Working with video and Premiere Elements

Adobe Premiere Elements targets the consumer video-editing market and, increasingly so, these two applications are often sold as a bundle, which incidentally should save you 25% or more compared to buying the two applications separately.

We can use the Organizer to catalog still images, as well as HD video clips, GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format files used to record short animations), audio tracks, and music, together or separately, depending on the work planned. Once organized, files can then be opened in either application—Elements or Premiere Elements—depending on how they are to be used. I edit quite a lot of video, so I find this close relationship incredibly convenient, especially where I might need to use still images in a video project, or video clips in a still image story that's, for example, to be exported to Facebook or Vimeo.

To the novice, Premiere Elements might seem unduly complex. Being a video editing application, it does deal with images and time in a single process, but this application is very much like the photo editor: you can skim through it using the automated video tools, or explore its many professional standard editing features to produce a movie of outstanding quality.

The relationship between Premiere Elements and Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe's industry-standard editing suite, is similar to that of Elements and Photoshop CC. It began as a dumbed-down version of the high-end commercial product, but it is now one of the best video editors on the market. Additionally, like Elements, Premiere employs some incredibly powerful features that include image stabilization; an amazing instant movie feature; a wide range of professional effect looks (a look is a prerecorded editing recipe designed to add a specific color, tone, or emotion to a video clip—they are great time-savers); sophisticated brightness, contrast, color, and sharpness tools; and an export function that allows you to easily upload any completed video project to social media effortlessly.

If you are considering moving into video production, this is a very capable and professional tool with a great range of guided and automated functions that makes the often tedious job of editing video clips a breeze. Note that Premiere Elements 2020 now handles HEIF and HEVC files (PC and Mac), while updating its noise reduction capabilities and speeding up file organization using Adobe Sensei technology and a feature called Smart Tags.

Over the years and versions, Photoshop Elements has grown to contain a staggering number of effects, automated processes, editing tools, and presets. So many, in fact, that storing them in a tidy manner, while presenting them for easy access, has become something of a challenge. To this end, Adobe employs a feature called panels to catalog these features while keeping them relatively accessible in a tabbed format. The following is an overview of how this works.