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Review - Adobe Premiere Elements 4 |
 Following on from our Photoshop Elements 6 review, the other half of the two-disc bundle is Adobe Premiere Elements 4.
Once again, having experience of using the Pro version, there is the feeling of meeting an ex partner who went away and lost a couple of stone, had a face lift and now has hordes of admiring suitors where before only you knew the right buttons to push. With Premiere however, taming and even ‘dumbing down’ of the menus and tools is a godsend, since the pro version of Premiere rivals even Acrobat 8 for its toolbar incontinence.
As you would expect from a bundled package, the interface shares a look and colour scheme with the new Photoshop Elements and the two packages interact with each other in an easy unobtrusive fashion.
The interface is helpful and intuitive and, while I raise a mildly incredulous eyebrow at Adobe’s claim that a novice could be cranking out movies in less than 15 minutes, it is almost instantly obvious what you are looking at and the steps you need to take to achieve your ends. The only place where that is not the case is importing new clips into an existing project. But even this, while initially sending me on a lip chewing click-fest, still passed the no-manual, dive-straight-in acid test.
 The feature list and output options remain rich and once again, there are added touches that are excellent. One such addition is the Beat Detect feature which aids in the creation of music videos or the like by analysing your music track and then inserting markers at key peaks in the rhythm. These markers allow you to accurately place cuts in your video, shaving huge amounts of time that you would normally spend in other applications scrubbing the timeline to find the sweet spots. As with the Photoshop Elements, Adobe have really done their homework in deciding what stays and what goes in this package and the end result feels comfortable without being dumb.
Your masterpiece can then be styled to perfection with the addition of pre-fabricated, themes, which include matching opening titles, end credits, filters and DVD menus. Effects, such as distortion, ripples, and blurs can be applied by simple drag and drop operations and there is no wait (on a decent machine) for rendering during editing – grab your desired effect, drop it onto your clip and hey presto, it’s done. From there your end results can be output to a wide variety of formats including Blu-Ray, and even directly published to youTube from within the program itself.
All in all, Adobe have pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of making video editing quick, easy and fun, and as a bundle with Photoshop Elements 6 this is not only a chance to put some remarkably powerful software in your creative arsenal, but also a bargain that’s too good to miss.
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