Adobe Premiere Elements 8 is the latest update of Adobe’s consumer level video editing software suite.
This latest version is not a major upgrade to the program or a major rewrite of the code and could be described as some general housekeeping, a little re-decorating and some useful new additions so the Adobe Premiere Elements 7 review still largely holds true.
Before I get into what is new in Adobe Premiere Elements 8 let’s get the bad news out of the way.
There really is no bad news as far as Premiere Elements 8 goes in any specific sense however there is a difference to the program that should be understood.
The main downside to this program as opposed to others in it’s category like Cyberlink Power Director 8 or Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 is that Premiere Elements 8 is the little brother of Adobe’s Pro software, Adobe Premiere Pro.
Because of that Adobe seem to take the view that anyone that is really interested in advanced features will go for the Pro version and anyone that is a hobbyist will go for Premiere Elements.
The result is that Premiere Elements 8 offers slightly less features compared to the others at this level.
The main aim here seems to be to offer a powerful video editing program that is dead simple to use and that certainly has been achieved. Premiere Elements is one of the easiest programs on the market to learn and use effectively in a short amount of time.
On the other hand if you are choosing from the point of view that you want ALL the bells and whistles that you can get at this level then one of the other programs will be more suited BUT, at the cost of slightly more intricate user interfaces.
Click Here to See Adobe Premiere Elements 8
The User Interface
No great changes have been made to the Premiere Elements 8 interface except for the addition of what they have dubbed Smart Trim.
This is a button at the top of the timeline view that, when enabled, analyzes the clips in your current project. The auto detection tool is called Smart Tags and flags any parts of each clip that it suspects to be of poor quality so that you can zero in on the offending piece and edit it out.
Premiere Elements displays a little “tooltip” dialogue when you hover your mouse over the clip and informs you as to why the clip has been flagged. Smart Trim, if activated, automatically trims out the bad parts detected.
Premiere Elements 8 allows you to choose from two styles of project creation.
You can manually take control of the process or use the Instant Movie feature to automatically step through the process. This is a perfect example of what I mean by Premiere Element’s user friendliness.
Although you may have made a choice to go with manual or automatic at no time in the process are you locked in to that method and Premiere Elements 8 allows you to switch seamlessly between the two.
Instant Movie integrates with the new Smart Tags feature to create a video project with music and transitions all based on the particular theme template you have chosen. The Smart Tags feature tries to guide the Instant Movie process into not using unsuitable or poor quality assets.
Also, Premiere Elements 8 offers customization tools for the Instant Movie feature so that you can still exercise control over content and quality as you go. In reality the Instant Movie feature is not going to win you any Academy Awards but in an overall sense it can be quite a time saver. You can let it do its thing then at the end step in and manually tidy up before final output.
For those of you that don’t want to use the feature the manual process is very easy to use with all features and functionality easily at hand.
Formats
As you would expect from an Adobe product Premiere Elements 8 has all the bases covered for both output and input formats including CDs, DVDs, iPhones, YouTube, camcorders of all types and on and on! You would have to be working with some pretty exotic footage to fall outside the compatibility specifications here.
As a side note and a hidden advantage to Adobe products remember that Adobe designs software for both Windows and Mac. The result of this is that premiere Elements 8 handles traditionally “Mac” type files such as .mod very well.
Auto Tools
In keeping with Premiere Elements 8 intentions as an easy to use video editor it packs a very usable set of auto tools for many editing functions within the program.
The Smart Tags feature is really the key to all of this and quite simply how it works is that the program automatically scans video and image files as they are added to the program interface. Images are analyzed for content and face recognition and videos are scanned for quality.
From that point each asset is tagged in such a way that the other auto tools can then decide what to do with that piece of footage or image.
The Smart Fix tool will attempt to correct any imperfections that Smart Tags has flagged.
Smart Trim uses the SmartTags to work out which pieces of a video should stay and which should go. The results on this one can be a little mixed so my advice here is to use the Samrt Tags to identify suspect footage but inspect it for yourself before making cuts.
Finally Smart Mix which is an automatic audio balancing feature that most users will love.
The problem with many home video projects is that often we are dealing with sound from a camcorder or an imported clip or from a CD or recorded on the computer and the levels are usually all over the place!
Smart Mix simply analyzes all of the audio assets on the timeline and automatically balances the sound. It does a surprisingly good job of it but if you still don’t like the final product you can step in and manually take control.
The Organizer
The biggest new addition to Premiere Elements is the Organizer.
The Organizer allows you to view, tag with keywords and organize videos and images. As a standalone feature is is quite impressive but becomes even more so when you have Photoshop Elements installed as well. The Organizer performs as a sort of go-between for the two programs through one common interface.
The auto Analyzer in the Organizer is actually the starting point of the Smart Tags process and makes storing and organizing images and video clips a breeze.
Anyone who has attempted a large project or a large number of projects knows that keeping track of which clip is which and what it actually contains turns into a nightmare in pretty short order.
Even without Photoshop Elements loaded this is a great new feature.
Motion Tracking
This is also a new feature in Premiere Elements 8 and it’s good to see that it is finally making it’s way into a number of consumer level video editing programs. Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 I think was the first to set the pace here.
In a nutshell Motion Tracking is the ability of the program to identify an element or feature within a video clip and to track it’s position as the clip progresses. All you do is select the object you want tracked and click on it.
The actual use of it can be quite varied but having a cartoon “speech bubble” follow someone around in the clip is one example. Another could be to overlay an arrow pointing to a specific player on a football field and have the arrow follow that player as he moves around.
The only way to do this previously was to insert the object and then every few frames re-position it which could take hours if not days!.
Now you just select what you want Premiere Elements 8 to track, insert your object or effect and the software does the rest.
Conclusion
Adobe Premiere Elements 8 is a great choice for anyone wanting fully featured video editing software combined with the widest of compatibility and the benefit of excellent ease of use.
Click Here to See Adobe Premiere Elements 8
