Adobe Asks for Help Testing Premiere Pro on Apple Silicon

If you rely on Premiere Pro for digital video editing and have already upgraded to an ARM-based Mac, Adobe has some good news for you: the first beta of Premiere Pro for Apple Silicon is available now, but Adobe needs your help.

Posting on the Adobe Support Community, Adobe employee Francis-Crossman announced the first public beta of Premiere Pro that runs natively on Apple Silicon hardware is available. Explaining the beta process, Francis-Crossman said, “Since Premiere Pro is built on a large codebase with support for a wide range of media and workflows, we will implement native support for Apple M1 in phases and some parts have not been ported yet. This phased approach allows us to validate performance and functionality for specific parts of the application before we add new components. And it also allows you to start seeing the benefits now.”

It’s still possible to run the Intel version of Premiere Pro on the M1 Macs using the Rosetta 2 translator, but Adobe would like Apple Silicon owners to test this beta version. However, keep in mind that it includes the new Captions Workflow announced back in October which requires upgrading a project’s file format. So it’s best to create a copy of important projects before trying them with the beta. Also keep in mind that After Effects and Media Encoder don’t have beta versions for M1 Macs yet.

As with all beta software, there will be bugs and not all features of the software are supported yet. Adobe has focused on “core editing functions and workflows like color, graphics, and audio, as well as features like Productions, and multicam,” but there are limitations, a few crashes, and visual artefacts present. In other words, don’t rely on the beta for any serious work just yet, but use it and feedback to help improve it.

Posting on the Adobe Blog, Eric Philpott, product marketing manager on the Adobe pro video and audio team, shared preliminary performance results for the beta. As the diagram above shows, even at this early stage H.264 encoding export times for the M1 MacBook Pro are half that of the Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro and approaching the performance of the 16-inch MBP.