Adobe Premiere Elements 2018
Improved video editing app perfect for beginners
$99.99 From Adobe, adobe.com Features Guided mode, new tools Needs OS X 10.11 or later, 4GB of RAM
Adobe Premiere Elements 2018 is comparable with Apple’s iMovie. 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 around appropriate buttons and panels in the 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. The Video Story mode helps turn raw footage into a short, slick video suitable for sharing via social networking sites.
One thing Premiere Elements 2018 does well is 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. Smart Trim analyzes 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. 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.
Candid Moments is another new feature that can help you quickly harvest socialmedia-friendly assets from a video clip. If you’ve filmed an event such as a kids’ party, then 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 editors can get finished videos onto social media platforms more quickly.
Overall, Premiere Elements 2018 can help beginners cut their video editing teeth with the Guided mode, but as they grow in experience, they can expand their developing skills in the feature-packed Expert mode. Unsure whether this is worth $100 to you? Put the app to the test with the free trial version, and compare it to iMovie.
The bottom line. Great for newbs, with ample power for the next step up. George Cairns