Premiere Elements 2020
Turn long rambling clips into slickly–edited social media content
$59.99 From Adobe, adobe.com
Features Guided edits, post–production keying tools, noise reduction effects, auto tagging
Like Apple’s iMovie, Adobe Premiere Elements 2020 is designed to help video makers import, fix and share their raw clips as tightly edited programs, complete with professional post–production assets such as titles and transitions.
As our iPhones can generate HD and 4K footage, we may have the problem of managing an ever–growing collection of video assets. This can involve lots of rummaging through folders in an attempt to find particular clips.
With the release of Premiere Elements 2020 it’s now easier to manage your video collection and find files more quickly. Thanks to Adobe Sensei, the Elements 2020 Organizer uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze the content of your video footage and add Smart Tags that cover common subjects such as sunsets, birthdays, dogs, cats, and so on. This is similar to the search tool in Apple’s Photos app, which also auto tags stills and clips with categories such as dogs, cats etc. Premiere Elements 2020 can now organize clips according to the faces featured in them, so you can search through auto–generated stacks of clips to find and label particular people. The Elements Organizer has been able to tag photos for years, so it’s good to see that video assets have now become easier to tag and search for in the 2020 version.
GUIDED EDITS
Premiere’s useful Guided workspace walks you through the video–making process, covering basic techniques such as importing clips and manually trimming them in the Timeline. Step by step text instructions are accompanied by pop–up highlights around appropriate buttons and panels in the workspace, so that you can quickly get to know where key editing features are located and how to use them. This gives Premiere Elements 2020 the edge over iMovie, which lacks an interactive workflow guide for editing newcomers.
The Guided workspace also teaches you how to make creative edits such as looping and bouncing an action clip. There are new options here, such as Animated Sky. This enables you to create the effect of adding motion to a static photo. As its name suggests, Animated Sky guides you through
the step of replacing a photo’s static sky with a range of animated presets such as clouds floating past a sunset. The guide introduces you to the concept of keying, where you replace a selected color or tone on one layer with footage from a background layer. You can then explore keying in more detail using the tools in the Expert workspace.
PILLAR BOXING
One problem faced by novice video makers is how to display portrait– oriented clips in a landscape–shaped screen. If you film with your iPhone held vertically then you’ll see black bars on either side of the clip when watching it on a TV or computer display. Premiere Elements 2020’s new Fill Frame Guided Edit shows you how to fill the pillar–boxed black edges of the frame with a magnified and blurred version of the video clip. This is a common post–production technique used by news and documentary programs to present iPhone sourced portrait–oriented video clips in a more palatable way.
Another new Guided Edit is Time– lapse. This shows how to import a series of stills (such as those shot on a camera’s burst mode) and use the Time Stretch command to change their duration en masse so that they run together as an animated sequence. You can also apply Time Stretch to video clips and make them run faster like a classic time–lapse sequence.
USEFUL FIXES
When shooting in low–light conditions most cameras will increase their ISO speed to capture more detail. This has the downside of adding nasty noise to the clip. Premiere Elements 2020 boasts a new Reduce Noise effect that can smooth away the digital noise without blurring key features in your clip. This is a very useful post– production tool as it gives you the freedom to work with footage filmed indoors or at night.
Adobe Premiere Elements 2020 certainly helps you gain video editing skills, taking you through the stages from newbie to more accomplished editor. It has the edge over iMovie when it comes to post–production filters and effects, though its titles aren’t as slick and polished as iMovie’s.
THE BOTTOM LINE. Develop at your own pace, from video editing novice to an expert familiar with advanced post–production tools.