Adobe After Effects vs. Adobe Premiere Pro vs. Descript

I would recommend Adobe After Effects to a colleague above all other comparable software that I have used, however, with the caveat that it can be time-consuming to learn to use and can be frustrating if you are not familiar with the software. Difficulty aside, once you begin to understand how to use Adobe After Effects, it is the only software for the job.

Incentivized

I have actually recommended Adobe Premiere Pro to many people looking to get into the editing field. It is perfect for any type of video creation. It would not be very useful for someone who isn't serious about video editing and wants to just use something to cut out the beginning or ends of clips. It's too advanced for that and [maybe] confusing for someone not educated in the field.

Incentivized

Descript is well-suited for fast editing of training videos, tutorials, podcasts, and screen recordings, where transcript-based editing and quick cleanup save time. It works best when you need a simple workflow to record, transcribe, remove filler words, tighten sections, and apply basic enhancement tools like noise cleanup.
It is less appropriate for high-stakes projects where losing edits would be very costly, or when you need strong guarantees around long-term project history, backups, and recovery. Based on our experience, if you are doing many hours of edits and expect to revisit projects months later, you may want an additional export/archive process outside the platform.

• Adobe After Effects allows you to exercise a great level of control over how to animate just about every aspect of an object. You can control animation speed of entry and exit, the direction of rotation, scale, position, and so many more attributes.
• Adobe After Effects is so popular that you can find so many paid and free third-party plug-ins and scripts to incorporate into your project.
• There is such a breadth and depth of features available in Adobe After Effects, you will never get tired of exploring the program and using its many features to take your projects to new heights
• Adobe After Effects works well with other products in the Adobe Creative Suites including, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Media Encoder
• Adobe After Effects allows you to customize the setup of your workspace and panels

Incentivized

• Premiere is able to import video in almost any format and has a number of excellent export formats and styles.
• Premiere has a great interface that once learned feels very intuitive.
• Premiere aligns easily with the other suite of Adobe software allowing for easy integration of graphics and audio.

Incentivized

• Removing filler words is a click of button and get rid of 'ums' and 'a's"
• Fine tune your edited script in a timeline to adjust timing
• Import and export Final Cut Pro or Premier XML video speeding up the editing process

Incentivized

• I would like the Re-Link file structure to mimic Premiere.
• I would like to see native .obj importing and manipulation.
• I would like to see better audio editing available within Adobe After Effects. if it could be given a separate layer/panel.

Incentivized

• Export times: I do a massive amount of exports with intensive graphics. They often need to be done quickly. If export times could be reduced by 90%, my life would improve drastically.
• Importing errors: Certain video formats are not compatible, such as specific types of MP4s and MKV files. Greater flexibility would be wonderful.
• End the subscription model. I'd gladly pay one flat fee once and be done with it.

Incentivized

• UX Performance. Because it's synced to the cloud, there can be some delay or lag in the UX when editing.
• Editing Transcriptions. Machine-based transcriptions always need some post-editing. While Descript makes it pretty easy, I still think there is some room for improvement. For instance, I would like to be able to automatically update for all occurrences of a word after fixing it in the transcript.
• Automatic importing of YouTube and hosted video files. I often have to download a video from YouTube to be able to import it into Descript. Would be nice to be able to just paste in the URL to the video and have Descript automatically import it.

Incentivized

I will renew my use of After Effects since it's affordable and always has been reliable. They also always continue to update new features and add new things to compete with other software out there. I also like all the 3rd party plugins out there that keep my interest for the future and new toolsets and creative solutions.

There is not better program for your needs than Adobe Premiere Pro. It doesn't matter if it can be hard to learn because this product is the top of the line and you will not find a better video editing program. This is what the professionals use. It is worth the learning curve.

There's a lot of features and functionality that Adobe After Effects offers that can be hard to navigate at times. Depending on the depth you plan to use the software for, that can take some time to learn. The built-in templates and tutorials really help soften that learning curve. Once you get past some of the basics, it's fairly simple to use.

