Adobe Premiere Elements 11

The biggest change in the latest version of Adobe's consumer video editing software, Premiere Elements 11 ($99.99), is the same as in its companion photo editor, Photoshop Elements 11?a redesigned, simpler interface for both the complementary Organizer app and the editing program itself. Premiere Elements 11 also adds some new effects, including cinematic FilmLooks, slow motion and speedup, and the ability to share with the artistic HD video site Vimeo. Video rendering speed has gotten faster, too, but some advanced video techniques still make for slow going during the edit process, and the software lacks some features you'll find in competitors like CyberLink PowerDirector.

Setup
If you install Elements from the web, you'll have to install or update the Adobe Air runtime in order to run Adobe Download Assistant. This requires an Adobe account login. At installation, you're asked to choose between NTSC and PAL format for your disc output format, but text in the dialog helps you with this choice?basically the former for the Americas and the latter for Europe. Next, you're warned that the program will attempt to phone home over the Internet to activate your license. The installation process required a restart. Thankfully, the setup doesn't require installing separate runtimes or try to add toolbars to your browser, as some others do.

Interface and Organizer
Premiere Elements 11's interface features a simpler, flatter, cleaner look?the direction the whole software industry is going, from Google Chrome to Windows 8. When you start the program, the redesigned Welcome screen reveals the new look: Organize and Edit have been replaced with Organizer and Video Editor, making it clearer that your choice is between launching two different apps. The Organizer is where you import, rate, keyword tag, and share media online, as well as outputting to other creative projects like DVDs. New mode options appear right at the top of the Organizer: Media, People, Places, and Events. These last three give you a new and helpful way of viewing your medi. The Organizer does seem skewed to photos?its Instant Fix button only works for those, as does the Places view.

You can capture video from within the editor, too, as well as simply importing media in the Organizer. The Editor's Get Media button offers choices for Flip or Cameras, DV Camcorder, HDV Camcorder, DVD camera, and Webcam or WDM. If you're planning to shoot in 4K, you're out of luck with Elements, but that's really a pro-level format that requires enormous computing resources. Users of the GoPro Hero3, which does shoot in 4K, will need to look at alternatives such as CyberLink PowerDirector. 3D video clips are another type of media unsupported in Premiere Elements, while several competitors such as Magix Movie Edit Pro, Sony Vegas Movie Studio, and PowerDirector have added support for this.

Like the Organizer and like Photoshop Elements 11, Premiere Elements' main editor has also been simplified and streamlined. Atop the window are Quick and Enhanced mode buttons. The Quick interface uses an iMovie-like storyboard view of clips, and is one of the cleanest video editing views you'll see anywhere. You can't pop out panels into their own separate windows as you can in Sony Vegas Movie Studio, but you can use a dual monitor setup. The program window, though attractive doesn't totally comply with Windows standard design?I couldn't drag it to the side to take up half the screen or to the top center to full-screen it.

Along with this cleaner interface redesign, the interface feels faster (until you start applying any serious effects): scrubbing through high-def clips was delay-free unless I'd added overlays. As with most consumer video editing software these days, the program creates a lower-res preview version of your clips for immediate quick performance. You can hit the Render button at any time to see the full resolution movie, but this can take many minutes, depending on your video length and resolution, and you can't render just one clip or section, just the whole movie. Somewhat helpfully, a line above the timeline shows which clips are rendered?green for done, and yellow for not ready.

The full-screen preview button was way at the top, away from the play and preview size buttons where you might expect it. This full-screen preview displays a shuttle control at the bottom, below step back and forward buttons and the play button, so it's not really full-screen, but those controls are useful.

New in version 11 is the Project Assets panel, which drops down to show thumbnails of all your clips, audio, and image files. This resembles the way pros use "bins" in their video editing software to keep track of assets. There's also a helpful History window, which lets you see what your project looked like at any point during your previous edits. One thing I missed on Expert mode's timeline was the ability to quickly solo a track, hiding all the others; I had to manually uncheck Enable for tracks I didn't want showing.

Basic Video Editing
Despite its simplicity, Quick mode has a button bar along the bottom of the screen offering plenty of editing tools, including color and light adjustments, transitions, titles, FX, music, and graphics. I liked the Auto options for lighting and color, which worked well. The Smart Fix tool attempts to automatically correct all this at once, and did a good job on my test clips. A search button makes it easy to find particular transitions, but thumbnails representing them are not animated using your own clip; they're just a still image with A and B. I do like how, when you choose fade in or out (the most oft-used transition), the advanced timeline shows a line graph that lets you adjust the timing of the fade in and out.

Double-clicking a clip in the timeline opens a trimmer window, which makes it easy to set an in or out point, but didn't let me split a clip or add multiple in and out points as CyberLink's PowerDirector can. That's useful for talking-head takes where the speaker may have goofed and repeated a phrase. This window doesn't offer clip splitting, either, but on the timeline, a scissors icon does. I like how the timeline is "magnetic," helpfully snapping clips to the edge of a preceding clip when you drag it near. Premiere Element's Smart Trim identifies poor quality sections of your media and can delete them all at once, but I found this often left too little of my video.

The Instant Movie feature can applies canned effects and transitions to clips you select. You just chose from the list of themes?Fun in the Sun, Outdoor Wedding, Road Trip, Extreme Sports, for examples?and the program creates an edited movie for you. This isn't at the level of iMovie's Trailers feature, which tells you what kind of clips to add to a project with Hollywood-quality sound tracks and effects.

You can also apply some video effects as well as the new FilmLooks effects (more on these in a moment) in Quick mode. I had one interface peeve that applies to both Quick and Expert modes: I wish that you could just double click an effect while the clip want it applied to highlighted, instead of having to drag the effect onto the clip in the timeline.

Among the effects you can add from either Quick or Expert mode is Stabilize, which does a decent job of smoothing out jerky video, but it doesn't play immediately, as you'd expect, and it gave my test clips a ripple-y look.

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