Video Clip Acquisition: Adobe Premiere CC Projects

In a research project performed by Pfeiffer Consulting for Adobe Stock, Pfeiffer found that users who acquire video clips from Adobe Stock could realized up to a 6x productivity increase for their video workflow compared to using other conventional stock video sources.

Adobe Stock allows users to send hi-res watermarked footage directly to Adobe Premiere CC projects. Once a file is licensed, all instanced of it are updated automatically, eliminating the need to re-apply non-destructive effects.

The Benefits Of Integration

The integration of Adobe Stock with Creative Cloud provides a significant workflow productivity increase since it cut out many time-consuming steps uses must go through when working with clips acquired from conventional stock sources.

The typical stock workflow looks something like this: once you have located a clip you like, you save it to your light-box, then you download the comp and place it in your project. Once you have finished editing, you need to go back to your stock source, license the full-resolution clip, download it, and the replace or re-link it in your composition. With Adobe Stock, on the other hand, the water- marked clip can be sent directly to Premiere Pro CC, and once you are ready to license the file, this can be achieved from within the application you are using. Non-destructive modifications and effects will be applied to all instances of the licensed clip automatically.

A Question Of Resolution

It turns out that footage from Adobe Stock has another significant advantage: Unlike many conventional stock sources, footage provided by Adobe’s services is not a low resolution version of a clip, but watermarked, full-resolution compressed footage, even in the case of 4K clips.

In other words, whereas many stock sources only provide comp files at resolution of a few hundred pixels wide, watermarked clips from Adobe Stock come in at resolutions of either 1920 × 1080 or 3840 × 2160.

Apart from making it easier to work with the watermarked footage, this difference in resolution of comp files has a significant impact on workflow productivity. Low resolution stock clip need to be scaled up to fit the resolution of the surrounding footage. Licensing the clip from Adobe Stock eliminates this step. Once the licensed clip is re-linked to the composition that contains the comp file it automatically has the required resolution. To make matters worse, if in the editing process effects such as pan and zoom have been applied to a comp file, these effects will need to be recreated precisely with the licensed footage after import.



The benchmarks Pfeiffer conducted for this project underline these productivity gains: The simple workflow scenario required just 50 seconds with Adobe Stock, compared to almost three and a half minutes on average with footage from several conventional stock sources.

The complex workflow scenario using HD footage, which included panning and zooming a clip, took less than a minute with Adobe Stock, compared with over five minutes on average when using clips from other stock sources.

Pfeiffer Consulting is an independent technology research institute and benchmarking operation focused on the needs of publishing, digital content production, and new media professionals.