Premiere Elements 2018
Channel Howard Hughes with the latest video app
VIDEO EDITING is a skill that comes with practice and study, but Adobe seems determined to slacken the learning curve if this latest release of its beginner-friendly movie editor is anything to go by. However, with a plethora of free apps available online, is it worth using a paid-for one?
Much like its brother across the page, Photoshop Elements, the additions to this 2018 addition are heavy on the automatic processing and time saving. It even claims to be able to teach you video editing.
The interface remains much the same, with a preview window up top, timelines below, and fixes and effects on the right— maddeningly for Photoshop users, who will want them on the left. It’s an old-fashioned look now, with the icons appearing too large. The app is split in three, with Quick, Guided, and Expert modes, plus eLive and the Organizer. Quick gives you a single video timeline, plus two audio ones, for quickly chopping up a movie you’ve made with a single camera, such as your cell, while Expert adds more video tracks, and opens up the number of effects available.
Adobe’s machine-learning and AI research is starting to come to fruition, and it shows in this release of Premiere Elements. Similar to the Organizer’s AutoCurate, Auto Trim assesses your video and cuts it into just the best bits. This is likely to produce a result that needs to be looked over by human eyes, as the software can’t know what was important when shooting, but it does a reasonable job of discarding bits where nothing much happens, and you can customize the algorithm to focus more on people or action.
Then there’s Candid Moments, which hunts through your footage for the best single frames to pull out and treat as still images, even opening them in Photoshop Elements for you. You’re probably going to want to be shooting 4K footage to take best advantage of this feature, and it’s support for this high-res format, although not a new feature, that marks Premiere Elements out above the slew of free editing apps, many of which top out at 1080p.
What Elements does well is to take the hassle out of video editing. Despite strong showings from developers such as Avid, Wondershare, and Lightworks, the beginner-friendly nature of Adobe’s app is one of its strongest features. The Organizer, shared with Photoshop Elements, makes it easy to import and locate your raw footage, then in Guided mode you can learn how to fix it up, be that by removing the distortion inherent in movies shot on action cams (a new feature), or improving a dull-looking clip with tweaks to brightness, color, and contrast. Adjustment layers, familiar to Photoshop users, make it easy to apply the same adjustments or effects to multiple clips, and you can record narration directly into the app, rather than importing it from elsewhere. There’s a full suite of DVD menus, titles, and captions for you to play with, and the Time Remapping tool lets you experiment with slow or fast motion.
Video editing can be daunting, and for beginners and advanced amateurs alike, the value of an app that holds your hand, but isn’t afraid to let go when you want to run free, is huge. If you only shoot one or two movies on your cell phone a year, a package like this may be overkill, but for anyone with ambitions that include multiple cameras, soundtracks, or animated graphics, you’re not going to find much better out there, even if the price may give you pause for thought in the face of free competition.