Adobe Premiere Rush 1.5.62 — Mac version

Fine-tuning colour

Rush packs proper colour correction, not just a few sliders. You get exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, temperature and tint controls, plus an intensity slider for dialling an effect back. The built-in LUT support is where it gets interesting — you can apply a look fast without starting from scratch.

Working with motion graphics

The customisable Motion Graphics templates save you from building titles in a separate app. Drag one onto the timeline, change the text, tweak the colours and it fits your cut. The professionally designed animated title templates are genuinely useful for quick social edits where static text won’t cut it.

Shaping the audio

Beyond clip volume, you get auto-ducking that dips background music under speech and a basic noise reduction pass. It’s not a full multitrack mixer, but it’s enough to clean up voiceovers and balance a soundtrack against your main audio track before exporting.

Option-drag edges for instant speed changes

Hold Option while dragging a clip edge and Rush performs a speed change instead of a trim — handy when you want a quick slow-motion moment without opening a menu. Double-tap an effect’s name in the panel to reset it to default, much faster than hunting for a reset button. Right-click any clip on the timeline to bring up Duplicate, which saves you dragging the same footage in again from the bin.

If you colour-grade one clip and want the same look across several others, copy it with Cmd-C, select the target clips, then use Edit > Paste Attributes. Rush pastes the colour settings only — not the motion or transform properties — which is exactly what you want for matching shots. On the audio side, Cmd-Shift-D applies the default transition to an edit point, and it works for crossfades between music clips too.

Turning phone footage into a polished reel

Here’s a workflow for a short social clip — maybe a weekend market walkthrough — shot on a phone and cut in Rush from start to finish.

1. Import and rough-cut. Drag your clips from the phone or SD card straight into the project panel. Drop them onto the timeline in roughly the order you want. Don’t overthink transitions yet — just get the sequence down.
2. Trim the fat. Skim through and use the Split tool (or just drag clip ends) to cut dead air, shaky sections and anything that kills the pace. Keep the timeline area tidy — four video tracks are there if you need overlays, but a single track sequence keeps things simple.
3. Add a title and motion graphic. Drop an animated template onto the first two seconds of the timeline. Edit the text, match the accent colour to something in the opening shot, and shorten the graphic’s duration to fit. A quick intro slide sets the tone.
4. Colour match. The clips from different spots will look inconsistent — shade, sunlight, indoor warmth. Pick the best-exposed clip, tweak temperature and contrast until it feels right, then copy attributes to the rest. Tweak outliers individually.
5. Audio cleanup. Record a voiceover directly in Rush or drop a music bed onto an audio track. Apply auto-ducking so the music dips under your voice, and run noise reduction on any clip with wind or background hum. Use the audio meters to check levels — keep peaks around -6dB.
6. Share straight from the timeline. Pick your export preset for the platform — square for Instagram, horizontal for YouTube — and let Rush handle the encoding. No round-tripping to another app needed.

A real-world editing session

The bike library’s open day ran from ten till four, and by five o’clock there’s forty minutes of phone footage in my Photos library. I open Rush, start a new project and dump everything into the project panel straight from the Mac’s photo library — no import hassle.

First pass is brutal. I scrub through each clip, split out the interesting bits, delete the rest. A volunteer welding a frame jig, a kid trying a balance bike, the rain starting halfway through — that’s the story arc right there. I drag the keeps onto track one, roughly chronological. The timeline’s simple enough that I can see the whole structure at a glance, no scrolling through layers of nested sequences.

I drop a motion graphic title at the head — “Fix-It Saturday” — pull the font down to something clean, make the background semi-transparent so the first shot shows through. There’s a good LUT in the presets that warms things up without looking filtered; I apply it to everything, then pull the intensity back to 40% on the welder clip because the arc’s already bright enough. The music track comes from an old live recording on the Mac — drag, trim, auto-duck under the bits where people talk to camera. Noise reduction on the rain section kills the wind thump from the phone mic.

Twenty minutes in, I hit export. Rush doesn’t make you wait around — the file’s ready before I’ve finished the tea. The whole thing goes straight to the library’s page. That’s the point of the tool: quick turnaround, decent results, no overthinking.

• macOS 10.12 or newer
• Intel 64-bit processor