Adobe considers the audience for its consumer-targeted video editing software to be what it calls memory keepers, who tend to be women in their 40s documenting, embellishing, and sharing their special family moments.
But really, anyone who wants to create compelling videos without the complexity of a professional application like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro can take advantage of Premiere Elements.
As well as being extremely easy to use, it lets you go fairly deep with multitrack and keyframe based editing—or you can ignore all that and use its more-automatic tools.
The program trails Daxdi Editors' Choice, CyberLink PowerDirector, in the breadth of effects, rendering speed, and formats it supports, however.
Compatibility, Pricing, Setup
Premiere Elements is available for 64-bit editions of Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 (version 1809 or 1903 recommended) and macOS 10.12 through 10.14.
I primarily review the Windows version here, though I have tested the software on an iMac, as well.
You can get the program together with Photoshop Elements for $149.99 or as a standalone app for $99.99.
These are one-time fees—no subscription needed.
Note that Premiere Elements is not a part of Adobe Creative Cloud service.
If you're upgrading from a previous version, those prices drop to $119.99 and $79.99, respectively.
A free trial gets you 30 days of full-featured program use, but any videos made with the trial get stamped with a watermark.
Make sure you have a fast Internet connection and a capacious hard drive before installing the program, as it requires at least 6GB of disk space.
You also need a reasonably powerful machine with a multicore CPU of at least 2GHz, and at the very least 4GB of RAM and 5GB of available hard drive space.
On Windows, the app requires SSE2 support on the CPU and a DirectX 9 or 10 graphics card with at least a 1280-by-800 resolution monitor.
When you first launch the program, it asks if you want to send diagnostic information to Adobe.
What's New in Premiere Elements
There are not many changes in the 2021 version, but the new mask selection tool with motion tracking is impressive.
In addition to that, the update gets an editing speedup with GPU acceleration, 21 new background music tracks, and two new Guided Edits: Double Exposure, and Animated Mattes.
More on those below.
The 2020 version introduced some nifty tools, too, like the following:
Video Noise Reduction.
This is particularly useful for night scenes, which tend to be grainy.Vertical to Horizontal Video.
A new Guided Edit shows you how to create a widescreen version of those vertical smartphone videos, using blur and the colors from the existing videos.Auto-Tagging.
Previously auto-tagging only worked with photos; Elements now can detect objects (cats, trees, mountains, and so on) in video content, too, and apply tags so you can easily find them in Organizer.Time Lapse Guided Edit.
Starting from either still photos or video clips, you can create a sped-up video.Sky Replacement Guided Edit.
This shows you how to replace a drab sky with a dramatic one.Support for HEVC and HEIC on Windows.
These codecs for video and images are more efficient with storage and can be used by the newer iPhones.
Other recent additions include Auto Creations and a new Home window for quick access to your projects and tutorials.
Other notable recent feature updates include Candid Moments, which picks the best still images from your video clips; Smart Trim, which cuts out boring video sections; Freeze Frame with motion titles; a Bounce Back effect; Fix Action Cam Footage; Animated Social Post; and Animated GIF Export.
Organizing Media
The Home screen is a separate window from which you can launch any of the three Elements apps—Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, or Organizer—and also see help links, Auto Creations, tips on using features, and recent projects.
The separate Organizer app is where you import, rate, keyword tag, and share media online.
It's also where you can output your work to DVDs and other project formats.
Mode options appear right at the top of the Organizer, including Media, People, Places, and Events.
The last three give you helpful ways of viewing your media.
The Organizer is somewhat skewed toward photos—its Instant Fix button only works for photos, as does the Places view.
It has, however, been much simplified and improved over the years.
The Organizer shows off its chops when you tap the Search magnifying glass icon in the top window border.
A set of buttons appears along the left edge, letting you filter your search by automatic AI-generated Smart Tags, People, Places, Dates, Keywords, Albums, Folders, Media Types, and Star Ratings.
