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Powerful video-editing program with improved ease of use
Premiere Elements has always been one of the most powerful video-editing programs available in the sub-£100 category.
However, rivals such as Pinnacle Studio have often scored more highly for beginners without much experience of video-editing work. Adobe seems to have taken note of this, as Premiere Elements 7 has added features that allow you to create video projects more quickly and easily.
Most photo-editing programs allow you to add 'tags' to your photos so that you can quickly organise them into categories such as 'family' or 'friends'. Premiere Elements has taken this idea and applied it to video clips. The program's new Smart Tags feature allows it to automatically analyse video clips and determine if they are blurry or out of focus, brightly lit or dark and under-exposed. Like many digital cameras, it can also detect faces within a scene, allowing it to tag a clip as a 'single face' or 'group shot'.
Once the Smart Tags process is complete, Premiere Elements can use the new Instant Movie feature to sort through your clips and locate the most suitable ones. You could set it to discard blurry or dark shots, or to concentrate on using group shots for a video of a skiing holiday. The program will then edit those clips together, automatically applying transitions and other effects. This upgrade also simplifies other tasks such as creating ëblue screení effects where you superimpose one video clip over another.
Pinnacle Studio still gives Premiere Elements a run for its money by combining powerful editing features with admirable ease of use. However, this latest version of Premiere Elements can definitely be recommended to beginners, as well as to more experienced users who know how to make the most of its powerful special effects and editing tools.
Read more reviews
Pros: New features improve ease of use and simplify the
editing process for beginners
Cons: Performance can be sluggish on older machines
Overall: It has taken a while, but Premiere Elements finally
seems to be focusing on the needs of less experienced users
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Hidden Features . . .
When I think about a video editing software, I think of Premiere Elements. Adobe has never disappointed me with their products. I consider Photoshop as the BEST. Anyways, without drifting much, let?s talk about Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0. I was expecting this version 3 years from now, but Adobe gives me this just after 4.0 :) as a bonus. (For those who are not Premiere Elements users, Version 5 and 6 are skipped to match version with the bundle product - Photoshop elements) When I look out for an editing application, I look for 'Ease of Use' 'Feature Set? Ease of Installation (Setup and Repair)''Documentation/Help'. In all these category, Premiere Elements excels. This product has always been a no nonsense product. You would be amazed to see so many features hidden within it. Not like many other competitor products that packages even a small feature and makes huge hue and cry about it. I would particularly like to mention the 'Replace clip' functionality that version 7.0 ships with. This is an excellent tool for users like me who like to create montages or promos of events. If I create complex layered graphic montages with Premiere Elements and want to repeat this throughout the timeline, I would just duplicate the entire chunk and use the 'Replace Clip' feature to replace the footages. Add to this the 'Smartsound' and you have professional looking video montage in a few click. I would recommend folks to buy version 7.0 just for these 2 features alone. :) Apart from these two (my favorite) features, Premiere Elements 7.0 comes with a host of new features. The best amongst the rest is the "Instant Movie". I gave it a try with one of my clients sports video clips, and was impressed with the effects that it applied to the clips. Infact, as a video editor, when I explored the resulting timeline, I learnt a lot of nuances of compositing (little techniques about how to use the effects and transitions to produce stunning compositions) And I can?t believe that this is all possible by coding. Instant Movie works really well for creating short montages and preview videos. Here again the replace clip feature comes handy to tweak the resulting video. ( I assume that the Replace clip feature was introduced for tweaking the Instant Movie videos). Organizer has improved further and is quite stable now even with heavy load of clips. The separate pop up screen UI for tagging is a plus. I have not explored the Smart Tagging feature, but it did pop up while creating the Instant Movie. Once the clip were tagged, i sorted the clips with the FACE tag and used these clips for creating a quick video of the all the guests in a party video, and it worked really well. It saves a lot of time in finding the footages with clear faces in it. I think this one could be put to good use if used correctly. But here it would have been good if the smart tagging happened a little faster or in the background (automatically). With Photoshop.com membership coming into place, Adobe pushes its advantage over others in a really impressive manner. The bunch of tutorials, Ideas and Online contents promises to be the next thing for amateur editing. I have not explored this area as of now, but the product review gives a very good picture of these. With 7.0, AVCHD editing is possible and it actually works well on my 2 GB duo core system. I need to take this for a spin with heavy editing though, but the initial impression is good. I wish I had a blu ray burner for enjoying the blu ray compatibility of the application. The other tools that I would like to talk about are, Videomerge. Videomerge in 7.0 works really well. I used to use the traditional Luma and Chroma key for my keying requirements, but this tool is a good addition in the toolbox. It works well with difficult to key transparent areas in the footage. One more secret improvement that 7.0 ships with, is the copy paste clips in the same track. In the previous versions the pasting of clips used to happen only on track1 (for some strange reasons :( ... ) But now you can copy paste clips on the same track. I wish they allowed us to select tracks and paste on a specific track. This would be a feature request for 8.0 along with a bunch of others like Render queue, better title animations, support of 5.1 channel audio mixing, Context sensitive Properties panel (my favorite feature in PRE2.0), editable DVD templates etc. My rating for 7.0 "with the current set of features" is Excellent. The tech support is OK and the Forum help is good. If you are looking for an editing application as a hobby or as a medium level professional user, I would strongly recommend "Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0". If you are waiting to upgrade this version is very promising. Thanks and happy video making.
Posted by Charu Hamilton, 06 Oct 2008