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Premiere Elements version 4.0 is a dramatic new re-imagining of this powerful program. Although the fundamental principles of the program’s function remain (If you can work the previous versions, you can certainly jump right into this one), tremendous effort has been made to make the program look and work better, and to be more intuitive, more task-oriented, with quick and easy access to its toolkit and features.
Like its sister program, Photoshop Elements 6.0 (How long until they just lump these two together and call them the Elements Suite?) , Premiere Elements has been given a major aesthetic makeover in addition to its new feature load. The program looks richer and more stylish than ever, and the interface is more dramatic and colorful. In short, it’s a very cool-looking program now.
In addition, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements don’t just look but act more like one big program. Among other interactive features, they both now share access to the Organizer, Photoshop Elements’ library system for browsing, searching, cataloging, and sorting every photo and media file on your PC. It’s a very literal way of demonstrating that Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements now draw from the same well.
The Task Panel
Beyond the new look for the program, the most obvious innovation in version 4 and the thing you’ll immediately notice is that virtually all of the program’s tools are now bundled into one multi-purpose Tasks panel. This panel provides easy access to nearly all of Premiere Elements’ tools through an intuitive, task-oriented categorization of the features. To capture video, for instance, you click on the orange Edit button, then Media, then Get Media, then Capture. The Edit tab also offers you quick access to Media, Themes, Effects, Transitions and Titles. Even without a guidebook, you can probably locate any tool you need by simply following the logical trail of tabs and icons.
Let’s have a look at some of the new features under the orange Edit, violet Create Menus and green Share tabs.
The Edit Tab
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The Edit tab is the access point to the Media, Effects, Transitions and Titles tools. In addition, a new category of tools has been added: Movie Themes. Movie Themes offer you an automatic way to create and stylize your movies. Applying a Movie Theme automatically creates opening and closing credits, special effects and even music. (By the way, you’ll notice that each panel in version 4.0 includes an Apply button in the lower right corner, an alternative to dragging effects or templates onto your clips manually.) By clicking on the Edit Movie Theme Options button, in the lower left corner of this panel, you can customize the theme with your own text and choose which effects to omit or add when the theme is applied. Premiere Elements 4.0 includes Movie Themes in the categories of Entertainment, General, Happy Birthday, Memories, Movie Genre, New Baby, Slide Shows, Travel and Wedding.
Clicking on the Effects button under Edit tab, you’ll find some very cool new effects have been added to the Premiere Elements arsenal. Most notable are several interesting and colorful effects created by NewBlue, a leading developer of innovative multimedia technologies and special effects. Their Motion effects include shaky video destabilizers with names like Earthquake and Active Camera as well as some trippy effects with names like Shear Energy and Zoom Blur. You’ll also find NewBlue Art Effects, for creating in video form some of the artistic effects (Line Drawing, Air Brush, etc.) that Photoshop Elements creates with photos. But the most welcome contribution by NewBlue must be the oft-requested Old Film effect. It’s a terrific effect, by the way, with Premiere Elements usual wealth of customization settings for adjusting things like the amount of film damage, wear pattern and sepia tone levels. One other very exciting addition to the Effects collection is the Video Stabilizer, a terrific tool for taking some of the shake out of your handheld camera shots.
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You’ll also find some contributions from NewBlue among Premiere Elements collection of Transitions. Included are some exciting 3D Explosion transitions (like 3D Spirals, Bouncing Cubes, Confetti, Wiggle), 3D Transformation transitions (like TicTacToe, Twist, and Box Fold-up), Art Blends (like Metallic Ice, Glow-Soft and Halo) and Motion Blends (like Shake, Smear and Wave). In addition, Premiere Elements has added a set of Picture Wipes — transitions that incorporate stars, a traffic sign or some wedding filigree into the wipe. This brings the total number of transitions (not including customizations) up over 110.
You’ll also find some exciting new templates in Premiere Elements Titles collection. But the most dramatic development in the Titles workspace is the addition of Text Animation. In other words, once you’ve added text to your title, you will now have the option of transitioning that text into or out of your video project via one of seven Fades, seven Move-In-and-Out effects, four Pan-and-Zooms, five Slides, seven Special Effects (including stretches, ripples and a transition from italic to roman) and eight Twist-and-Turns.
The Create Menus Tab
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The Create Menus tab is your access point for Premiere Elements’ DVD authoring tools. Although the function and customization controls for creating your DVD menus in Premiere Elements remain pretty much the same as in version 3.0, version 4.0 brings some new and very nicely designed templates to the collection and, even more interestingly, a great many of these templates now include Drop Zones. In other words, in the past, you were limited to replacing the background art in a DVD template with a photo or video. But, with Drop Zones, you can actually position and size the photo or video clip within the design of the DVD template itself.
In the wedding DVD menu in the illustration at the right, for instance, you’ll note an area labeled “Add Your Media Here.” As you can see, not only can I now browse to replace the background of that template, but I can size and position that clip within the template’s artwork. In the template I chose, the video clip remains behind the sheer curtain in the template, integrating my clip into the template’s design rather than merely replacing it. The clip or photo you incorporate into the DVD menu now adds to rather than butts up against the template’s design. In my opinion, this is a major step forward for Premiere Elements’ oft-derided DVD authoring capabilities.
The Share Tab
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Perhaps the most powerful new work area in version 4.0 is the workspace accessed via the Share tab. Adobe has put a tremendous amount of thought into creating an intuitive interface for directing your video project toward its final output. Again, the effort has been to make the whole process task-oriented. You decide where you want your video to go and Premiere Elements will create, or offer to create, the best file format for doing so.
