Have you ever wanted to create a DVD video from pictures you took on vacation or at family events, or just put all your photos on DVD, or make your own home movie? Whether you’re interested in creating video DVDs to give to other people or editing video content for other uses, Premiere Elements is the program for you.
With more and more people using digital cameras or digital camcorders, creating and editing your own videos is becoming more popular. Online video sharing sites like YouTube may even see an increase in the number of videos uploaded as more people want to share their creations with others.
Premiere Elements is an easy-to-use, yet powerful, video editor and DVD maker designed with the home user in mind. Premiere Elements supports a wide variety of capture devices; you can import video from a digital camera, camcorder, mobile phone, or web cam, or just use files from your hard drive.
Many users may find themselves put off by some of the competitive products out there, such as Pinnacle Studio, Ulead VideoStudio, or PowerDVD, because they look like they were designed for professional video editors. Premiere Elements isn’t lacking in professional features, but its new Sceneline option makes it much easier for the average user to piece together movies. A Sceneline looks like a storyboard and allows you to easily lay out each individual clip as a single still image and then add in any transition effects, voice narration, or background soundtracks. There are a lot of effects and transitions that users can work with to spice up their projects
Premiere Elements also offers a wide variety of video output options that include support for a number of different media devices and media formats. If you don’t need to edit your videos, you can easily use Premiere Elements to download your video and copy it directly to a DVD as well.
What's Hot: Installation went very smoothly, although it did seem to take a bit longer to install than most programs. The only choices you have to make during setup are where to install the program, whether or not to install the DVD templates, and which default TV format to use (NTSC or PAL). The program installed on Widows Vista Home Premium and on Windows XP without any trouble.
What's Not: The only issue with installing Premiere Elements may be the rather high system requirements. For example, you need to have a processor with SSE2 support, which includes all Intel processors
made after 2001 and all AMD processors made after 2004, starting with the Athlon 64 CPUs. This means that users with older computers won’t be able to install the software. The program also uses a lot of system memory (as do all video editing packages), so I would recommend at least 2GB of RAM or more to keep the frustration level down. Finally, when editing video content, you’ll want to have a decent video card installed so you can get a more accurate view of the video quality. Using my laptop with an Intel 945GM Express card installed, I found the video quality to be pretty good, but when I switched to my PC with a 512MB GeForce 7900 card, I noticed a big difference.
What's Hot: What do I like about Premiere Elements 3.0? There are so many features I hardly know where to start. You can combine multiple video clips into a movie; you can narrate a video; you can create video for your website; you can edit a video clip to upload to YouTube; and you can burn professional-looking DVDs with full menus that play on any DVD player. Whether you are making home movies of your kids, compiling a catalog of your stockpile of vacation pictures, or just looking to make a home movie on an limited budget, this is one of the best software packages out there in its price range. Premiere Elements also offers a cool stop-motion feature that enables users to create stop-motion or claymation-type animated movies.
Once you’ve created a new project, you start by choosing where your media resides. The menu allows you to chose from DVD, digital camera, mobile phone, hard drive, camcorder, card reader, DVD camcorder, HD camcorder, or web cam. You can also browse for files or folders on your hard drive or connect to the Internet to look for different types of media.
After loading all your images or movies, you can double-click each clip to open it in the preview window and adjust its overall length, or you can go into the more professional timeline view and adjust it there. The timeline view is easy to use for both new users as well as people who are familiar with more expensive editing suites.
For those of you that may be put off by working in the timeline view, you’ll find that the default view in Premiere Elements, Sceneline editing, makes it even easier to work on your project. To begin, all you need to do is drag and drop your pictures, media clips, or other files onto the editing workspace. When you do this, you will see an image of each clip in your movie appear on the workspace as an individual scene that you can then edit or add transition or other effects to. Moving clips is done by simply dragging them with your mouse and placing them in a new position. This allows you to easily rearrange files in your project.
When you open Sceneline view, you’ll see three windows that allow you to work with your project. The Media window is where you can open your media files, select different transitions and effects, or create titles for your project. Next is the Monitor window. This large window allows you to preview your movie so you can see how different effects will look in your final project. To preview a clip, all you need to do is click it to put it in the Monitor window. Each time you make a change to your project you can rewind it back to the beginning and take another look in the Monitor window to see your progress. The final window is the Properties window. This window is where you are able to make adjustments to your media clips such as changing the brightness, contrast, opacity, and other options to fine-tune your project.
Another nice feature that’s very easy to use is the Add Narration. This tool allows you to easily add a narration recording from any microphone that is attached to your computer.
When you’re ready to make your movie, Premiere Elements allows to output videos for use with a wide range of devices, such as DVD players, iPods, Sony PSPs, and other devices. There are also a number of different media formats to choose from when outputting your video. These include Windows Media, QuickTime, MPEG, and Adobe Flash. From the Export menu, you can get additional control over your output by clicking the Advanced button.
Premiere Elements also includes a wide selection of DVD menu templates, which can be dropped into the Monitor window to quickly author a DVD of your video. If you don’t find a template that suits your needs, you can easily create your own DVD menus in Photoshop Elements (sold separately or in a bundled option).
What's Not: As good as Premiere Elements is, there are a few features lacking. The program seems to render video very slowly, although most of the video editing programs I’ve used do, and there’s no support for HD DVD or Blu-ray disc in this version.
One feature that's missing is a link to online video-sharing sites. Adobe has a new sharing site that's accessible from Photoshop Elements 5, but not from Premiere Elements. In addition, the site that Adobe offers is very basic. I'd prefer to see some integration with YouTube and other popular sites.
Premiere Elements also doesn’t have the ability to capture video from older devices like VCRs. The program can capture video from some devices, but it doesn't work particularly well with many capture cards (nor is it really designed to).
Premiere Elements can do some video enhancement, but it is more of a timeline editing tool. If you want to significantly improve the quality of your captured video, removing noise, adding high-quality zooming, and so forth, you'll need another program.
As I mentioned in the Installation and Setup section, RAM usage goes up pretty fast. Once you get a large number of clips in the workspace, you’ll notice a huge increase in RAM usage. Once that happens, Premiere Elements will tell you it is getting low on memory (this even happened on my laptop with 2GB of RAM) and will warn you to shut down. It was much smoother on my other PC with 4GB of RAM. You should also save frequently in case the program crashes. I should also mention that I’ve had this same problem with other video editing software as well, such as Pinnacle Studio.
I'd like to see support for Blu-ray and HD DVD discs and some integration with YouTube and other popular online sites.
Premiere Elements is a great program for getting started and will serve many of your video-editing needs. For Photoshop Elements users, integration between the two products makes them a powerful combination. In fact, Adobe sells the two bundled into one box if you want to get them both. I would recommend this program to any first-time users as well as people with more experience in creating and editing video. In a relatively short amount of time, I was able to import all of my family's Disney World vacation pictures and add transition effects, visual effects, color corrections, menus, and background music to create a pretty professional looking movie that I burned onto DVD.