While Adobe Premiere Elements hasn't been around as long as Adobe Photoshop Elements it too is getting better and better, though at a much slower rate, if you compare the features of Adobe Photoshop with the features of Adobe Photoshop Elements and then you compare the features of Adobe Premiere with Adobe Premiere Elements you will see that Photoshop Elements is much closer feature and capability wise to Photoshop than Premiere Elements is to Premiere.

The recently released Premiere Elements 4 Screen Shot isn't as large of an upgrade as I was hoping for. In fact it is a little lean in my opinion. There are some nice new things in version 4 to be sure, but it is still far behind its big brother.

Adobe Premiere Elements 4 is a consumer level video editor. It is what is known as a non-linear editor, meaning you have multiple video and audio tracks to work with, think of tracks as layers. You can put a video clip on track 1 (layer 1) and then put a video clip on track 2 (layer 2) and have it in the middle of track 1 and then use various tricks to have the two work together, like mattes and such. You can do the same thing with audio like music, narration or just the audio that was recorded with your video. This track method of working is powerful, but can take a bit to get used to. But, once you do you will realize just how powerful and flexible tracks are.

Another technology found in Premiere Elements 4 (and other video editors) is keyframing. This is another powerful tool that can take a little bit to get the hang of but once you do you will see that it is what makes all of the cool special effects and stuff possible. Basically a key frame is a marker in your video where you tell the software to change something. For example say you have a video clip that is 20 seconds long and you set a 0% opacity key frame at the 10 second mark. When you play the video you will see the video and then at the 10 second mark it will drop to 0% basically instantly disappearing. If you have a second video track and have the video on that track align properly the video would drop from the first video to the second video and while the remaining 10 seconds of the first video would still be there it wouldn't be seen. Key frames control many things besides opacity, you can control position, size, color saturation and when you get in to some of the transitions and special effects you can key frame them as well. Though the transitions are not a flexible as the special effects are, with transitions you can basically control where in the transition effect they start and stop which still allows for some very interesting effects.

An interesting new feature is themes. Themes allow you to quickly create a video project with a unified themed look. It helps with the video, DVD menus, etc. While this is very interesting and could be a real time saver Premiere Elements 4 ships with very few themes and the ones that are there are not that great if you ask me, certainly not of the quality I would expect. Using any one of them is going to give your video project a decidedly amateur look and feel. It would have been nice if Adobe had included at least a 100 or so themes of professional quality. I also find the lack of an easy way to create your own themes another disappointment.

Now, let's talk output. Of course Adobe Premiere Elements lets you output your video creations, you can output to DVD and even create menus for them or use the included templates replacing the text and animated buttons and such with whatever you want, again I don't find these templates to be all that great nor is there very many of them.

You can also output your video projects for use on the web including YouTube. You can output it for iPod's, cell phones and other portable devices. You can output it to a high quality or other level of quality file on your computer; you can even output it to DV or HDV tape.

The output features are pretty good and you do have control over basic compression, codec, size and quality settings for both the video and the audio. For a consumer level program I think the output options are very good and the end results are also very good too. It is also important to note that of the 30 DVDs that I have created with Premiere Elements 4 I have had no problems with DVD playback on either my computers or my standalone TV connected DVD players. Do however use a good quality disc for your burning.

What's New?

Streamlined Workspace

• Find everything in one place. The new Tasks panel keeps everything you need to add, edit, and share your files and project in one place. Use the Edit tab to add media, or apply themes, effects, transitions, and titles to your project. Use the Create Menus tab to create menus for your DVD or Blu-ray discs. And use the Share tab to save and share your projects for viewing in a variety of formats and to a variety of media, such as online, DVD, or mobile phone.
• Intuitive Timeline. The Timeline now uses a more intuitive organization: video and audio are always grouped together. When you add a new clip above another clip in the Timeline, the audio stays with the new clip. The Narration and Soundtrack tracks remain at the bottom of the Timeline.
• Apply and edit transitions and effects easily. Effects now use preset properties, so when you apply an effect to a clip in the Timeline or Sceneline, you immediately see the impact of the effect—there is no need to adjust the properties yourself. If you want to adjust the properties for effects or transitions you can simply click the Edit Effect or Edit Transition button in the Tasks panel to open the Properties view of the Tasks panel and make your changes.

Access and Manage your Files Using the Organizer

• Add files directly from the Organizer. Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements now share the Organizer. All the videos, stills, and audio files that you open in either application appear in the Organizer in both applications. You open the Organizer by clicking the Edit tab in the Tasks panel, clicking the Media button, and then clicking Organizer. You simply drag files from the Organizer view to the Timeline or Sceneline to add them to your project.
• Manage your clips in the Organizer. Use tags in the Organizer to organize your clips in categories such as people, places, and events. Each project you create is listed in the Albums section, so you can quickly and easily find all the clips used in a specific project, without having to open the project. You can also sort the Organizer by media type, or show newest or oldest first.