Incentivized

Premiere Pro is a very powerful tool, but it's not intuitive - it's virtually impossible to use without some kind of training or instruction. That being said, once you've learned how to use the product so that you can take advantage of its various video editing and creation options, it's an incredible program in terms of features and tools.

Incentivized

It's pretty user friendly, has a easy-moderate learning curve. However during updates they do change the features in different panes / sections that make them harder to find. The text editor is near perfect, some of the other tools such as colour, templates, audio etc. are arranged in a slighlty less intuitive manner

Incentivized

Adobe customer support is wonderful. They genuinely care about their product and the end user experience. The products they create have always been innovative and continue to improve. They have a huge chunk of the user market in their field and still strive to improve. This is such a big deal for me and other small business/organizations that need their products and don't have a large voice on our own.

Incentivized

It is a professional team that provides customer service at any time. I think that the team does not rest until they find a solution to your problem. I think this makes this company great because when a company offers a good service, and they treat you well, the customer always returns satisfied.

Incentivized

We had a very frustrating experience with Descript and their support.

We used Descript to record and edit several videos. The edits were done around May, mainly using the web app. When we opened those same projects in December, many of them looked like raw recordings again. Cuts were missing and effects were missing.

Support and engineering told us they checked their logs and only saw “creation → recording → transcription,” and they said they could not find proof the edits were ever made. That explanation does not match what we saw in the app. The affected videos show two project backup files. In Descript, backups only appear after you start editing (the app even says so). But when we checked other projects that we know are raw, those do not show any backup files. We asked a simple question: if backups appear only after editing, why do the “raw” affected videos have two backups while truly raw videos have none? They did not answer this clearly.

One rep also said they noticed a spike in network errors in May. That is exactly when the edits were done, which makes it very likely the edits did not save or sync correctly. Instead of admitting this could be the cause, support kept pointing to “no logs of edits” and that it was our fault.

They refunded one month, but called it a “courtesy.” That was disappointing. We also stopped using Descript while they were investigating because we did not feel it was safe to keep working in the platform. If that one-month refund was meant to cover the time we could not use the service during the investigation, that still does not address the real damage. We lost many hours of work, we paid our editor hourly, and we paid for the subscription for convenience and reliability. For the amount of inconvenience and loss we experienced, one month is clearly not enough.

Utilizing one of the many books available on Adobe Premiere Pro, each video editor can learn at their own pace.

Incentivized

I find Adobe After Effects to be superior to iMovie and Final Cut Pro in that I am able to do much more with the software. It isn't as limiting as the other two. I also like that it isn't an Apple product. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Apple. There is a bigger learning curve with After Effects, but once you get the hang of it, there's really no comparison.

Incentivized

DaVinci Resolve is a powerful editing and color-grading application, and the base version is free. However, I've found that with the Lumetri Color panel in Premiere, I really have no need for Resolve as it meets all of my needs. Additionally, I've found Resolve to be lacking in support for the broad range of file types that Premiere handles gracefully.

Incentivized

Descript is by far superior to the other editing software you can get on Apple computers. It's able to do a lot more and really save us tons of time. Other Adobe apps are great, but take a while to learn. Descript is very user-friendly, making it easy to start from day one with very little training.

Incentivized

• Adobe After Effects has a great impact on business as maximum work can be done in one software
• To run this software you need to have good configuration system
• Motion Graphics, 2d Animation and video editing can be done in one software

• Speed of workflow has increased- specially when coupled with keyboard shortcuts
• Jobs have had a faster turnover rate which makes clients happy.
• I have two Adobe accounts, one for work and one for personal use. Both of these accounts are paying for themselves through the work I can provide with the use of Premiere.

Incentivized

• I can get video completed much more quickly and cheaply
• We can produce more video content because of the speed with which we can have a finished product
• We can have shorter timelines for example I record on Monday and we publish on Tuesday which wouldn't be otherwise possible with other methods I've used

Incentivized