What editing software was used for the majority of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival Program?

The Sundance Film Festival starts tomorrow, with the usual slate of films and events scheduled in Park City, Utah, and it turns out that over half of them were edited on Adobe Premiere Pro for the sixth year in succession.

This year’s annual Sundance Institute survey found that Premiere Pro is the festival’s most popular video editing software, used by more than half (57%) of Sundance films, including such big-hitting titles as Dìdi (弟弟), Will & Harper, FRIDA, Thelma, and Little Death. This is actually a bit down on recent figures — it was 67% last year — but when you factor in other Adobe tools it rises back up again.  68% of this year’s entrants used either Premiere Pro or Frame.io in their production, and 83% of the 2024 film slate used one or more Adobe Creative Cloud applications, including After Effects, Photoshop, and the Substance 3D Collection.

“I cut the movie on Premiere Pro – it’s my go-to editing software because the interface is so intuitive and smooth,” said Josh Margolin, Writer, Director and Editor of Thelma. “We also leaned on Frame.io heavily for reviewing cuts, color passes and VFX. It was super helpful because of how precise you can be in giving feedback. Throughout post, a handful of our core team members weren’t in the same country, so Frame.io made some of the remote elements of the process a lot smoother and more conversational – allowing us to give notes and resolve them in realtime.”

“On Dìdi, we edited in Premiere Pro Productions, which allowed both Chris [Tennant, Assistant Editor] and I to be in the project at the same time and effortlessly pass sequences back and forth,” said Arielle Zakowski, editor of Dìdi (弟弟). “We also had a handful of scenes that take place within the world of a 2008 computer (we’re talking AIM, MySpace, etc.). For those sequences, we used Photoshop and Illustrator to create the computer assets, and then we built our fake computer and created the animation in After Effects. It was super easy to send material back and forth between the programs during this process and allowed us to work quickly and efficiently as well as have many different people help out with different aspects of the process.”

It’s been a successful week for the company. The Premiere Pro edited The Bear added a clutch of Emmys to its recent Golden Globes, and the week before that won four Creative Arts Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Picture Editing for a Single-Camera Comedy Series.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Five Days at Memorial used After Effects for its motion graphics, and won Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode. Similarly, Adobe Substance 3D swept the latest Emmys’ Outstanding Visual Effects category, as it was used on every nominated project from Andor, House of the Dragon and The Last of Us to Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and The Mandalorian.