Adobe Premiere Elements 7 Review

By: Dustin Sklavos

Kicking off a series of video editing software reviews here at Notebook Review, today we're taking a look at Adobe's entrant, Premiere Elements 7. Branded essentially as a consumer grade version of their much more powerful, much more robust professional-grade video editing suite Premiere Pro CS4, Premiere Elements 7 exists chiefly to let the armchair videographers and sometime amateur filmmakers put together quality video projects.

In the interests of full disclosure, I recently received a degree in Visual Arts and have years of experience with Adobe's Premiere and Apple's Final Cut Pro. I'm used to exactly this kind of robust software, so taking a step down the ladder and looking at the consumer side of things is an interesting detour and if nothing else gives me information that I can eventually pass on to other people -- people like With all that said, I'm looking to see how easy this software makes editing video for John Q. Public, but also if it provides a good stepping stone for the filmmakers of tomorrow to cut their teeth on more professional software. This isn't iMovie-level stuff, it's a notch up. I'm also going to look at whether or not this software really adds anything that you couldn't get for free from Microsoft in the form of their Windows Live Movie Maker (currently in beta).

Personal and professional introductions out of the way, with Adobe's pedigree in higher-end software one should expect Premiere Elements 7 to be a cut above the rest. At $99.99 for a shiny new copy direct from Adobe's site -- the price definitely on the higher end of this market -- does Premiere Elements 7 have what it takes?

FORMAT SUPPORT

Well, the first and most important question I had is whether or not Premiere Elements supported the major digital video formats on the market. Consumer video's transition to high definition is a little bit fraught, especially with hard disk-based cameras becoming more and more popular (much to my dismay).

As a side note, I will point out that the proliferation of disk-based cameras is not a good thing for anyone looking to take their video work remotely seriously. Archiving old footage is much more difficult as instead of keeping master copies of your tapes, you'll have to back it up on your PC, taking up more space and potentially being more expensive in the long run. A computer's hard disk also has a decent chance of failing, versus just keeping your master tapes in Garth Marenghi's a dark place. Worse still, in my time in college, the classmates that shot on these hard disk-based cameras were the ones that routinely had the most trouble capturing and editing footage, and the AVCHD codec frequently used to encode video on these cameras can be much more processor-intensive than HDV, which uses tapes.

So with all the bluster out of the way, I'm pleased to report that Premiere Elements 7 supports all major consumer formats out of the box in both NTSC and PAL versions. It also allows you to mix formats easily, and will master the video in the format you chose when you started the project.

IMPORTING FOOTAGE

Bringing footage into Premiere Elements is a breeze. It offers eight (8!) ways to import and is very clear with each. Webcam, DV camcorder, HDV camcorder, AVCHD camcorder, and beyond...even your Mobile Phone has an option here.

Of course, it's not all kittens, unicorns, and rainbows. Capturing footage from my HDV camcorder should've been a breeze, but I found myself with two issues. First, Premiere Elements does not allow you to log and capture; you leave your camera running and then the software decides when a new scene/clip starts. While the detection is alright, this is not the ideal way to do things. Second, and more damning, is what happens when Premiere Elements hit the end of my tape, or specifically the end of my footage.

This is a problem I've had with Premiere Pro that was alleviated by just being able to tell the software which timecodes I wanted captured, but with that option removed, most users are going to just rewind their tape, press the "Record" button to capture all their footage, and go make a sandwich. Oh what joys they will discover when the software hits the end of the timecode and then just sits there like an idiot, waiting for you to inform it that, yes, there is no more footage. Premiere Elements should just call it quits when the end of the timecode is reached.

As I said before, Premiere Elements supports mixing formats and mastering them in a single one, and this actually works pretty well. I started an HDV 1080i project and imported some older DV footage (480i) and it scaled appropriately. Unfortunately, because of the precarious nature of widescreen DV (I've had all kinds of issues with it historically), that DV footage only appears in standard aspect despite having been shot wide.

EDITING

Premiere Elements uses two different modes of editing, dubbed the "timeline" and "sceneline."

The sceneline will be familiar to people who've used other consumer-grade video editors, but the timeline is some kind of editing trainwreck. Mercifully, for the vast majority of edits, the basic sceneline is going to be fine, and allows you to drag-and-drop transitions between clips.