Share your Projects with the Click of a Button

• Find all your sharing needs in the Sharing Center. The Share tab in the Tasks panel contains everything you need to share your project. When you click the output type you want, Disk, Online, Personal Computer, Mobile Phones and Players, or Tape, the Tasks panel view changes to display all the options available. The optimal settings are automatically selected in the Presets menu, so all you need to do is click Save. Advanced options are available if you want to make adjustments. 
• Save your favorite sharing settings. Use Quick Share to save and reuse your favorite or frequent sharing settings. For example, if you frequently upload your video projects to your website, and you have a particular quality and format setting that you like to use, save and name your settings as a Quick Share; then just click it in the Quick Share section to save your project using those settings.
• Burn your movies to Blu-ray discs. Create menus and burn your movies to HDV Blu-ray discs using the Disk option in Share tab in Adobe Premiere Elements.
• New presets for mobile phones and players. Play your video projects on a variety of mobile phones by using the new mobile phone presets. Choose from a variety of mobile phones and player options, such as Apple iPhone, Apple iPod, Microsoft Zune, Pocket PC, and more. All export settings are preset to make optimal playback as easy as possible.

Finesse your Audio with the Audio Mixer and Edit to Musical Beats

• Mix audio to get the volume and balance just right. Use the Audio Mixer to adjust the volume, balance, or both for the different audio tracks in your project. When you have multiple tracks of audio playing at once, the audio you want to hear can get lost. Using the Audio Mixer, you can adjust the volume and balance of the different audio tracks as the audio plays, so you can make sure your audience hears what you want them to hear. For example, you can lower the volume for the Soundtrack while people are talking, and increase it again when they are silent.
• Edit to the beat of music. Click Detect Beats in the Sceneline or Timeline to automatically add markers at the beats of your musical soundtrack. Beat detection makes it easy to synchronize slide shows or video edits to your music.

Add Professional Touches with New Themes, Animations, and Effects

• Enhance your movies with prearranged themes. Movie themes let you quickly add pizzazz to any video project. Simply dragging a theme to the Timeline or Sceneline adds everything you need to create a polished and consistent movie. Themes can include effects, transitions, overlays, introductions, and titles. You can edit themes to suit your design needs.
• Jazz up titles by animating them. Use animation presets to make the text in your titles fly, zoom, fade, and pop.
• Explore all the fun new effects and transitions. Choose from many new effects and transitions. For example, use the new Colorize effect to create sepia-tone clips, or convert the clip to black and white, and then colorize objects using one or two specified colors. Or, use the Old Film effect to make your film look like it was shot 50 years ago.

Facilitate Editing Uusing New Tools and Features

• Detect scenes by content. Use the new Scene Detect By Content command to detect different scenes from an HDV video capture or from any clip in your project. Scene detection by timecode is still the default option for DV capture.
• Use project presets for reverse field order. New presets for hard-drive-based or Flash-memory-based camcorders (such as Sony HDR SR100) that you can access from the New Project Setup dialog box let you quickly and easily set up a project for video coming from non-tape camcorders or other devices that produce video with reverse field order.
  Of all of the new features the one I find the most fun is the new Detect Beats option. Having it go through your sound track find the beats and then tag them so that you can use them to synchronize your video and still images to it is just really fun, useful and something that if done manually would be time consuming.

Complaints, Weaknesses and Disappointments

While there are some new effects and transitions there still aren't enough of them and the overall types that were added along with the ones in there from previous versions are not what I call high quality, they look fine but they are old and archaic. I would like to see more added that are high quality like some of the effects you see on news broadcasts and in the movies. Really high end and cool would be nice, I don't know about anyone else but the barn door, swipe, pixilated and other old time transitions are getting a little long in the tooth and when used just scream "AMATURE!" There also needs to be some cool particle and lighting effects too, there are a couple but nothing really stellar.

Premiere Elements does work with some Premiere plug-ins it can be hit and miss if the maker of the plug-in doesn't specifically say they support Premiere Elements. If they don't say this there is still a chance that the plug-in will work, but there is also a chance it won't and given that these plug-in packages are seldom cheap it is a risk I don't think many will be willing to take. Since, I haven't found a large abundance of third party add-ons specific to Premiere Elements I would like to see Adobe include more with Premiere Elements and not light or demo versions either. I would also like to see Adobe reach out to the plug-in makers and the book and training publishers to have more plug-ins, books and training available for Premiere Elements. Their near total lack of push in these areas really makes me wonder just how dedicated Adobe is to Premiere Elements. To date I have seen no books announced for version 4 and there was only one or two for version 3. This is not good. Given that Adobe has Adobe Press through Peachpit Press and they do the classroom in a book books I see no reason why there should be such a lack of training materials. Again, this makes me question Adobe dedication to their consumer line of products.

