Premiere Elements 2018
An improved video-editing app that’s ideal for beginners
£86.56 FROM Adobe, adobe.com needs OS X 10.11 or later If you’re new to video editing, the Guided mode will help take you through the basics
Adobe Premiere Elements 2018 is comparable with Apple’s iMovie in terms of its abilities. Both apps are designed to help entry-level editors import, fix and share their clips as slickly edited projects featuring titles and transitions.
If you’re new to video editing, Premiere Elements 2018 is worth a look – its Guided mode will take you through basics, such as importing clips and trimming them in the timeline. Step-by-step text instructions are accompanied by highlights that are centred on appropriate buttons and panels in the app’s workspace, so you can quickly get to know where key editing features are located and how to use them. This gives Premiere Elements 2018 an edge over iMovie, which lacks an interactive workspace and workflow guide for newcomers to editing.
One thing Premiere Elements 2018 does well is to provide ways to speed up the editing process. Trimming clips to lose the boring bits is a common video editing task, so the new Smart Trim feature is designed to speed up this time-consuming part of your workflow. The feature analyses the footage for the presence of faces, groups of people, or areas that are in focus, for example. You can also manually set it to look for properties such as action in a clip, so the footage will be trimmed to include only those scenes that feature activity to save you wading through less engaging bits.
Once Smart Trim has found appropriate scenes in a longer clip, you can fine-tune them using the timeline’s trim handles. Smart Trim is a springboard to help you find the best bits of your footage more quickly, although it can be a bit hit and miss in its automated results.
As well as that, Video Story mode turns raw footage into a short, slick video suitable for sharing via social networking sites.
Cut your editing teeth
Candid Moments is another new feature that can help you quickly harvest social mediafriendly assets from a video clip. If you’ve filmed an event such as a kid’s party, you can run the footage through the Candid Moments tool to automatically find frames that you can export as stills to share on Twitter, for example. These automated features help speed up the editing process, so you can distribute your finished videos online more quickly than before.
Overall, Premiere Elements 2018 can help beginners cut their video editing teeth with the Guided mode, and as you grow in experience, you can expand your developing skills in the app’s feature-packed Expert mode.