But, if you like clip art, you will probably be charmed by the vulgar hideousness of it all. Clip art is usually ghastly, and this animated stuff is no exception - some of it may leave us with nightmares for weeks to come. The updated program is supplied with a larger volume of clip art (see above), and now includes cartoon-like animations. It doesn't try to reattach a speech bubble to the wrong person, thankfully. At this point, the program just stops tracking the item, which is the sensible thing to do. If there's too much cross-screen movement in the clip, for example, the tracked item can lose its anchor. This feature isn't infallible, of course. You can balance a cartoon football on your friends' noses in the Sunday league, for example, or simply add name captions under faces in a jostling group shot. Even better is that you can designate multiple items to be tracked independently in the same clip. Naff though the idea is, it's fun and it works. One suggestion from Adobe is to apply a speech bubble to a face or put a comical cartoon hat on someone's head. You can then link a title or piece of clip art to the tracked item and watch it follow the item around the screen (see image below). This lets you draw a rectangle over part of your video in the preview pane, such as someone's face, and then allow the program to track its movement automatically throughout the clip. Our favourite new feature in Premiere Elements 8 is the motion-tracking capability. We could certainly hear the improvement during our tests. The idea of SmartMix is to just let the program do the work for you, producing less amateurish results without you having to worry how it did it. On the audio side, a SmartMix feature (see image above) helps to smooth out spiky audio while automatically balancing additional tracks, such as background music, narration and overdubs. Thankfully, you are prompted whether to allow SmartFix to do its work, so you can always decline. If you take pride in knowing your video camera inside out, however, you might find that SmartFix 'corrects' your artistic efforts by whacking up the saturation and applying a sharpen filter. You would never have known it was dull and overcast when we shot the video. This feature is difficult to evaluate: does it do the right thing? For casual camera work, it probably does, in the sense that some of our decidedly average test clips ended up looking jolly bright and cheerful after 'fixing'. This kicks in as soon you open any clip for the first time, doing its best to smooth out shaky footage, brighten dim clips, enhance the contrast in dull shots and so on. Just don't trust it to trim the right thing without checking for yourself.Īnother automated quality-correction feature to note is SmartFix. On the other hand, Smart Trim does make it easy to locate problem areas quickly. This feature may prove problematic with movies of sporting events. What it tends to do, however, is flag up every instance of blur and camera shake, effectively offering to trim 50 per cent of your material. Theoretically, this ought to be a great feature for quickly trimming out those parts at the beginning and end of many clips in which the video camera points at the operator's own feet. An expanded 'tooltip' appears, listing its reasons for suggesting the trim. To find out what Premiere Elements thinks the problem is, you hover your mouse over the hatched sections of the main preview timeline. It then marks passages in each clip that it considers to be poor and, therefore, ripe for trimming out. When this is enabled, the program analyses the clips in your current project for quality. You can pick up a copy of Premiere Elements 8 now for around £75, or get it bundled with Photoshop Elements 8 for roughly £115.Īlthough no striking changes have been made to the Premiere Elements program interface, one new addition is a little Smart Trim button at the top of the Timeline/Sceneline pane (see screenshot below). The emphasis is on ease of use, and version 8 expands on this theme. It provides just about everything you could want, from video effects and multi-track audio editing to titling and transitions. Version 8 also includes automated features for enhancing and trimming poor-quality clips, and introduces smart motion tracking.Īimed at the domestic user who wants a simple drag-and-drop approach to browsing, composing and exporting home movies, Premiere Elements is the top-selling video-editing software on the market. Adobe's latest annual update to its home video-editing package, Premiere Elements, tries to pack more of everything onto the disc: more clip art, more themes and more effects.
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