Premiere Elements offers a veritable mountain of transitions, but here was where I came upon my first real rub with the software. While there is a wealth of these to use, and they're easy to drag and drop, you can never actually SEE what the transition will do with your existing video. If you hover over the transition icon in the window, you'll get an idea of how it works, but I couldn't find a way to actually see what the transition would do with my video.

As a film nerd note, using all the crazy transitions offered by Premiere Elements will probably be fine for home videos, but for any remotely serious kind of video work, you're going to be best served avoiding anything other than hard cuts (no transitions) or dissolves. George Lucas you are not, wipes you must not use.

Premiere Elements also offers a vast array of effects you can use on individual clips, including some choice color-correcting effects. Unfortunately, to actually get to the window where you can tweak the effects, you have to right-click the video on the sceneline and select "Properties." This is a clunky way of doing things and not immediately intuitive. And as a request from concerned viewers everywhere, please ignore the "Lens Flare" effect. Unless you're J.J. Abrams, it does not exist.

The titling system is, unfortunately, pretty unintuitive, and largely requires you to use the timeline. Titles have always been kind of sticky to deal with in my experience, and even the titling system in Premiere Pro is kind of clunky. Premiere Elements 7 really doesn't improve on that situation.

So, remember how I said the timeline is a trainwreck? That's because the timeline is a trainwreck. Most people have a pretty clear understanding that editing involves picture and sound, and it's certainly natural to marry and manipulate the two together when editing clips. Where Premiere Elements fails is by pairing up video and audio timelines together instead of separating them into video and audio the way they're handled in professional software like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. This is going to screw up people learning the ropes, and the strange decisions made in the design of the timeline have resulted in some kind of messed up chimera that exists solely to confuse users. Or, alternatively, to just lock them into a specific, proprietary style of editing as opposed to the more standardized way of doing it.

OUTPUT

Premiere Elements 7 allows for several simple presets to export to, but curiously, does not have built-in support for 1080p output, peaking at 1080i or 720p. For the more technically-minded users, Premiere Elements 7 does support tweaking individual output settings, but you'll probably feel better using the presets. At least I do.

With that in mind, Premiere Elements 7 again offers a wealth of options that frankly I'm happy to see as far as exporting is concerned.

DVD mastering is built into the program, albeit clunkily and very sparingly, but it is there. You can set menus, but the kinds of wacky special features you'll probably want to include aren't going to be available since the software only allows you to edit a single video together (as opposed to editing individual scenes and then assembling them later on).

When you do click the big green "SHARE" button, you're given five basic options for exporting your video, and these pretty much cover your bases. You can burn directly to a DVD or Blu-ray (provided you have the appropriate hardware), upload your video directly to YouTube (very cool) or your own website, export it to a single file for viewing on your computer, export to file formats for viewing on mobile phones and personal media players, or just export back to tape (a preferred option for HDV editing). These features cover all your bases and work well, and as I mentioned, more fine-grained tweaking is available.

CONCLUSION

So the big question is going to be whether or not Premiere Elements 7 is worth the $99 price tag, especially when cheaper and often pack-in alternatives exist in the market. Software like this is ill-designed for editing together your magnum opus, but a video that runs ten or twenty minutes is probably perfectly fine for it.

What Premiere Elements 7 really has going for it is flexibility. It'll edit just about any video you throw at it from just about anywhere, and it'll send it right back where you got it or shoot it directly to YouTube if you're so inclined. A lot of the features you'd expect to find in professional grade software are abstracted into Elements 7, but abstracted to the point where they're going to be hard to find for average users.

Still, I can't help but feel like Elements 7 falls short of the mark in at least preparing a user for making the jump to bigger, better software, and some of the abstractions make no sense at all. It's going to be fine for users who just want to put together family videos, but the user who wants a little more oomph is going to find himself digging through menus a little and hitting a troubling learning curve.

Overall, Adobe Premier Elements 7 is a reasonable piece of software, but I hesitate to draw any conclusions until the wrap-up when we're done with this series.

Pros:

• Flexible input and output.
• Sceneline is easy enough to navigate.
• Lots of options for tweaking the video.
• Direct upload to YouTube.

Cons:

• Too much is abstracted away from the user.
• Doesn't easily allow for capturing individual clips.
• Timeline is NOT a timeline in the traditional sense, and should not be used by anyone.

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