Working With Sound
The Audio panel lets you choose among a decent selection of background music tracks, loops, and sound effects. You can also add a music file of your choice for background and change clip volume (or mute it). A microphone below the main video track lets you add a voiceover. An Auto Volume checkbox didn’t do anything noticeable in testing.
Audio editing is limited, however. There's no auto-ducking, and you can’t drag down the audio level in the waveform on the timeline as you can in many video editing applications. Forget about effects like changing the type of acoustics for the sound—some apps let you re-create the effect of a stadium or cathedral. There’s no audio scrubbing, either, so you can’t hear sound as you move quickly back and forward in the timeline. A final note for Windows users: I didn't hear any sound while playing a Rush project until I set Audio Input in the application's Preferences to "No input."
Time Remapping
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)As you can see in the screenshot, the Speed tool lets you select a stretch of your video to speed up or slow down. The Maintain Audio Pitch option is helpful, as is Ramp, which applies the speed changes gradually. One missing—and very much in demand—speed effect is freeze-frame, which Apple’s iMovie app does offer.
AI Features
Rush lacks AI features in alternatives. Both CyberLink PowerDirector for mobile and iMovie include AI background and object removal, while the former can even generate video from a photo or text. CapCut can remove backgrounds, has generative AI features, and supports motion tracking. Both PowerDirector and ClipChamp support autocaptioning, too.
Exporting and Performance
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)Switch to the Share mode to send your video project out to the world. You can use presets for Adobe’s beloved Bēhance, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Alternatively, you can set custom parameters for frame rate, resolution, and audio to output an MP4 file. You can’t, as you can with most enthusiast video software, specify a file format or codec. Splice supports HDR output, for comparison.
The most powerful output option is to open your Rush project in Adobe Premiere Pro, which includes an option for just that on its home page. Once you do so, any limitations I mention here vanish. Rush projects open in Premiere Pro as if you built them in it, with all your clips, edits, effects, and tracks (both video and audio) in place.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)For repeatable, comparable testing, I have each program join seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p all the way up to 8K. I then apply cross-dissolve transitions between them. I note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 and 192Kbps audio at a bitrate of 15Mbps. The output movie is just over 5 minutes in length. I run this test on a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
Rush lived up to its name on this test: It took just 45 seconds to render the project, which is in the top half of the applications I've tested. For comparison, the fastest performer was DaVinci Resolve, at 27 seconds, and the slowest was Nero Video, at 256 seconds. So, Rush's time is respectable if not class-leading.