Adobe Premiere

And this advisor from their College of Communications, like comes up and he's like, Oh, how's it going? I'm like, Oh, it's good.

She's like, I have, you know, Premiere open on my laptop.

She's like, what are you? What are you doing? Can I see that? Like, yeah, sure.

Like I made, you know, videos for her.

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All right, so you mentioned Premiere.

At this point now, what's your tool stack that you're working with? You're still Premiere, your primary editing tool.

[gentle guitar music] In October of 2026, a software developer named Brandon Thomas attracted a lot of attention by releasing a collection of free open source programs with names like PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, and VectorCraft.

These apps are meant to replicate the functionality of digital tools like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator.

Within days, the same project also had a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app, alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint respectively.

The coverage of these releases was borderline breathless at times.

An independent reviewer at Creative Block tried several of the apps and found a similar mix of usable tools and barely working good intentions.

The Lightroom style editor after-- offered familiar controls, but its sharpening option produced artifacts and its masking was rough.

The Premiere style editor can do basic cuts, but struggled with the reviewer's high-quality footage and could not open Premiere project files.

PhotoCraft could handle basic editing but still had weaker selection and retouching tools than Photoshop.

On a technical front, work- workflow front, um, what did you cut with?

I cut in Premiere Pro.

And are you a longtime Premiere user? Is this your go-to?

Yeah.

You're a designer.

You work in tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, but Premiere? Well, that might feel like an entirely different world.

Maybe you opened it before, saw all those panels and thought, "I'm not a video editor.

Why do I need to learn this?" But you don't need to master Premiere.

If you give it a chance, Premiere can become a useful part of your design toolkit.

So where should you start? Which parts of Premiere are worth learning? And how can you use it without feeling like you need to master the entire application? That's what Mike Rankin is talking about today with designer and educator and Creative Pro contributor, Myra Ferguson.

[upbeat music] Hey, design friends.

Welcome to the Creative Pro podcast.

I'm personally just a lot more interested in the AI tools to help run the business.

But what I'm really talking about, what I'm quite blown away with is ChatGPT's ability now to basically run Premiere, to run After Effects and to run Illustrator.

For example, we received this list of changes from a client recently to do with a motion graphics project where they needed to change text, change images, color, move the order of things, whole bunch of stuff.

And it was so amazing that we just fed the list of changes into ChatGBT and then watched it go, watched it work in real time, opened up Premiere, found the place in the project, opened up the embedded After Effects file, and then it even went and opened up Illustrator, all totally unprompted, and it created a new piece of content in Illustrator, brought that into After Effects, made the changes, updated the project in Premiere, nailed it 100% correctly.

I just said watching in wonder.

And, you know, for now a good video editor would have been able to do that a lot faster, like probably two or three times faster.

It really is quite mind blowing.

And then still on the topic of AI video editing, I'm also finding now with running ChatGPT Astra at its highest level, which is called Ultra, its ability to work with a transcript of something like a case study video and create a very good paper edit based on quite a detailed skill that I've created and a good brief that I've given it.

If you're going to do page layout, InDesign.

If you're going to do video editing, Premiere.

If you're going to do effects, After Effects.

They've got the standard set of tools and loads of others as well.

I mean, yeah, you can replicate most of the functions that 80% of people use Photoshop for, but the other 20% is really what makes Photoshop sing for a lot of high-end users because it is those things.

Same thing with Premiere.

I use Premiere every day.

Most people use 40% of what it does because that's what they need it for.

It's the other 60% that you use that really make it stand out over something a little less capable.

I think another kind of point here as far as like the value of software that is created by someone or a team of someone's versus, you know, I have this need.

I'm going to just spin up an agent and tell it to create the software that I think I need.

Is that often the person that's in that seat of needing something doesn't entirely know what they need up front, right? And so like you take a look at like Premiere.