I also wish Adobe would stop messing around with the interface. It seems like instead of adding more features and power they spend a lot of time messing with the interface. Both Premiere Elements 4 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 have new interfaces. The old interface in Premiere Elements I liked better and thought it was easier to work with. The only thing these new interfaces do well is cause users of the previous versions to waste time finding and figuring out where things are and how they work all over again. Changing the interface is in my opinion not a new feature. Maybe if the new interface was a drastic improvement it might be but it isn't it is just an annoyance.

Advanced automation, Adobe even with their so called consumer products seems to have a problem with adding in features that provide advanced controls but in a full automated package. For example take the Ken Burn's effect. For those that don't know what the Ken Burn's effect is, it is the creating of motion with still images. In other words it is the panning and zooming of still images to give them motion. Now you can do this in Premiere Elements and you can do it two ways. You can add your images to the time line as still images or as a slide show group. You then go through the images one by one adding the panning and zooming effects manually. While this is fine for a few images, if you have dozens or even hundreds of images it is a slow, time consuming and a frustrating exercise. If you add your still images as a slideshow group you still have to go in and add the panning and zooming effects to each image, the difference is that the group keeps the still images as a single entry on the timeline until you go in to edit the group which it then expands out to the individual still images. No real advantage to this other than it keeps the timeline tidier.

There are panning and zooming presets you can use but these have the problem of not really panning or zooming in on the subject of the photo. From my experience more often than not it pans and zooms on things I don't care about in the image and it can with the panning actually cut off the subject of the photo. Doing it image by image really right now is the only way to ensure it is done right. However, an automated method would be easy to do. Keep reading to hear my idea.

Your second choice is to create a slide show in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and then have Elements automatically add the pan and zoom effect randomly to your images and then export that slide show as a video file and then bring that in to Premiere Elements. The problem with this you have very little control over the pan and zoom effect and very few options for exporting the slide show to video as well. In fact during my testing of this feature I found the amount of pan and zoom it did was very weak. It also had the unattractive habit of stopping the pan and zoom before it moved on to the next image instead of it panning and zooming while the current image faded out and the new one faded in. Also, I was limited to an output resolution of 800x600 which is fine for standard definition or web use but not even close for high definition. I also don't know why this is in Photoshop Elements and not Premiere Elements even as weak as it is it is still more appropriate for Premiere Elements. Adobe's reasoning sometimes just leaves me scratching my head. At the very least it should have been added to both programs, having the version in Premiere Elements render for the size of your video project. Now even if it had been in Premiere Elements it is such a weak feature that I still wouldn't use it. Instead what I would like to see is…

A wizard that walks you through the process of either adding the images to your timeline as separate images or as a slideshow group and during the wizard it allows you to view each image click on the focus point of the image like a persons face, a bridge, tree, car, etc. and then give you the option of setting the limits for the random application of the panning and zooming effects. Like for the zoom you set the most zoom it can apply to something like 200% and the least zoom it can apply to 45%, it would also provide similar options for the panning. This would give you more control without having to spend hour's manually adding pan and zoom effects to dozens or hundreds of images. And by setting the focus point of each image it would ensure that that important part of the image wasn't cut off or zoomed past and being able to set the pan and zoom minimums and maximums would ensure that you get something that was really usable.

Computers and software are supposed to be time savers. But, for some reason Adobe has some real problems with adding powerful user configurable wizard like automation to its consumer programs. Other companies don't seem to have these issues and I wish Adobe would get on the ball. There are other areas too that could stand this kind of high power automation, I wish I had the time and space to go in them here but I don't, sorry folks.

Bugs and Flaws

While there are some disappointments in the number of improvements and new features in Premiere Elements 4 the biggest disappointment of all is the bugs. We aren't talking about minor bugs; we are a talking about some major problems with perhaps the biggest bug showing up when undock the timeline panel and either have it floating or off on another monitor, this will cause Premiere Elements to give you an error message about your project file being corrupt when you try to load saved projects with the timeline panel undocked. This kind of bug in a shipping product is just unforgiveable and plain sloppy. However, there is no need to panic should you get this error message your project file is not corrupt, just redock the timeline panel to its default location and you will be able to open your project files just fine. How undocking a panel can cause such an error message is beyond me. There are other problems too; the new animated title options which are so limited as be near worthless don't work right. For example if you have text block that is two lines of text you can't apply a title animation to it, title animations would be like making the text fade in and out or roll on and then off the screen. To be able to apply a title animation you have to create each line of text on its own separate line and then add an effect to each one separately. The choice of animations and the control over the animations is next to non-existent, just making a bad feature even worse.

