A few weeks ago Adobe released the Premiere Elements 4 and Photoshop Elements 6.0 applications. The bundle sported a new user interface but also new features. Read on for more for a quick rundown.I always felt that Premiere Elements is the second best video editor in the consumer market, second only to Sony Vegas Platinum. It is a serious editor that has a long tradition, compared to the more visual and cheapo editors like Ulead’s. So I tested it for two weeks to assess how good it is. Installing Premiere takes a while and requires a reboot.
After a while the application is up and ready to be used. Using a number of presets for DV/HDV or direct camera capture/stopmotion, you can start a new project in it. The application captured from our Canon HV20 without any problems. Premiere Elements 4 (PE4) is a heavy application, heavier than Vegas. It requires over 1 GB of RAM when a web browser and email client are also open at the same time and well over 1 GB of RAM when encoding. Overall interface speed is good though and preview speed of HDV is real time on my P4 3Ghz with 3 GB RAM.
PE4 has a brand new interface, featuring a dark theme. On the left side you will find the preview window, below it the timeline/sceneline, and on the right side there is the “Edit” tab which lets you control your Media, themes, effects, transitions and titling, the “Create menus” tab that lets you put together and export in DVD or Blu-Ray, and the “Share” tab which offers a number of ways to export your edited footage.
The new PE4 feels more like a client to your media rather than a stand-alone application. And using the sceneline and the included movie themes, you can put a movie together in seconds, like you can with the new iMovie ’08. In this new version PE4 comes with a lot of Newblue’s filters, a company known for their special effects filters. Filter examples include the lighting effects, posterize, levels and contrast (not user controllable), distortion, lens flare, ripples, page curl, chroma keying, sketching, motion blur, stylization, transformation and my favorite, video stabilization. Unfortunately, adding 1 or 2 of these plugins pushed RAM utilization to 1.6 GBs, which is a bit high compared to the competition.
Regarding editing, the application allows you to de-interlace, interpret footage as 24p (although no 24p timelines are supported), audio mixing, have many tracks, easy slow-motion/fast-motion and more. Overall, it only takes a few hours to learn how to use PE4, which is a good track record for a video editor. Not as easy to pick up as iMovie, but possibly easier than Vegas.
Regarding exporting options, you can choose from a number of presets, e.g. DVD/Blu-Ray, Youtube and other online sites, PC viewing, mobile phones and PMPs and print back to camera’s tape. Under PC viewing you can choose to export in Flash, mpeg/mpeg2, DV AVI, WMV, and Quicktime. I found the WMV export dialog to be the most complete of all, and the h.264 dialog to be the second best (it was only missing the ability to save as .mp4 instead of .mov, which completely kills the ability to play back your HD files in XboX360/PS3). Most of the exporting dialogs allow you to customize the frame rate, video size, bitrate which is another plus compared to Vegas Movie Studio.
Overall, I’d say that Premiere Elements 4’s best features are its DVD integration, fully customizable exporting dialogs and its Video Stabilization plugin, but it loses points on RAM usage and dumbed-down project properties customization (e.g. no custom frame rates).
Now, regarding Photoshop Elements 6, this application has not only seen a UI redesign, but also a whole philosophy redesign. It is not anymore Photoshop’s little sister, but a completely new application in terms of target market. By default it starts up with a splash screen that asks you if you want to organize, edit, create or share.
Among the main features of Photoshop Elements you will find tagging with keywords, save query searches so you can create smart albums, put together elements of different but similar picture in order to “fake” the perfect shot, create new images with pre-defined purpose, e.g. DVD labels/photo books/calendar, export in Flash instead of just a static image, get realistic skin tones, red eye reduction, fix exposure, easily remove unwanted elements from photos, user filters for sketching/painting/sepia etc and more. The usual, and then some more.
In other words, Photoshop Elements has become this big “service” application rather than just a photo editing application. They even have added an option to backup online. Will this new philosophy succeed? I think it will, given the direction multimedia is going. At $150 for the bundle, it is a very good price. I still find Sony Vegas Platinum a better video editor than Premiere Elements overall, but with the addition of Photoshop Elements, Adobe competes in equal terms and at a similar price.
Rating: 8/10
Thanks. I haven’t read the article but at least we no longer have to stand Ballmer’s stupid face when we open OSNews! And that is cool!!!
Edited 2007-12-07 07:14
+1
That was extremely bad taste and unprofessional on osnews part.
Maybe, but I didn’t do that. We are not all one and the same on osnews. So I shouldn’t be the one paying for it with off topic comments on this article. I spent time to test these apps and write the article, so I appreciate only on topic comments and valid questions on the discussion.
Edited 2007-12-07 10:17
Thanks. It made me test them.
Photoshop Elements is almost good enough for webdesign – it lacks some stuff like masks but there are some 3rd party filters to enable them.
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/p/layermasks.htm
It’s for version 5. Just save thumbs.psd to Layer Mask.png and copy both files to “C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataAdobePhotoshop Elements6.0Photo Creationsfilters”. It isn’t perfect, but gets the job done.
As for Premiere Elements I find the requirements a little steep. I tried it on a P4 2.4ghz, 512MB and it was almost unusable.
Off-topic: the 3 pictures really look bad, both in v3 and v4 of the site.
>P4 2.4ghz, 512MB and it was almost unusable.