If you choose to output to a Personal Computer, for instance, Premiere Elements offers options for outputting either DV-AVI, MPEG, Flash, Windows Media or Quicktime as well as making recommendations for which media format best fits which delivery method. The Mobile output option offers you formats for iPods and iPhones (including MPEG4), Audio Podcasts, Creative Zen, Microsoft Zune, Pocket PC, Smartphone and Mobile Phone and Sony PSP.
Perhaps most interesting is the Online output option, which offers you presets for outputting your video to the web and even launches an FTP wizard to get it there. Select YouTube as your output option and it takes you right to the site’s logon screen!
One other noteworthy new feature for the Share workspace: High-definition BluRay DVDs have now been added as an output option.
So where’s the Properties Panel?
One work area that’s notably missing from this Tasks panel is, strangely, the Properties panel — an area that formerly dominated the Premiere Elements interface and, for most of us, is where we spend a significant portion of our editing time. It’s still fairly easily accessed once you know where to look, though it’s certainly not in any obvious place. The easiest way to access it is to right-click on any clip on the timeline and select Show Properties. (You can, of course, also access it from the Window drop-down menu.)
In my personal opinion, this relegation of the Properties panel to a right-click menu is a pretty serious design flaw in this version of the program.
In addition to it being a major work area — This is, after all, the workspace where you control and keyframe effects and create motion paths — tasks done in the Properties panel often involve a lot of moving back and forth between it and the Effects panel. In the past, this was not a problem, since both panels could be on-screen at the same time. But not so in version 4.0. You get one panel or the other, and adding effects to a clip and then changing their settings involves a lot of switching back and forth between work areas.
I’m still not sure why Adobe felt this important panel should be treated as an afterthought, but I really do think it’s the worst ergonomic decision in a program designed with improved ergonomics involved.
Capture and Scene Detection
There some exciting, and welcome, new features in the Capture workspace. First and foremost, you can not only capture HDV in version 4, but HDV now streams in, just like standard DV, complete with scene breaks.
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And speaking of scene breaks, version 4.0 now includes the option to break your captured video into clips not only based on timecode but using Scene Detect by Content. This will be especially welcome news for people who are using pass-throughs or DV bridges (like the ADS Pyro AV Link) to capture. In past versions of the software, separate clips could only be made by manually starting and stopping capture process.
In addition, Premiere Elements 4.0 includes a feature for Scene Detect after capture. In other words, you now have the option of right-clicking on a clip in the Media/Project panel and selecting Scene Detect, then designating whether the clip is broken into smaller clips based on content or time length or you can designate how many total scenes you want the clip divided into and let the program do the math. (These scenes, by the way, can be easily “tweaked” you break them, their length reduced or extended up to the length of the original clip if necessary.)
The Timeline
Even the Timeline has been re-thought in version 4.0. The biggest and most notable re-thinking is that audio and video tracks for your clips are now paired (as opposed to the video tracks stacking above and the audio tracks stacking below).In other words, when you add a clip to the timeline now, the audio and video tracks for that clip are always directly above and below each other.
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I’m still trying to decide if I like this “improvement.” It certainly makes it easier to locate the audio track for a given video clip and vice versa. However, if you’re like me and you tend to stack a lot of video-only and audio-only clips across several tracks, it can make for one very wide timeline! So it might have been nice to at least have the option to switch back to a more traditional timeline look. But I guess it’s certainly not an entirely negative re-design element.
You’ll also notice that the elements on the timeline are color-defined. Video clips are one color, audio another, stills and titles are another. This is a nice feature that makes it easier to identify the media type in your project at a glance.
There are a couple of other exciting, new tools that have been added to the timeline (all of which are clearly visible as very intuitively designed icons across the top of the timeline panel). My personal favorite is the Detect Beats tool. When applied to a music clip on the timeline, this feature automatically drops unnumbered markers across the top of the timeline in rhythm to the music, making it a cinch to then add a slideshow that cuts to the beat. Naturally, this feature works best with music with a clear, regular beat. Music with more erratic rhythms can yield some less elegant results.
Other features
* When starting a new project, you’ll notice that an additional preset option has been added to the set-up page, one that is specifically designed to support Hard Drive and Flash Memory Camcorders. This preset assumes that the interlacing field order for all clips added is set to upper field first, and clips added to this project will automatically have their field order reversed to lower field first (more in line with Premiere Elements DV-AVI workflow and yielding much cleaner video output). Although it’s not clear from the documentation, it might be assumed that this preset will also work with other MPEG source files, such as video captured over USB, which also use upper field first interlacing.
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* Long-time users will immediately notice, and welcome, the return of the Save, Redo and Undo icons at the top of the interface, features which were strangely and controversially stripped from version 3.
* A more intuitive feature has also been added for controlling audio levels at specific points on your timeline in the form of a graphically represented Audio Mixer. This mixer allows you to control audio levels for entire tracks on the fly, automatically generating audio keyframes for the various levels as you change the level settings.
* Video from DVDs, hard drive camcorders, digital cameras, mobile phones and memory card readers are still imported as single files via the media downloader, not yet “real time captured” over USB. Supported files for input include Illustrator files, bitmaps, gifs, eps, filmstrip (flm), swf, ico, jpg, mp3, mpeg, aiff, pict, pcx, psd, png, mov, 3gp, 3g2, mp4, wbm, pxr, jpf, jpx, jp2, tif, Targa (tga), wmv, wma, asf and wav. I’ve had great success running many of these file formats through the program but, as we always say, your mileage may vary. Remember that how Premiere Elements handles many of these video file types depends an awful lot on what other media programs are installed on your system and which video and audio codecs you have installed.