Another bug that just drives me crazy is that when Premiere Elements 4 opens on my 22" wide screen monitor it only covers about two thirds of the screen. Even if it was maximized when I closed it last and to make matter worse when I click on the window control button to maximize it, it doesn't just maximize it, it actually spills over on to my second monitor by about 1/4 inch. I tried leaving the window un-maximized and then dragging it out to fit the screen as best I could, but it won't let me move the window or resize it. This is just sloppy and not something that should be in a shipping program. It isn't as if this is the first time Adobe has done a Windows program.

These problems and more seem to be more and more the norm. Rush stuff out even when you have such a major flaw that it is causing problems with your saved projects. This is also par for the course for new features and enhancements; they are limited and not very flexible. In the end this all means that Premiere Elements 4 is an upgrade, just not a very good one.

I find it interesting that Adobe Photoshop Elements has more than half the features of the full version of Adobe Photoshop, yet Adobe Premiere Elements is lacking in the basics and is lacking in the options and controls for what is there compared to the full version of Premiere. It is almost like Adobe is playing at offering a consumer video editor instead of taking it seriously. Normally I wouldn't think such a thing, but since Adobe has in the past played at doing things only to abandon it leaving customers hanging, past occurrences include Image Styler and LiveMotion, both were Adobe's attempt at Flash and web graphics and both were killed after the version 1.0 release leaving customers hanging. Because of this and the lack of any real progress with Premiere Elements in the capabilities field I have to wonder.

Now I am not saying that other consumer level programs are better or worse. I am saying as upgrades go Adobe Premiere Elements is getting the short end of the stick and so are its users. Adobe Premiere Elements 4 should be a much more feature rich and powerful program than it is. Because of this and the bugs I strongly suggest you download and use the trial version before you buy. I strongly suggest you don't play with it but actually use it for a project, then and only then will you know if Premiere Elements 4 is for you.

In the meantime we can all sit and wonder why there hasn't been an update out to fix the bugs especially the timeline undocking bug. It seems to have taken Adobe less time to put out bug fixes for the more expensive applications, which is just another reason to wonder about Adobe's dedication to the consumer level products.

Now it is time to bring all of this in to context. Yes, Premiere Elements 4 isn't a large upgrade, yes it adds some interesting new features, but some of them don't offer a lot of choice of variety, think themes. Yes, Adobe once again has messed with the interface and decided to call that a new feature. But, given all of this, I still like using Premiere Elements 4 better than any of the other consumer level video editors I have tried. Perhaps the biggest advantage Adobe Premiere Elements 4 has over the competition is its compatibility and integration with Adobe's other products. This makes editing images, audio and other things so much easier and so much less stressful because you know when you create an image in Photoshop Elements 6 or Photoshop CS3 that you will be able to use it in Premiere Elements and without any hassles.

The only thing I find totally inexcusable or unforgivable are the major bugs. Corrupted project files when you undock the timeline, poor title animation controls and options, the problems with maximizing the Premiere Elements window and problems on large widescreen monitors is just unacceptable as is the fact that several months after release and we still don't have a fix. It does make it seem Adobe is only playing at consumer video software. This is not a feeling I enjoy and it does make me think twice about getting too involved with Premiere Elements. I am worried that a major investment in time and money is going to go the way of Adobe Image Style and Adobe LiveMotion.

Needs

• Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron 1.7GHz (or compatible) processor; Pentium 4 3GHz processor required for HD or Blu-ray
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista
• For Windows XP: 512MB of RAM (1GB required for HD or Blu-ray)
• For Windows Vista: 1GB of RAM (2GB required for HD or Blu-ray)
• 4.5GB of available hard-disk space
• Color monitor with 16-bit color video card
• 1,024x768 monitor resolution at 96dpi or less
• Microsoft DirectX 9 or 10 compatible sound and display driver
• DVD-ROM drive (compatible DVD burner required to burn DVDs; compatible Blu-ray burner required to burn Blu-ray Discs)
• DV/i.LINK/FireWire/IEEE 1394 interface to connect a Digital 8 or DV camcorder, or a USB2 interface to connect a DV-via-USB-compatible DV camcorder (other video devices supported via the Media Downloader)

Adobe Premiere Elements supported import/export formats include:

• MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DV, AVI, Windows Media, QuickTime, JVC Everio MOD (import only), 3GP, ASF (import only), WAV, WMA (import only), Dolby Digital Stereo, PSD (import only), JPEG, PNG (import only), DVD, Blu-ray Disc (export only)
• Import/export of some formats including DVD, Blu-ray, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, and Dolby Digital Stereo may require activation via an Internet connection. Activation is fast, easy, and free. Import/export of 3GP, 3GP2, and MPEG-4 requires QuickTime software