Yes, Premiere Elements is much heavier than Vegas or Ulead or Magix (dunno about Pinnacle). It requires 1 GB of RAM to start with, while 2.4 Ghz will only get you as far as plain DV. For HDV you will need 2 GBs of RAM and 3 Ghz to edit comfortably and not swap (although Vegas’ own requirements are similar about HDV too).
Edited 2007-12-07 11:08
Maybe I remember it all wrong, but back in the days I was doing a lot of video editing with Premiere 6 on a PIII with Win98 without much performance trouble. I’ll have to find that CD and give it a try one of these days.
Edited 2007-12-07 11:23
Once upon a time Win98 itself would run on a P-133 Mhz too.
I don’t think you were doing it at the resolution these guys are using. Moving from PAL/NTSC to HD increases the size of each frame exponentially.
-1, no sense of humor.
You could try hitting the “close” button. What’s unprofessional about drawing attention to stories that are on your site? If you don’t like it, you can close it.
Photoshop Elements is written using QT. Maybe it’s a sign of a future Photoshop (the full version) version for linux ?
No, only Photoshop Album is written in Qt, not the editing app.
According to http://trolltech.com/customers/allcustomers/adobe/
Photoshop Elements is written in QT too.
http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/00000120
“Adobe Elements 3.0 is a new product that combines the functionality of Adobe Photoshop Album with some of the Adobe Photoshop functionality. The Organizer functionality in this product is a continuation of the Photoshop Album product, is built on the same codebase and does use Qt.”
Wonder why they don’t release on the Mac or Linux then? Surely there is a market for such tools on the Mac and I’m fairly sure no Linux user would complain about having Adobe tools on their platform too.
Read that carefully. It’s not the photo editor. It’s the organiser (like Bridge) that is able to do a few functions of files en masse.
Still, if there is a Qt runtime on Mac OS X as TrollTech say, why didn’t they easily move Album?
How does it compare to Final Cut Express? Vegas and the Adobe bundle don’t appear to run on Macs.
FCE is more of a traditional video editor. It requires more knowledge to catch on, and it can do more in terms of editing, but less in terms of creating DVDs and such. However, what bugs me with FCE4 is the fact that it does not support full HD (won’t deal with 1920×1080, but only up to 1440×1080 w/ PAR 1.333), and it doesn’t support 24p timelines at all. For me, these two problems are a deal breaker as my HV20 supports true 24p (after I remove pulldown) and I want to be able to export in full HD progressive and de-interlaced for my friends with 1080p HDTVs and PS3s (yes, I have such friends
).
Edited 2007-12-07 09:49
Thanks for the reply. Are the gripes you have with Final Cut Express fixed in Final Cut Pro? I’m interested in dabbling with video and iMovie can only take you so far.
Yes, Final Cut Studio and After Effects don’t not have these limitations. But you need over $1200 to buy these, when Vegas Platinum costs $120 on a PC.
Now Adobe needs to get around to releasing a new version of PS Elements for OS X. Elements has always been at the sweet spot for what I needed, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a Mac release.
>> Now Adobe needs to get around to releasing a new version of PS Elements for OS X. <<
Adobe announced they would be releasing PS Elements 6 for the Mac in early 2008 (don’t know how many months into 2008 that means). Since the organizer in PS Elements 6 on Windows has now been recoded (from MS Access) to use a DB that runs natively on the Mac (its used in Lightroom on Win/Mac), there’s every reason to hope the Mac version will now have the Organizer – just like its Windows sibling.
Edited 2007-12-07 21:43
there are some online petition sites specifically petition online. I did an ATI one once. Although I wonder how effective a large online petition is?
The version for the Mac seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. I have sent emails to adobe asking about it but nothing ever came back from them.
$150 in the US store and $230 in the regional store -.-
Are you using 64 bit Windows? I know some people have trouble with over 2 gigs of RAM in the 32 bit versions of Windows.
On 32bit Windows 1 GB can be used by the kernel and the drivers and leave the rest 2 GBs for apps. Apps can’t access more than 2 GBs, but the kernel can, even if it’s 32bit. I don’t have any stability problems.
Edited 2007-12-08 04:33
I had tried 4 gigs on my Windows Machine. Did not work very well, although it could be a chipset limitation. I’ll give three gigs a shot. (XP 64bit works fine, some apps are not happy with it though)
You can actually use 3 GB for a single app on 32bit Windows, but not by default:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=107255
I wonder when they stop screwing around with it and just use native look & feel.
It’s frankly annoying and looks totally out of place.
When people work with Photoshop, they are typically only using that program, not multiple programs simultaneously. So I think Adobe is at some liberty to change the UI. I think the UI is supposed to mimic a darkroom.
Well, the last time I used the darkroom, it was really dark and didn’t resemble the computer environment at all.
I suppose my point is that controls and UI should help rather than being annoying.
I think that could be handled by providing themes or skins with the ability to use native OS look & feel.
Apple’s Aperture is closer to the photographer’s environment but you pay a lot in the need for 3D power to use it. Photoshop’s tools could be described more as an artist’s grab bag since just about everything is there. I never found an airbrush or paint bucket near the fixer.
I’m curious as to why Adobe changed Photoshop Elements 6 to this darker interface since it’s not present in Photoshop CS3, though Bridge CS3 uses the dark background for the folder items. I suppose they’re just trying to join the Windows consumer application space with some different theme since there are so many already.