When the industry later began to move in the direction of 4K, Adobe was ready. That was one of the key considerations that helped Premiere.” “Resolution independence became much more important. “Historically, any system that was created was purpose-built for SD, but at that juncture, smart people were thinking about resolution,” Roberts said. The program already handled digital intermediary files at 2K resolution (roughly equal to Full HD) in order to work with film scans. The transition to HD wasn’t smooth for everyone, but Premiere’s software-only approach made it easier. Of course, all tape formats soon fell into obsolescence as cheap solid-state media became the norm, and the 30-plus-year-old SD standard finally vanished as HDTV sets got better and cheaper. Premiere promised powerful, personal computer-based video editing well before most home computers had the processing power or memory to handle the job (hence the very limited resolution).īy the end of the century, things had smoothed out a bit thanks to rise of the DV standard introduced in 1995 and popularized at the consumer level in the form of MiniDV tapes.DV was the workhorse digital format of the standard-definition era, and the modified HDV variant carried it into high-definition starting in 2003. While this approach may seem obvious today, that certainly wasn’t the case 25 years ago. “In 1991, the maximum resolution we could support was 160 x 120.” “In 1991, the maximum resolution we could support was 160 x 120 ,” Helmly told Digital Trends. By modern standards, Premiere (and the entire ecosystem of digital video technology) was laughably limited. Premiere was the first affordable non-linear editor available to anyone.” The first stepsīack in the early 1990s, Premiere looked different than it does today, but all the basic building blocks were in place to let users trim and cut video and add a soundtrack. Helmly shared an experience from those earliest days in a blog post covering Premiere’s anniversary (written by Roberts): “I remember lying on my living room floor, editing video on my PowerBook laptop, something that was previously impossible. We spoke with Adobe’s Bill Roberts, senior director of Video Product Management, and Dave Helmly, senior manager for Professional Video and Audio and a 26-year veteran of Premiere (yes, he was working with Premiere even before Adobe acquired it). “Video users today can no longer just edit…you have to have a broader skillset.”Īs nonlinear editing (NLE) systems from many big name players continue to evolve, Adobe remains confident that what has set Premiere apart in the past will continue to be its key differentiator moving forward: universal support for different media formats and seamless integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Premiere pro version history