Premiere Elements Impressions

[Alyosha]

I started looking for some video editing software a few weeks ago and saw that adobe had released an elements version of their premiere pro. I was intrigued as it can be had for under 100$ and has much of the functionality of its big brother. I poked around and didn't find too many reviews, but those I found were very positve. I decided to go ahead an get it and started using it yesterday. So, for anyone who has been interested by this I thought I'd share some reactions to it..

I got it from buy.com for under 90$ shipped which made me happy to begin with. It comes on 2 CDs in a nice multi-disk DVD style case. It also comes with a tutorial DVD which is a nice addition as it has a bit of a learning curve. It also comes with an extensive yet extremely usable manual. For pretty much any question I've had so far, the manual has had useful, easy to find answers.

Aside from the manual, there is also a help window in the workspace which is actaully useful. The help window has a selection of topics activated which change depending on what you are working on at the moment. So, if I have the "effects" protion of the program selected, the help window has a bunch of effects related tips you browse through if needed. For a noob like myself its a very nice feature. And, when you're not using it, its very subtle and doesn't get in the way like other program assistants.

As for the program itself. It has an intuitive capture interface. If you've captred video from a DV device before you can do this.

The editing workspace is, I'm assuming, very much like Premiere Pro (though I've never actually used it). You have the standard timeline, preview window, and "tool box" which holds the effects, project media, and so on. There is a task bar along the top which allows you to select what is active in the tool box.

Importing media into a project is as easy as poking yourself in the eye. That is to say, really easy.

The effects have really impressed me. There are a ton of video effects, audio effects and transitions here. Like, way more than I'd ever use. Like other edition programs, just drag and drop an effect and its there. You can also customize most effects and transions and it seems to be pretty powerful, though I haven't played with that too much yet.

Some of the transitions didn't seem to work right at first. I followed the instructions and the effect would act goofy. Some random clicking and draggin seemed to fix this but I don't know what I did. Only a minor gripe.

It comes with a bunch of nice title templates which actually look pretty nice. Lots of fancy fonts and pretty letters to make your titles and credits look more professional. I haven't seemed to figure out how to animated titles with scrolling text and such. Not sure if I can or not. The only animation options is to make the whole template (background and all) scroll across the screen which looks really cheesy.

Thats about as far as I've gotten. And I'm very happy so far. It took about 2 hours to get comfortable using the program and I'm getting pretty functional with it now. Its extremely easy to use but looks like it will be very powerful once I learn to use more of the tools.

It also does DVD creating and, if anyone is interested, I'll report on that once I finish my project. Otherwise, for anyone looking for some good video software, this looks like a really good bet.

 

[arkamw]

I'll have to take a look at that. I bought Photoshop Elements and I love almost everything about it. It does more than I will ever learn or have the opportunity to use.

My only real gripe is that the layers "table" won't stay open. You have to click the layers tab every time to get it open again, which is a pain if you are doing a lot of switching between layers. At least, if you can get it to stay open, I don't know how.

 

[djnes]

I just saw it in Best Buy today. I might have to look into it soon once I get a digital camcorder.

 

[pbj75]

Thanks for the update. I have been using Premiere for a couple of years, but due to cost and complexity, I don't recommend it for people just starting with DV.

Let us know how the export function works. Direct to DVD, DVD folders to the HD then burn with Nero, any other video export options. What about any DVD menu creation tools?

 

[Alyosha]

Glad this is helpful, here's some more.

You can export to WMV, quicktime and MPEG. WMV and quicktime are a little lacking and only let you create videos up to 320x240 as it seems to be geared towards publishing these videos online. MPEG has a lot of nice rendering options, resolutions up to 720, with different audio and video encoding options to tweak. I've rendered a couple of my shorter clips in MPEG with no problems so far.

I'm a little disapointed in the DVD creation portion, but I may have been expecting too much. It is a complete DVD creation program so you don't have to have any other software to make your final disk. Its menu creation section has some decent templates but they are not very customizeable. I didn't look long, but there at least seems to be a lot of them even if they can't be tweaked much. Their may well be a custom menu section but I haven't looked for it yet.

The slick part about the DVD creation part is that you can put DVD markers of various types throughout the video. There are scene markers which divide your movie into scenes and make a scene selection menu in your main menu. There are stop marks which will send you back to the main menu after a section of the movie has played. Lastly there are main menu markers which create a button for that section of video on the main menu. So, you can take multiple videos, with multiple scenes and arrange them all in the timeline and cause them all to play like separate movies by the use of markers within the timeline. I'd prefer somthing a little more flexable which allowed me to build DVDs with clips outside of my current project's timeline and without the rigid menus, but this is my only real gripe with the program and it isn't too big a deal to me.

Once you build your DVD you can export it straight to DVD-R or just to a DVD folder which is kinda nice as, in the case of my 2+ hour project I want to start it rendering and just walk away and not have to worry about something going wrong with the actual burning of the disk which I can then do later.