EXCLUSIVE: Adobe Premiere Elements 4 Review
Quick rundown:
Pros: Simple and easy to use, but with the flexibility to create more complex videos.
Cons: No AVCHD support, yet.
Adobe makes it easy to create quick, appealing home movies with the latest installment of Adobe Premiere Elements. A slick interface, better integration with Photoshop Elements, and better support for Flash-based sites like YouTube make Adobe Premiere Elements 4 a great choice for video projects, but the current lack of AVCHD support makes it a product I cannot fully endorse for anyone wanting to edit non-HDV video.
On first creating or opening a project in Adobe Premiere Elements 4 you are presented with a simple, yet familiar interface. The bottom third or so of the window is taken up by the timeline/sceneline bar, where clips, effects, music, etc. are placed. The upper left of the screen is entirely taken up by the preview window. To the right of this is the tasks window, where most of the action of importing clips, creating DVD menus, choosing transitions, and pretty much every other action, takes place. This layout will work for almost everyone, but, depending on your project, the entire workspace can be customized.
The tasks pane is divided into three distinct tabs, “Edit,” “Create Menus,” and “Share.” Getting your clips into Adobe Premiere Elements is as easy as choosing “Media” then “Get Media” from under the “Edit” tab. From there, you can choose from multiple options such as your camcorder, digital camera, or local files on your hard drive. Imported files are displayed under both the “Project” and “Organizer” tabs.
While the Project tab only shows files that have been added to the project itself, the Organizer tab allows you to peruse other projects for files and even categorize and assign keywords to your media. Once you have imported your chosen media, dragging it onto the sceneline or timeline will add it to your movie.
Depending on your proficiency at video editing applications, you may choose either the sceneline or timeline view, or switch between the two. The sceneline view is the simplest way to add your media. It consists of just three tracks, one video and two audio tracks. Transitions, effects, titles, can be applied directly in this view. Though utterly simplistic and basically foolproof, the sceneline view does not allow the level of editing that the timeline view allows.
The timeline view will be familiar to anyone who has worked with higher-end editing applications. Multiple video and audio tracks can be added in this view for more control over your creation. Audio can be separated from its corresponding video track, and creating the perfect start and end point for your video is much easier. There are many other things you can do in the timeline view, so it is definitely worth checking out if you want to expand your editing skills. If you are looking to do more intricate editing, this is the view you will want to stick with.
Adobe Premiere Elements 4 has quite a robust featureset for being as simple as it is. Beyond the basic editing tools, there is an abundance of special effects and transitions that kids will be sure to love. Just don’t go overboard with them in any of your home movies. Keep it nice and simple and your audience will love you for it.
Once you have finished editing your masterpiece, it’s time to share. If you are going to burn your project to DVD, the next step is the “Create Menus” tab. Adobe supplies plenty of pre-fabricated templates under a number of different categories, so you are sure to find one that fits the style of your video.
Once you have selected your DVD menu, or if you are not going to be burning your project to DVD, the next step is the “Share” button, which is just what it implies. How do you want to share your creation? Adobe offers plenty of selections from DVD and tape to cell phone and online options. The online options could be more robust, offering more than just selections for YouTube and FTP.
Adobe Premiere Elements 4 functioned quite smoothly throughout my time testing it out. The interface is slick and easy to navigate. Both SD and HDV clips imported without a problem. Editing was quick for simple projects but advanced options made it possible to create more complex projects.
My only real problem with Adobe Premiere Elements 4 is the lack of AVCHD compatibility. As we enter the year with the majority of HD camcorders using AVCHD, it is hard to imagine that a company such as Adobe would not feature support for this format. Adobe has stated that they are working on an update that will add AVCHD support, but no further word has surfaced.
It would be very negligent not to mention Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 in this review. Though Premiere Elements 4 is the focus, Photoshop Elements 6 has its place, mainly with its Slide Show creator. Creating video slideshows from your pictures has never been so easy. The Slide Show Editor window allows you to quickly set up a slide show with only a few clicks. Changes to transitions, slide times, and Pan & Zoom settings can be made easily with the simple interface. Adobe has also included a ton of clipart for those who like to add a little flavor to their projects.
Probably the best feature in the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 slideshow creator is that with just a couple of clicks your slideshow project can be sent directly to Premiere Elements 4 for further editing or addition in an existing project. The Slide Show creator is exclusive to Photoshop Elements 6, and, in my opinion, makes buying the combo Premiere/Photoshop package worth it in and of itself, even if you use it for no other reason.
To sum it all up, if you have absolutely no need for AVCHD, I can heartily recommend Adobe Premiere Elements 4 (and Photoshop Elements 6) as a consumer-end editing program. It has everything you will need to create great looking videos. However, if you fall in the ever-growing crowd of AVCHD camcorder owners, you will want to look elsewhere for the time being.
I do not think the reviewer reserved very well or tried to make a large video project with Premiere Elements 4.0 (PE4). It will not take long to search in amazon.com or innumerable web site, including Adobe’s own forums, for issue with the product which is known to crash often and have numerous incompatibles with various video formats. These are worsened when working this HD projects (720i or greater) where it is importable to complete any project this more than 15 to 20 minutes of video in it.
