Product Reviews

Premiere Elements 4 was released less than a year ago, but it has jumped straight to version 7 to synchronise with Photoshop Elements. This makes sense, as the applications are much better value when bought together for £100.

However, where Photoshop Elements omits certain advanced features offered by its competitors, Premiere Elements lacks very little compared with Premiere Pro, and its object motion and effects are in a different league to those of other low-cost packages.

Our major reservation with version 4 was the lack of support for AVCHD cameras, so we're delighted to see that Adobe has rectified this. Previews of this demanding format were a little jerky but better than with other editors we've seen, except Serif's MoviePlus X3. Along with HDV camera support and Blu-ray disc authoring, the software is now fully primed for high-definition capture, editing and export.

With its advanced editing features already so far ahead of the competition, it's hardly surprising that most new features are aimed at beginners. InstantMovie automatically edits a collection of clips together, complete with an intro sequence, titles, transitions, effects, soundtrack and end credits. As with similar features in Corel VideoStudio and elsewhere,

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edits are sometimes clunky and most people will find uses for only a couple of the 20 supplied themes. Even so, it's handy to be able to edit clips of your holiday and upload them to YouTube from the software within half an hour of getting home.

InstantMovie draws on another new feature, Smart Tags, which analyses clips and tags them with words such as High Quality, In Focus, Shaky, Faces and Zoom. These tags are easy to view and filter by, but analysis is slow and a little unpredictable. Clips were subdivided into short sections to no obvious benefit. Another new feature, SmartSound, generates soundtracks that are edited automatically to fit the required length. Production values aren't great, though, and auditioning them is convoluted. In private projects where copyright isn't an issue, we can see most users sticking to using their MP3 collection for soundtracks.

Our favourite new feature is Videomerge, an update to the fairly basic Green Screen Key effect included in previous versions. It springs to life as soon as a clip with a solid background colour is imported, and is able to isolate a subject from its background without any tweaking of settings. It still requires an evenly lit background to work reliably, though, so the hardest part of creating these effects is the same.

There's not a huge amount here to convince more experienced users to part with £58 for an upgrade, but Premiere Elements remains the obvious choice for new but ambitious videographers. Casual users face a tougher choice - between this, MoviePlus X3 and Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. Previously we felt that Sony's more streamlined interface made it better for less technical users, but Adobe' increasing focus on casual users - and its Blu-ray authoring, which the other two titles lack - push Premiere Elements into the lead.