Adobe Premiere Elements 10 review

1 / 2

It was once the undisputed champion of consumer video editing, but Adobe Premiere Elements has spent the last few years in the wilderness. It doesn’t matter how many snazzy effects and time-saving features an editor has if its basic ability to edit video is compromised by stumbling previews and sluggish controls.

With version 10, Premiere Elements is now available as a 64-bit application, and preview performance is massively improved. Version nine could only manage a couple of simultaneous AVCHD streams or just one Canon EOS 550D clip on our Core i7 test PC. Any more and the preview would grind to a virtual halt, making further editing all but impossible. Version 10 running on Windows 7 64-bit on the same hardware played seven simultaneous AVCHD and four EOS 600D streams – a massive improvement that brings it up to the standards of the best consumer editing packages. This bodes well for those who want to produce complex title sequences and animations – something that Premiere Elements excels at with its sophisticated Bézier keyframe tools – as well as those editing HD footage on slower PCs.

Pan and Zoom adds zip to your slideshows, but you’ll need to tweak it to get a pleasing effect

It’s not all good news, though. Navigating the timeline and the various tabbed panels was often painfully slow, even on our fast test PC. Even with a single video stream, playback wasn’t as smooth as it should be, with uneven playback of frames giving slightly clumsy motion in previews. At least Adobe has addressed a bug whereby 1080i footage was not de-interlaced when exported as 720p, which lead to ugly sawtooth-shaped interference. It took long enough, though – we first reported this issue in our review of version 8.

As usual, Adobe’s efforts seem to be largely focused on ancillary features. There are new themes for the InstantMovie function and greater control over its output, but it still resulted in clumsy edits that bore little relation to the source footage. The themes themselves are attractive but they’re quite specific, with names such as Doggie Days and Outdoor Wedding – more generic themes would be preferable.

A new Pan and Zoom Tool detects faces in photos and lives up to its name as it moves from face to face. It’s a nice enough idea but the execution was poor. Face detection brought up lots of false positives – in our first test-run, it chose to zoom straight in on a teenage girl’s chest. It then moved on to faces, but zoomed in so tightly that photos looked blocky, while the linear paths and abrupt starts and stops resembled a Crimewatch report rather than a photo slideshow.

It’s easy enough to modify the size and position of each resting point in the animation, but the only way to create curved paths and gently accelerating movement is via the Bézier keyframe tools, which aren’t easy to find. They are worth mastering, but once you’ve done so you may as well design animations from scratch. We’ve commented on this fractured relationship between Premiere Elements’ beginner- and enthusiast-oriented functions before, which makes it hard for beginners to progress to more advanced techniques.

The new colour-correction effects are more welcome. AutoTone & Vibrance makes colours rich and punchy, and there’s manual control if the fully automatic processing doesn’t hit the mark. The Three-Way Color Corrector allows sophisticated adjustments, removing or applying colour casts to the highlights, midtones and shadows using a trio of colour wheels. It would be even better if its controls fitted on the screen without scrolling.

Colour wheels let you add colour casts to your videos, with plenty of fine control

Export options now include AVCHD disc, which puts Blu-ray quality video onto DVD media that will play in the majority of Blu-ray players. You can now upload to Facebook as well as YouTube but, as before, videos are converted to 30fps, regardless of the project settings, thus compromising motion smoothness. There are lots of templates for other export destinations, but their frame rates don’t adapt to the source either. iPad templates use an inexplicably low 640×360 resolution.

It’s this lack of attention to detail – and the sluggish timeline controls – that make it hard for us to warm to Premiere Elements. It remains the only consumer editor that’s equipped to produce complex animations, but for home videos, we’d much rather use the simpler, faster and more elegant Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum.