Adobe Premiere Elements 8 review

Premiere Elements has spent a large part of its existence attempting to escape from its past. It has its origins in the professional package, Premiere Pro, so with each new version Adobe has attempted to balance the underlying power with greater ease of use for the beginner. Adobe Premiere Elements 8 continues this trend, but also includes a few more sophisticated creative options for the seasoned user.

The differences are visible from the first splash screen. There’s now an Organize button that leads you to a newly unified asset-management tool. This will be familiar to users of Photoshop Elements 8, but now it’s integrated with Premiere Elements.

The Organizer still contains the familiar abilities to retouch photos and create simple image montages. However, it can now import video, plus other video-specific features have been added.

All the options – Organize, Fix, Create and Share – are arranged as a series of tabs along the top of the main window. The first provides facilities for cataloguing and tagging your clips.

You can add your own keywords to group clips from various events together, but performing more detailed tagging yourself across numerous clips would be laborious, so Adobe provides an Auto-Analyzer.

This runs through your media and creates tags automatically, such as overall image quality, whether the footage is shaky, the volume level of the audio, and even the kind of shot. You can then use these to locate the media you’re after in the Organize tab – for example, a medium shot to follow a long shot.

Most of the facilities in the Fix tab can only be performed on still images, however, and include automatic correction of colour, levels and red eye, among others. The new Auto Smart Fix also only works on photos within the Organizer. Similarly, the options available under the Create tab are primarily focused on making calendars, greetings cards and collages out of still images.

The Share section includes a couple of specific options for video, allowing you to send video to either mobile devices or the internet. Overall, though, the addition of the Organizer to Premiere Elements feels like a first step rather than a fully mature addition to the video-editing facilities. The video options merely send your clips to Premiere Elements and append them to the end of the current project.

Continuing the ease-of-use theme, the Instant Movie facility added in version 7 has been enhanced with a host of new themes. These group together graphical titles, music, transitions and effects according, then use the smart tags created by the Auto-Analyzer to select the clips with the best quality, and to decide which order to place them in. The results can be a bit random, but for a quick non-narrative edit when you can’t be bothered to do it yourself, Instant Movie is potentially useful.

And Adobe has added a few other facilities to take some of the pain out of the menial tasks in video-editing. Drop a clip onto Premiere Elements’ timeline, for instance, and Smart Fix offers to correct colour and lighting problems, and also take some of the wobble out of obviously shaky footage.

The new Smart Trim tool requires a little more user input. Again, the smart tags created by the Auto-Analyzer are used to suggesting which portions of a clip are worth using. You can either tweak the recommended in and out points, or switch to automatic mode and accept Smart Trim’s suggestions every time.

The system is sophisticated enough to remove portions in the middle of a clip, if necessary, and add a fade between the parts. Overall, Smart Trim is most useful in automatic mode, as once you start fiddling with its suggestions, you might as well do the trimming yourself.

The last time-saving feature is Smart Mix, which automatically balances foreground and background audio volumes. So, for example, your musical accompaniment will drop back when your main tracks contain significant sound. In use we found it worked pretty well when placing clips with intermittent dialogue over music.

And, while most of the new features in Premiere Elements 8 are for newcomers, there’s one big new addition for the more mature user. The Motion Tracking tool will detect a moving object within a clip and allow you to match the action of a graphical element or effect to it. The tool performs its initial detection automatically, but you can specify other onscreen objects to track and then add separate elements following these.

The remaining enhancements are minor. A vast library of clip-art, both static and animated, is now included. There’s a handful of new visual effects, including Duochrome, Dream Glow and Film Look. Premiere Elements 8 also explicitly supports Windows 7 at launch.

Despite the improvements, we feel that Premiere Elements 8 doesn’t do enough to justify an upgrade from version 7. For new users, however, it remains the best non-professional video-editing software on the market. It may not be the most friendly desktop video-editing app on the market, but the new smart tools make mundane tasks easier to bear and, unlike competitors, its range of power and control means you’re unlikely to ever outgrow it.

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