Premiere Elements 15
Video editing made as simple as you want it to be
GETTING TO VERSION 15 of an app means it must be doing something right, and with Premiere Elements, that’s taking the hopelessly complex art of video editing, and making it appear simple. At least, making something you wouldn’t mind sharing on YouTube or Facebook look simple.
It’s not, of course. Available as a bundle with Photoshop Elements, or as a standalone app, Premiere Elements makes use of the same Organizer as its photo-editing brother, a clever move that enables you to import both types of media together, and keeps it all in one place. This means it can analyze and tag your videos as it would photographs, detecting faces, and taking even longer about it than with still images. It’s unfair to complain about the slowness of this process, however— it’s doing a hell of a job.
Video editing is so different from photo editing that it almost feels wrong to sell the two products together, as though they’re somehow different sides of the same coin. The raw materials might come from the same camera, but that’s where the similarities end.
Adobe’s approach to video editing sees you assemble a timeline from your footage, before trimming out the bits you don’t want—it’s more like sculpture than painting, but you have to make the marble before freeing the artwork from inside it.
Premiere’s face detection aims to make this easier, by trimming clips back to the bits that feature people. The idea seems to be that we upload videos to social media with our friends in them, rather than clips featuring mountains or lakes, so this will be a huge timesaver. The emphasis on creating movies to be shared online is underlined by the simple Facebook and YouTube export options. (Smart Trim can be turned off if you’re in the habit of shooting pastoral scenes.) Premiere Elements retains the three-mode structure of Photoshop Elements, showing a friendly face to photographers who might be familiar with still image editing, but a little cautious about chopping up video. HAZY DAYS More features from Photoshop Elements have migrated over, including the dehazing that originated in Creative Cloud. Applied as an Effects slider from the Advanced Adjustments tab, Haze Removal cuts through partly cloudy skies and foggy backgrounds to reveal the structures and colors buried in them. It does nothing of the sort, of course, being a contrast tweak applied largely to the highlights, but it can reveal a blue sky through wispy cloud, and increase the general clarity and color of the footage. As with the Clarity slider in Lightroom, however, it’s possible to overuse it, and end up with a harsh, highcontrast result.
As with many of Premiere’s effects, applying haze removal is a two-step process. Firstly, you drop the effect on to the timeline, dragging it out to cover the part of the video you want it to work on. Then it can be set to automatic, or adjusted manually. Another new piece of clever programing that simplifies and shortens the editing process is Remix, which modifies a music track you’re using to accompany your video, so it comes to a natural end when the movie does, rather than cutting out suddenly. Elsewhere, you can also now make a collage of video clips, all playing at once in different areas of the screen.
As with Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements’ new features seem focused on special effects, but they’re streamlining the video-editing process, rather than complicating it. Converting a mass of raw footage into a coherent narrative is a skilled job, and anything that can take some of the strain is welcome. –IAN EVENDEN