Coming from Premiere Pro

Wabcut was made for editors whose hands already know Premiere Pro. It uses Premiere's default shortcuts and its edit rules, so most of what you do every day works the same way.

What carries over#

• The keys. Premiere's default shortcuts, panel by panel, with Windows and macOS tables. Import your own Premiere key set from a .kys file, and practise with the Keyboard Trainer. See Keyboard shortcuts.
• The edits. Insert and overwrite, lift and extract, ripple, roll, slip and slide, razor and add edit, trim mode with J K L, three- and four-point editing, source patching, track targeting and sync lock, and markers with ranges and chapters.
• The structure. Nested sequences and multicam, with an angle grid and live switching, synced by timecode or audio.
• Keyframes and time. Keyframes with Bezier handles, Speed/Duration, time remapping with speed ramps, freeze frames and reverse.
• Your timelines. Open a Premiere sequence exported as Final Cut Pro XML, or (experimentally) the .prproj itself, and send it back the same way. See Move timelines between editors.

What is different#

• No menu bar. The File menu opens from the logo (Alt+F), and every command is in the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) with its shortcut beside it. See Get to know the Wabcut window.
• Workspaces are yours. None is built in: you make them from presets (Edit, Color, Audio, Captions, Export) and arrange the panels as you like.
• AI runs on your machine or with your own key. No credits and no account; each cloud call shows its price first. See Use AI.
• Redaction belongs to the source. A blur or bleep follows the footage into every sequence and export. See Mask, track and redact.
• The Pen tool edits audio volume bands; set video opacity keyframes in Effect Controls.

Where Premiere is still ahead#

• Slow motion. Premiere has Optical Flow. Wabcut uses the nearest frame, so high-frame-rate captures slow down cleanly but 30 or 60 fps footage slowed far down will stutter.
• HDR. Premiere grades HDR. Wabcut tone-maps HDR game captures to SDR.
• Hand-off to audio post and broadcast. Wabcut has no AAF or OMF export, no broadcast caption formats (SCC, MCC, STL, DFXP) and no caption file import.
• Ecosystem. Premiere has third-party video effect plug-ins, .mogrt templates from After Effects, Adobe Stock, a far larger effects library and Frame.io review.
• Maturity. Wabcut is an alpha, not code-signed, with no auto-update.

The full feature-by-feature table is in Wabcut and Premiere Pro compared.