The product is built on ancient C++ code with HD and many other feather shoehorned in without proper error handlers. The two most problematic areas, besides not being able to handle even a “short film” reliably, are incompatibility with codec and file formats, the Adobe integrated playback display suffers from memory leaks, and issues with the “layers” such as when adding text (titles) or other multiple media layers in the same frames.
From a company like Adobe this was most unexpected. The quality is 100% lacking in this product. Anyone who recommends it, has not even bothered to search the internet for the large amount of issues with the product. Don’t believe the hype. Do not buy this product.
Thanks for the info, Dennis. I for one used Premiere Elements for quite a while and did not experience the problems you are talking about, although I did not edit a project in HD that was more than 15 minutes. I have had it since November, I believe.
As to your “two most problematic areas,” of which you listed three, the review is clearly in agreement when it comes to codecs, as AVCHD is not yet supported. I threw quite a few other file formats into the program and didn’t have a problem.
Not sure about the memory leaks in the display, if there were any they were not apparent.
And yes, if you have a lot of layers on a clip it is going to slow it down due to memory usage unless you have a very fast computer. That’s just what happens in these programs. You can, of course, choose to render that portion of the video on its own so that it will play back at full speed and resolution.
You also have to compare to other products in the same category. I still say this is one of the (if not the) best of what is currently available.
I read what Dennis posted and that was my exact experience. Continuous crashes, extreme frustration on an hour long video project with relatively few effects (mostly because the more I tried, the more often the program would crash) I love the Photoshop interface though. I’m not a pro user, but it seems my modest needs for decent video editing were too much for this software.
I just bought this product also while editing was no problem I tried to “Share” my project to disk standard DVR+
and each time redeived an error from Microsoft which identifies the Applicaton at the cause to be Adobe Premiere Elements4. Whn I close the error box and PE4 I have to restart the computer to get the program to restart??? Never had this problem with Pro 1.5???
I’d like to ask about problems on HD movies and movies an hour or longer. I’m not a big editor, so I do not intend to ever edit a movie in HD nor make one longer than 10 minutes long. I would like to know if the problems being talked about aply to the type of videos I would be making and editing.
This program is so unstable. Even if I have nothing else running in the background, and not doing anything with the program it will hang in about two minutes. Don’t you do any real testing when you write these reviews?
I’d like to know the speed of the OS people are using when they say they experience a lot of instability. I’ve used 3.2 extensively and actually bought that over 4.0 because of what I read on the Internet. However, we are looking to upgrade our laptop and Vista 64-bit is the new standard. Adobe 3.2 works “only” on 32-bit. I can’t use it on our new laptop. I’m wondering if 4.0 is designed to work on faster systems (i.e. 1.8 or more GHZ, 2 or 3 GB Ram, etc.).
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I’m afraid I’ve found elements to be too buggy to be usable for HD projects. Crashes, odd behavior and extremely long return-to-action times for anything more than the most basic. Max project length with any effects: about 30 seconds.
Essentially the program is useless at its current stability level (as of Premiere Elements v4 Nov 11, 2008).
Bummer, it can do a lot.
Jeff
I am finally fed up with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0. I thought I could work it out and not have to resort to writing a review about it but I HAVE TO. I am currently editing a wedding video shot in HDV 1080i. The video is about an hour and 20 minutes long and the program will not stay on longer than a minute. This is after taking about 5 minutes to finally boot up and be usable. And I know it’s not my computer because I have a Core2Extreme QX6800 processor and an NVIDIA 8800GT with 512DDR3 and 2Gigs Ram on XP Pro. I don’t see why my setup should not work. I am able to do anything else at blazing speeds but Adobe PE4 will NOT work for me. The program is so unstable it makes the current economy promising. I ended up on this forum because I was searching for Adobe PE4 Crashes. Go figure. Now I have to write a review. I am so frustrated. I just want to finish this wedding video I already spent so much time on when the program seemed to be working. Someone please help. How can I continue my edit in another software? Or another version that won’t crash every minute. Gosh!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I got a new Camera (Sanyo Xacti) with Adobe Premier Elements 4.0 as the base editing program for it. I have a Celeron M 1.73 GHz computer and I loaded a series of images making up 11 minutes of movie. I wasn’t even able to load the images before it started to crash. Haven’t even done any serious editing yet and the program continually fails on me. This is shocking. I went online to see if it was my computer and all I see is others who have the same and similar problems. I’m going to uninstall this and hunt for something more stable. ADOBE PREMIER ELEMENTS 4.0 is a lemon.
Arrgghhhh!
Corel Video Studio crashes some times when the track is really overloaded but.. i just finished my 30 minute project full of effects, movie, sound editing with filters, a lot of titles so on, in 5 hours. I never use it before yesterday. Just searched a good alternative to iMovie on Mac. Never used Adobe Premier Elements x but used Adobe Premier.
From a far angle the Corel Video Studio X2 is the best solution for fast and easy performance. Also they build a Proxy mechanism (nothing related to networking proxy thing) in the X2 which reduce the quality of the images, movies in the production time to increase the PC performances. When you finish the project just stop this feature and it will process the movie to the best quality. Also has a lot of choices for exporting formats making this very very versatile. So, don’t waste your time and nerves with Adobe. Use Corel’s solution and you will get much more satisfaction and less time consuming projects - without frustration
Best regards,
nexenta