Adobe Premiere Elements 2021
Create slickly edited videos for friends, family, and social media followers
$99.99 From Adobe, adobe.com
Needs macOS 10.14 or later
Like iMovie, Adobe Premiere Elements 2021 is a non–linear video editing app that’s designed to help video makers trim, fix and share their video footage as polished programs, complete with titles and transitions. However, compared to iMovie, Premiere Elements 2021 boasts a more sophisticated set of post–production tools, such as the ability to make selective adjustments to the colors and tones of a sky without changing the foreground exposure. iMovie only lets you apply one effect filter at a time; Premiere Elements 2021 enables you to apply multiple effects as nondestructive adjustment layers, giving you more freedom to experiment with a range of creative looks.
STAY ORGANIZED
These days we may shoot as many clips as we do stills, thanks to the impressive HD video quality produced by our devices. This can lead to asset management challenges. Fortunately, the Elements 2021 Organiser uses Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence technology to analyze the content of your video footage as well as your pictures. It then adds Smart Tags that cover common subjects
such as sunsets, dogs, cats, and so on. Premiere Elements 2021 can also organize clips according to faces so you can search through auto–generated stacks of clips to identify particular people more quickly.
HIT THE GROUND RUNNING
Premiere Elements 2021 is a suitable app for the video–editing novice to explore thanks to its Guided workspace. Here, 25 themed Guided Edits walk you through the entire production process — from importing, re– ordering and trimming clips in the timeline to adding post–production “bells and whistles” such as graphical elements. In the Guided workspace, step–by–step text instructions are accompanied by pop–up highlights around appropriate buttons and panels, so you can quickly learn how to find and use key editing tools. After exploring the tricks and techniques introduced by the Guided Edits, you’ll become more confident in exploring the Expert workspace.
Premiere Elements 2021 adds two new creative Guided Edits: Double Exposure and Animated Mattes. Double Exposure enables you to creatively combine part of a video layer with a photo using a range of layer blends. This Guided Edit is a springboard to a variety of creative montage effects that will catch people’s attention as they swipe through their social media feeds. The Animated Mattes Guided Edit enables you to introduce a clip’s main subject in a variety of creative ways. Instead of fading up (or mixing) from black you can reveal your subject via animated effects such as geometric patterns.
This type of Guided Edit adds texture and variety to your programs as well as introducing novices to advanced post– production techniques such as Luma keying.
KEEP ON TRACK
One of Premiere Elements 2021’s new features is the ability to apply effects to specific objects and then have those effects follow (or track) the subject throughout the video. In the official Adobe demo video, we see a child running through a field. The image is blurred with an effect and then the child is selected with a quick scribble. Auto tracking then ensures that the child remains sharp while she runs through the blurred background. In practice, we found that auto effect tracking worked well if your subject remains at a similar size in the frame throughout the clip (as the girl does in the demo). However, when faced with a spaniel running back and forth, Premiere Elements couldn’t keep track of the subject’s changing size in the frame. It also failed to track the vertical changes in position of a child bouncing on a trampoline. This auto tracking feature would have benefitted from a Guided Edit as it takes a while to get used to it.
Premiere Elements 2021 provides all the video organizing, fixing and editing tools that the average social media content–maker will require, plus it gives you room to develop your editing skills thanks to a wide range of post–production tools.
THE BOTTOM LINE. A good, if not fully effective, tool to guide you through both simple and sophisticated video editing techniques. GEORGE CAIRNS