Video Editing Tools
Premiere Elements 7 includes a long list of editing tools with previews including scene indexing, audio conversion, transitions, drag and drop edits.
Also new in Elements 7 you can view and sort video clips, audio files and still photos using a comprehensive library management system.
Video Editor Interface
Video Capture
Premiere Elements 7 supports all the usual camcorder formats including DV AVI, MPEG2, HDV, AVCHD, TOD, Windows Media files, Quick Time files and a host of portable device files. It will import directly from unprotected DVDs. I can't really see anything that they have missed on this point.
Adobe Premiere Elements 7 is the more user friendly (and pocket friendly!) consumer oriented version of Premier Pro their professional video editing suite.
Adobe Premier Elements 7 is squarely aimed at helping the less tech savvy (or the tech disinterested) user to edit their home made videos and share them in a wide variety of formats.
Premiere Elements 7's interface can seem a little strange at first. Adobe tends to design to their own ideas of a simple user interface rather than follow the "Windows" school of thought.
Regardless of which video editing software you choose there is always a learning curve and with Adobe premier Elements 7 it wont take you long to figure things out and see there is a logic there.
Adobe Premiere Elements 7 Review
The progam has a large selection of transitions that may be applied to a project with a simple drag and drop procedure.
The timeline view lets you visualize the start and end point of every clip, transition and sound effect you have added to your project making it easy to arrange all the components. Elements 7 offers up to 99 separate audio and video tracks if you need them so you can get quite creatve with that degree of flexibility.
There is also a large number of video effect filters and the audio editing tools can trim, fade, mute, crossfade your sound files in a wide range of formats. Elements 7 allows you to record from a microphone connected to your computer for narration.
Videomerge is Adobe's version of greenscreen or bluescreen and can automatically identify the background of your video clip and can "key" it so that you can superimpose a different background behind. It gives good control over what color you can use to key out the background and works quite effectively.
Video Preview
Video Output Formats
The video playback functions of the program work quite smoothly without noticable jumps, freezes or macro-blocking but it is important to note that a large part of the effectiveness of this feature in any video editing software comes down to the specs of your computer. This becomes even more crucial when dealing with the High Definition formats such as HDV and AVCHD.
Premiere Elements 7 will export video to High Definition formats such as HDV, AVCHD and MPEG-4, as well as to portable formats like iPod and PSP.
It handles most standard formats like DV AVI .MOV, .MPG, .WMV, .FLV, and DivX.
The export process is as simple and straight forward as it gets, making the final steps in editing video quite simple.
Again a note here on computer resources. When exporting to the highly compressed formats the performance (speed, not quality) of the software will only be as good as the computer running it.
Video Disc Creation
Premiere Elements 7 will burn to Blu-ray discs, DVDs, VCDs (remember those!?), and AVCHD discs. In the case of Blu-Ray you will of course need a Blu-Ray burner and discs.
Premiere Elements 7 includes a number of disc menu templates with a good degree of control on offer for you to be able to customize them more to your own liking. You can create multi-level menus and select individual scenes from any video from the project to use as a motion preview button.
Help and Support
Summary
Premiere Elements 7 will help anyone get up to speed creating professional looking videos with a minimal learning curve in a short amount of time. Premiere Elements offers a good all round collection of video, photo and audio editing tools wrapped up in a simple user interface that belies the more powerful features and control offered within.
Adobe Premiere Elements 7 help is very strong as you would expect from Adobe. The Help files within the program are quite extensive and readily accessible and this is backed up by Adobe's even more extensive online Knowledgebase. If you are still stumped then there is a specific Adobe Premier Elements 7 FAQs area and a full manual as well.
Adobe Premiere Elements is very easy to use and provides user-friendly tabs that allow you to Edit, Create Menus and Share videos laid out in a logical sequence.
Note: Adobe have now released Premiere Elements 8 on to the market to replace version 7.
I have now had a chance to play with it and the info is as follows:
Version 8 is not a major re-write of the software or it's code. Basically it has been enhanced with some more usability features and a few other services. This review page for Premiere Elements 7 still essentially applies so I will leave it for reference.
Click here to see my full Adobe Premiere Elements 8 review
or keep reading of you are looking for more info on Premiere Elements in general.
