Case Study: NBC Universal achieves three-day sketch-to-air turnaround with Adobe Premiere Pro

Film unit behind successful late night comedy show embraces Adobe video workflow

NBC Universal’s Saturday Night Live film unit produces all the show’s pre-taped content—commercial parodies, digital shorts and other segments—on a tight three-day turnaround while production runs parallel to live-show rehearsals. The team needed a fast, reliable post-production workflow that handled multiple camera formats, rapid edits and last-minute changes without slowing the process.

They moved to an all-Adobe workflow—Adobe Premiere Pro with tight integration to After Effects and Photoshop—mapping familiar hot keys to minimize retraining and leveraging features like Warp Stabilizer and dynamic trimming. The result: faster, more stable editing across formats, the ability to execute more ambitious pieces reliably within the three-day window, and consistently on-air delivery of multiple finished shorts each week.

NBC Universal