Product Reviews

Premiere Elements is a video-editing program aimed at home users, and is designed to replicate what Photoshop Elements did for affordable photo editing. Based on the respected and powerful Premiere Pro, it strips out the high-end features most home users won't miss and adds new ones to make it more accessible for inexperienced users.

Premiere Elements resembles Premiere Pro closely, but there are some obvious differences. There's only one monitor window, which switches between clip and timeline previews, rather than one for each. This makes room for a How To window, providing walkthroughs for common tasks such as dissolving from one scene to another. The toolbox has been simplified to just three tools, while a row of buttons has appeared at the top right of the screen, covering capture, edit, effects, titles, DVD and export. These just bring the relevant windows to the foreground, but they nevertheless make Elements far more approachable than Premiere Pro.

Other than these cosmetic differences, there's not much lacking here compared with Premiere Pro. There's no surround sound or nested sequences, but it can handle an unlimited number of video and audio tracks, and can stream previews via a DV camera for monitoring on a television. You're free

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to customise the window layout for each of the top-right buttons, which speeds up editing and delivers dual monitor support. Text formatting is extremely comprehensive, and VST plug-in support delivers exceptional audio capabilities.

Remarkably, most of Premiere Pro's superb video effects are included. You don't get the advanced colour correction effects and a few others such as Camera Blur, but it's still a vast, powerful collection, with highlights including Lens Distortion, Chroma Key (for blue-screen effects) and 3D effects. Effect automation allows you to vary effect settings over time, while separate keyframes for each parameter rather than for the whole effect make it considerably more powerful than similar tools offered elsewhere. Object motion benefits from the Bezier paths for precise, smooth movement, a fantastic feature added only recently to Premiere Pro. Bezier and keyframe controls are daunting for new users, though, and not all the effects have pop-up windows for easier adjustment.

The timeline is quick to navigate, but there are no ripple edit options to determine what happens to other clips when you move or truncate one. The default ripple edit mode works well overall, but can sometimes behave unexpectedly. DVD authoring is extremely basic, with a combination of markers on the timeline and a dialog box for menu template selection, but it gets the job done.

With the power and stability inherited from Premiere Pro, Premiere Elements is leagues ahead of other low-cost editors. Its only competition is from Sony Vegas Movie Studio +DVD (see page 41), which is easier and faster to use and has far superior DVD-authoring capabilities, but falls behind in terms of effects automation and its limited track count. With Premiere Elements less than half the price of Vegas Movie Studio, Adobe has a hit on its hands.