Adobe Premiere Elements 9 review

1 / 2

Lots of people shoot videos but few of them own editing software. Adobe has spent a lot of time and effort trying to change that, gearing Premiere Elements towards casual users who want instant gratification. However, this left more experienced – and willing – videographers out in the cold. Admittedly, some extremely sophisticated editing tools remain , but by version 8 they were buried in a sprawling, bloated interface. Worst of all, footage in the popular AVCHD format was handled poorly, with garbled previews and dropped frames when attempting to preview transitions.

We’re relieved to see the arrival of a new video playback engine in version 9. It’s not the same engine that transformed the performance of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 – but, as that’s 64-bit only it wouldn’t be suitable for a consumer product like Elements.

The new engine does bring numerous benefits, though, including an end to garbled AVCHD previews. We were able to play two simultaneous AVCHD streams on our Core i7 test PC before dropped frames set in. However, our current favourite editor, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 can manage twice that many.

Canon EOS 550D clips (in QuickTime AVC 1080p format) played smoothly whereas they brought version 8 to a standstill. However, playing two simultaneous clips – such as during transitions – was still too much for it. The background rendering feature introduced in version 8 would have helped, as it automatically generated MPEG-2 copies of AVC clips, making them easier to handle. Sadly, though, background rendering has quietly disappeared in version 9. There was room for improvement in its implementation, but abandoning it entirely is regrettable. Even with a fast PC, Premiere Elements struggles with demanding formats.

24fps footage is now fully supported, which is good news considering its increasing popularity among digital cameras. Other problems persist, though. When rendering an interlaced AVCHD clip to 720p progressive scan MPEG-2 file, the software didn’t bother to de-interlace the footage, resulting in ugly sawtooth-like jagged lines. We found a laborious workaround, but it’s particularly worrying because we first noticed this problem in version 8 and it still hasn’t been resolved.

While preview smoothness is generally better, the timeline controls have become much less responsive. Zooming in and out was instantaneous in version 8 but now it can take a couple of seconds for the timeline to redraw. That might not sound like much, but we found that it had a major impact on the speed of operation.

Other new features pale into insignificance next to the revamped playback engine, but they’re welcome nonetheless. The NewBlue Cartoonr Plus effect turns clips into block colours and bold outlines for a cartoon-like appearance. Conceptually it’s fairly gimmicky but technically it’s surprisingly sophisticated, with a huge range of controls plus presets to get you started. Six new audio effects provide various ways to clean up soundtracks, including noise reduction. It couldn’t combat loud wind noise or traffic but it successfully attenuated gentler hisses and background noises.

The disc-authoring module can now export Web DVD – a Flash animation that replicates the menu controls used for DVD and Blu-ray production. It’s a great way to share home videos with friends and family, but with no integrated web hosting, we doubt many people will find much use for it. It’s possible to upload to YouTube directly from the software, but although HD resolutions are supported, none of the export templates offer a 25fps frame rate and new templates can’t be created.

It’s these lacks of attention to detail – the de-interlacing problems and sluggish timeline controls being other examples – that make Premiere Elements less than pleasant to use. There’s nothing here to change our view that Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 is a far more elegant and rewarding video-editing program.