Premiere Elements 7.0 from CNET.com

[sidd finch]

Fresh in from CNET.com:

Premiere Elements 7 will see the bonus features in Elements 7 and raise them with new movie-making tools, support for AVCHD, and automatic video upload to YouTube. Lori Grunin weighs in on that update, too:

"As with its sibling Adobe Photoshop Elements, with Premiere Elements Adobe pushes the Web subscription message a little too hard. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The InstantMovie, Open Project and New Project options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared to the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $40 Plus membership for photoshop.com (more project templates, remote access and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.)

This version really feels like an attempt to catch-up to competitors. It now includes AVCHD support, for which Adobe has lagged far behind its competitors for a long time. The good news is that it handled every AVCHD file format on my hard disk--from a variety of Canon, Sony and Panasonic camcorders--without problems.

Its new InstantMovie basically rolls selected clips into prefab templates. They're nice templates, and it does a good job. But when compared with innovations like Pinnacle Studio Plus 12's Montage themes, which allow for some really clever, sophisticated effects, and a friendly implementation for editing them, InstantMovie seems pretty basic and uninspiring. Ditto for its basic SmartSound music-generation implementation. Adobe licenses it like everyone else, but didn't even bother to give it a similar interface to the rest of Premiere.

Using technology from Adobe's Ultra, Premiere Elements now suports rudimentary chromakeying. On one hand, this Videomerge feature is dead simple to use. When you drag a video with a (relatively) solid-colored background into the timeline or onto another video, the program asks if you want to treat it as a Videomerge clip and automatically combines them with the background chromakeyed out. However, Adobe provides no controls for you to tweak the results. Even a simple color tolerance slider could have prevented the flag from showing through Dan Ackerman's skin here.

Granted, orange isn't your standard chromakey color, but in a consumer product, not everything that's shot is intentional. If the point was to find fun new ways of using the clips you have, the implementation just missed the boat.

The one interesting new capability is Smart Tag, which can automatically analyze your clips and keyword them based on video characteristics like blurred, shaky, high quality, in focus and so on. You can then, say, choose all the clips that are "high quality" and "in focus". Since it shares much of the organizer with Photoshop, you have access to all the same album and search features. Unfortunately, it can't display basic information such as video resolution without popping up the properties of each individual clip.

The product ships at the end of September ($99.99)."

[Chuck Engels]

Looks like an Adobe announcement
http://www.elements7.com/

[Doreen L.]

There's already a thread on this in the Premiere Elements Corner.

[cdeemer]

What happened to PE 5 and 6????????

[Ron]

viewtopic.php?f=57&t=3542#p30746

[Steve Grisetti]

The CNET review, by the way, isn't very complete. Of COURSE you can tweak Videomerge after you apply it! I guess he just didn't know where to look.

We'll soon be publishing an article detailing the new features. We just didn't expect the announcement to come so soon!

[Bill Hunt]

Steve,

As you work with PE7, and prepare your article, I'd greatly appreciate your noting any problems with installing it on a system with the Pro version suite installed. Do not know what you have on your test system(s), but worry about upgrading here, only to have to do a RegEdit and re-install of my Production Studio programs, like with PE4. I was surprised, when I had to patch my install of Bridge and also do a Repair Install of PS, PP and Encore, because of Registry changes (and even a folder deletion) made when I installed PE4. I worry that worse could happen, should I upgrade to the PE/PSE 7 bundle, as I use my Production Studio suite far, far more. I think that Adobe needs to anticipate that some users might have the big-brother programs already installed, and take a page from the Hippocratic Oath, "Do no harm... "

I'll be looking for your indepth article.

Hunt

[Chuck Engels]

No problems when installed on a computer with Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3, Soundbooth, Bridge, and Encore CS3.

[Bill Hunt]

Chuck,

Thank you for that bit of info. After my little experience with PE4 and my CS2 Production Studio, I have become a bit shy. Glad to know that Adobe has changed the install proceedure, so as to not interfer with existing Adobe programs. I'm sure that the PE4 thing was an anomoly and Adobe just didn't consider that it might get added to a system with the Production Studio.

Hunt