How to download Premiere Pro (and why you'd want to)

After you download Premiere Pro, you'll probably need some help getting up and running with it. It's not particularly intuitive, especially if you haven't done timeline-based video editing before, and the interface is pretty busy and complicated. Thankfully there are all manner of videos online that can help you get started and find your way around. You'll find a good selection in our guide to the best Premiere Pro tutorials.

If you don't have any experience of timeline-based video editing, Premiere Pro may not be the best software to start with. Because it's got so many sophisticated tools, its interface can be a little imposing for total newbies. 

That said, if you're willing to spend time following the tutorials and learning the software, it shouldn't too long to get your head around. Just be aware this isn't a tool you can pick up and run with quickly; there is a bit of learning curve. 

In other words, if you just want to make some quick edits to holiday videos, you may find it easier to use a simpler app such as iMovie on Apple devices, Kinemaster on Android devices, or Premiere Rush on desktop and mobile. 

Premiere Pro is commonly used to create and edit videos for a variety of purposes, including feature films, television shows, commercials, documentaries, and social media videos. 

As the most fundamental level, Premiere Pro provides a variety of tools for editing your clips, including trimming, cutting, splicing and merging them. You can also add transitions and effects between clips, add audio (including music, sound effects and voiceovers), and mix and master your audio to achieve a professional sound. 

Furthermore, Premiere Pro allows you to create or import graphics and animations to accompany your video footage, including text, titles and motion graphics. It enables you to colour-correct and grade your videos, adjust levels (such as brightness, contrast and saturation), and export your clips in a variety of formats, including MP4, MOV and AVI. 

Most of the basic features of Premiere Pro are replicated in other video editing software. But Premiere Pro stands out in two main ways. 

Firstly, for professional video editors it offer some advanced features you won't find in cheaper tools. For example, the recent addition of automatic tone mapping means you can convert the wider colour gamut of HDR files (such as iPhone HLG) and popular log formats (such as Sony S-Log), so that they display correctly in standard sequences. Another highlight is share for review with the Frame.io panel, which makes it easy to collaborate on video edits in real time with clients, colleagues and stakeholders.

Secondly, Premiere Pro is adding some clever AI features that can make video editing easier for people at all levels of experience. For example, text-based editing automatically transcribes your source media, allowing you to skim through transcripts, search for keywords, and add them to the timeline to start your rough cut. This tool also includes Filler Word Detection, which automatically removes 'ers' and 'ums' from your recording. There's also the Enhance Speech feature (currently in beta), which use AI to remove noise and improve the quality of dialogue in your voice recordings.

To download Premiere Pro, head to the Adobe website, click the 'Free Trial' button, sign in (or set up your Adobe ID if you don't have one), and download the software. Be warned, though: your subscription will continue and you'll be charged, unless you cancel it before the trial period ends. Alternatively, if you like Premiere Pro and want to keep subscribing, you won't have to do anything, and will just be billed automatically.

Premiere Pro is compatible with Windows 10 (64-bit) version 22H2 or later and macOS Monterey v12.0 or later. You can download Premiere Pro on both types of desktop computer on the same subscription. 

However, note that while its rival Final Cut Pro has an iPad version, Premiere Pro doesn't. So you want to make video on the move, you'll need to look at alternatives: see our guide to the best video editing apps.

It's also worth noting that Premiere Pro is quite resource-intensive, so it may not run very fast on older machines. If you need to upgrade your hardware, check out of our guide to the best video editing laptops, and our selection of the best video editing monitors. Alternatively, if you can't afford a new computer you could always speed up an existing one by investing in one of the best graphics cards for video editing.

The cheapest way to buy Premiere Pro at the moments is as a standalone app; this will cost you $20.99 per month or $240 per year. For this, you'll get Premiere Pro itself as well as access to new features and updates as soon as they're released, along with 100GB of cloud storage, Premiere Rush, Adobe Portfolio, Adobe Fonts and Adobe Spark.

Alternatively, an All-Apps subscription gives you access to everything in the standalone subscription along with more than 20 other apps in the Creative Cloud suite, including After Effects, Audition, and Photoshop. This costs substantially more at $54.99 a month, but if you're likely to use more than two Adobe apps, it does represent excellent value.

There is no student discount on a single-app subscription to Premiere Pro. However, if you want an All-Apps subscription, which gives you access to the whole Creative Cloud suite, there's a discounted plan available for students, teachers and others who work in education, with a massive 60% discount.

You can download Premiere Pro for free, but only for seven days. Adobe offers a free week-long trial on all its creative apps, both on Mac and PC, and you'll get the full package with all the latest updates and features. This will be completely free as long as you cancel your subscription before the trial period ends; otherwise it will continue and you'll be billed automatically.

At time of writing, the current version of Premiere Pro is the August (23.6) release. You can find full details of what's changed in this Adobe blog post. Note, though, that you don't really need to know the latest version number. As a subscriber, you can always access the most up-to-date version of the software. Just launch Premiere Pro and choose Help > Updates.

No, you can't use Premiere Pro on your phone: it's a desktop-only application, and it is not available for mobile devices. Nor is that likely to change in future, to be frank, because Premiere Pro is very resource-intensive and even some older laptops struggle to keep up. 

Adobe does, however, offer a mobile app called Premiere Rush that is included with every Premiere Pro subscription. This is basically a simplified version of Premiere Pro that allows you to create and edit videos on your phone or tablet. Handily, you can move footage between the two tools, allowing you to continue your video editing while you're on the move. For more details, see our article Adobe Premiere Pro vs Premiere Rush.