You can combine search types, looking up, for example, pictures of Joe Smith taken in New York City in September.
Automatic object tagging and people tagging works with video content as well.
The program did find and identify objects in my videos (even faces), but the People view didn't offer any face tagging from my video clips, which were rife with smiles.
AutoCreations
After importing about a thousand clips and photos, the home screen showed more than a dozen Auto Creations that it had produced from my content.
From photos shot around the same area and time, it produced pleasant collages, which benefited from a bit of editing and photo swapping.
The feature also produced several movie slideshows of varying interest from my test media, with effective transitions and backgrounds.
The background music was usually well chosen to fit the image subjects, but it often stopped abruptly rather than fading out.
Some were also so short as to be pointless.
In any case, the project can provide starting points for your own creativity.
Video Editing Interface
Premiere Elements' video editing interface remains largely the same in the latest version, with the standard timeline across the bottom and preview and content panels sharing the top half of its window.
I like that the content panel collapses when you're not using it, for a bigger view of the video window.
The editing interface has three mode tabs: Quick, Guided, and Expert.
Touch screens on PCs are increasingly common (they're included on all Surface Pros and Surface Laptops), and they get excellent support in the recent versions of Windows.
I'm happy to see Adobe also putting in the effort to support this input option, at least in the Organizer and in Premiere Element's Quick mode.
That said, the support could be better.
You can scrub through video and add and split clips, but some controls are still on the small side for pudgy-finger manipulation.
There's no touch-specific interface option like that in Photoshop and Lightroom.
As with most consumer video editing software, the program creates a lower-resolution proxy version of your clips for quicker performance while editing.
You can hit the Render button at any time to see the full-resolution movie, but this can take several minutes, depending on your video length and resolution.
A line above the timeline shows which clips are rendered—green for done, and yellow for not ready.
You can capture and import video and photos from within the editor as well as from the Organizer.
The Editor's Add Media button offers choices to get media from the Organizer (which opens a preview panel), from files and folders, or directly from cameras and devices.
Elements supports 4K content, so owners of a GoPro Hero or any recent flagship smartphone can take advantage of their cameras' top resolutions.
In my testing, even 5K footage from a recent GoPro doesn't present a problem.
Premiere Elements now supports the H.265 High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) format on Windows.
This finally worked for me with the 2021 version, but when I added an HEVC clip to an existing project containing non-HEVC content, the results were unreliable, sometimes showing ghost images of the other clips and sometimes being oddly framed.
When I started a fresh project and inserted HEVC there were no such problems.
Also note that the program doesn't let you export to HEVC format, only to import it.
The program still doesn't support 3D or 360-degree VR clips.
Those could be considered niche usage cases, but competitors such as Magix Movie Edit Pro, Vegas Movie Studio, and PowerDirector (as well as Final Cut Pro on the Mac) have long supported these formats, and it's not that unusual to see 360 video in social media posts.
Premiere Elements also lacks screen-cam recording, which lets you create videos of desktop activity on your computer screen, a feature offered by Corel VideoStudio Pro and PowerDirector.
And there's no multicam editing feature, which lets you sync the same scene shot with different cameras at different angles, as found in PowerDirector and Magix Movie Edit Pro.
Mac users get strong multicam editing in Final Cut Pro X, our Editors' Choice for video editing on the Mac.
The Project Assets panel helpfully drops down to show thumbnails of all your clips, audio, and image files.
This resembles the way pro software uses bins 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.
You can also search within the transition and effect selection boxes, which I find helpful.
One thing I miss on the Expert mode's timeline is the ability to quickly solo a track, hiding all the others, though you can hide either a video or audio track by clicking on the film or speaker icons at the head of the timeline.
Also missing is the ability to zoom the timeline in and out with the mouse wheel, which most competitors offer.
You can't pop out panels into their own separate windows as you can in Vegas Movie Studio, but you can use a dual-monitor setup.
