Adobe Premiere Pro update lets you edit videos like it's a word doc

Adobe’s latest update to Premiere Pro promises to be an absolute game-changer for video editors with the arrival of text-based video editing.

According to the company, the feature, first trailed in April 2023, is “an entirely new way of creating rough cuts that are as simple as copying and pasting text.” That means it doesn’t change how videos are produced – it alters who can edit videos.

Text-based editing isn’t the only new feature now available in one of the best video editing software tools on the market. In a bid to maximize workflows, Adobe has unveiled Background Auto Save, smoother scrolling, and improved language support, too.

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Editing videos through text is all about streamlining and simplicity. This is, after all, about making it easier to stitch together rough cuts before fine-tuning.

Once source footage is transcribed, users can quickly highlight the required text from the transcript and insert it into the timeline. Using the sequence transcript, editors can then copy and paste text to move clips, or delete it to bin them, before refining the cut using Premiere Pro’s trimming tools.

It’s not the first time Adobe has toyed with text-based video editing. Last year, the company unveiled its Project Blink beta, an AI-powered video editor for browsers, that works in a suspiciously similar manner.

When we reviewed the web-based video editing app, we were impressed by its overall accessibility. Anyone who’s ever used Microsoft Word or similar will find themselves in somewhat familiar territory. At the time, we said, “it’s fair to say you lack the omniscient control that you’d find in other video editors, and this isn’t exactly an Adobe Premiere Pro alternative. But what would usually take hours in a fully-fledged video editor, Adobe’s Project Blink can accomplish in minutes.”

Adding text-based video editing in Premiere Pro takes that to another level. It not only gives just about everyone the ability to build a rough cut, but makes it an integral part of the workflow for experienced and professional video editors.

And, like the proliferation of machine-learning neural filters and the ability to remove objects from an image in one click Photoshop, it’s another example of Adobe simplifying creative processes. We’re all content creators now.