A final interface annoyance is that Premiere Elements' windows don't follow Windows standards, so you can't for example drag a window to the side to take up half the screen or shake the title bar to minimize other programs.
Quick Mode Edits Your Clips for You
Quick mode offers a clear, simple way to join video clips, add titles, transitions, image correction, soundtracks, and effects—all without requiring you to work in a labyrinth of tracks and controls.
It uses an iMovie-like storyboard view of clips and is one of the cleanest views you'll see anywhere.
A clear scrubber lets you move through your movie, and you can easily apply freeze-frames and rotation using buttons.
Smart Trim and speed-altering are within easy access from each clip thumbnail.
Another button lets you add music, with options to fade in and out.
Basic Video Editing in Adobe Premiere Elements
Premiere Element's Smart Trim identifies poor-quality sections of your media and can delete them all at once.
Style choices—People, Action, and Mix—affect what sections of the clips are retained.
It automatically chose Action for my bike-stunt test video, and trim suggestions appeared with no waiting required.
You can preview the suggested trims, and it did a good job of selecting the most active scenes, though one short section was dull, and some further-away bike tricks weren't included.
It also removed out-of-focus and shaky sections, which is helpful.
Handles let you easily extend its selections, and you can simply hit the Delete key to remove one.
If you have long footage of limited interest, Smart Trim is a helpful tool.
Video Stabilization
Premiere Elements lets you apply video stabilization from either Quick or Expert mode by choosing Shake Stabilizer from the Adjust panel.
There are two methods of stabilization accessible from buttons—Quick and Detailed.
Quick isn't actually that quick: My 1:35-minute clip took about 10 minutes to stabilize in Quick mode.
At least Premiere Elements shows you the progress—minutes left, percent done, and current frame.
After that, a banner message says, "To avoid extreme cropping, set Framing to Stabilize Only or adjust other parameters." In my testing, this meant going into the Detailed panel, and then choosing Advanced, where I had a lot of choices, such as smoothness, crop percent, and edge feather.
It's a powerful tool, but you'll need patience for long clips.
Large bumps aren't always fixed, even with Smoothness set to 100 percent.
One cool choice is Synthesize Edges, which prevents cropping.
Dehaze, a feature that has made its way into a lot of photo editing software, is available from Premiere Elements' Effects panel's Advanced Adjustment section.
It did a fine job of adding contrast and saturation to my test landscape footage, as you can see in the nearby screenshot.
Reduce Grainy Noise
The Reduce Noise tool is another example of bringing something from photo editing to video editing.
Amusingly, the program has long had a tool for adding noise as an effect, but not a correction.
You simply drag the Reduce Noise icon from the FX menu on the right, and then the adjustments for the tool open.
You only get three settings for the amount of noise reduction: Default, Medium, and High.
It's not going to turn a horribly noisy clip into a great one, but it does smooth out very grainy looking shots.
As with most noise reduction, when you remove graininess you also lose some sharp detail, but in video this is less an issue than for photos.
In the above screenshot the left has no correction, while the right has Noise Reduction applied.
As you can clearly see, the tool works tolerably well.
Auto Smart Tone
A feature shared by Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements is Auto Smart Tone.
After adjusting the image to its best-guess fix, this lighting correction shows a control puck in the center of a rectangle, with four extremes shown in thumbnails in the four corners of the preview window, towards which you can drag the puck and refine the app's correction.
In Premiere Elements, the tool finds similar scenes within a clip for correcting at the same time.
The tool let me noticeably improve a test clip's lighting.
Guided Edits in Premiere Elements
Premiere Elements' Guided Edit tools hold your hand through the steps of creating effects that are more complex than just pressing a button or adjusting a slider.
Simply tap the Guided Edits mode-switcher button to see all of them.
When you go through an edit, a right-panel with actions you need to take show up as tooltips that tell you exactly what to do, and even prevent you from clicking Next until you've completed a step.
The 2021 version adds two new Guided Edits: Double Exposures and Animated Matte Overlays....
