A turning point for home video editing
Software developers often try to make video editing less time consuming and intimidating by simplifying the process with automatic editing facilities. But we’ve never seen the appeal of twee templates and automatic editing options that randomly throw video clips together. Thankfully, Adobe Premiere Elements 13 has a new' Video Story feature that removes much of the effort and complexity, yet produces surprisingly good results.
First, you choose from eight themed templates (including Party, Festive, Birthday Bash and Graduation Day). Two wedding themed templates seems a tad excessive, and we’d prefer a few more generic Day Out templates, but it’s a decent starting point.
Next, you group your clips into chapters. This is far more convenient than a traditional timeline and helps you develop some narrative structure to the video. Chapters are already titled in accordance with the template’s theme, but it’s easy to rename, re-order and delete them (though not reformat the chapter headings or omit them entirely).
With your video footage in place, the software analyses it to pick out the best bits. If you don’t like its selections, one button click reveals the new Favorite Moments editor, where you can re-select which footage to use. These controls are delightfully simple - drag the highlighted blocks to mark the sections of footage you want, or click the button during playback.
Effects and music are added automatically, but these too can be customised. You can also speed up a video clip or apply a slow-motion effect by choosing the Crisp, Normal or Slow' edit speeds.
We’ve seen dozens of automatic-editing modes, but this is the first time we’ve actually liked the results. Being able to arrange clips into named chapters helps to create a coherent narrative and it’s usually quite easy to override the automatic editing decisions if you want.
If you don’t need this level of assistance, you can still use the Favorite Moments editor to help identify the best bits in your clips. It’s quicker and more intuitive than chopping and truncating clips on a timeline.
Premiere Elements also caters for more ambitious users. There’s a huge amount of power and lots of advanced functions in Expert Mode, although they aren’t easy to find or get to grips with. You can, however, turn on Guided Mode to provide tutorials while in Expert Mode. One new tutorial explains how to make video appear inside text, while another show's how to apply effects to a specific area within a frame. The Guided Mode here is much more successful than the one in Photoshop Elements 13, because it helps users get to grips with Expert Mode’s controls rather than merely repackaging them and limiting what you can do with them.
While the most experienced users won’t need any of this, they will appreciate the new' Shake Stabilizer effect, even though it takes a while to analyse and stabilise footage. One word of advice: avoid Quick mode, which speeds up processing times by deliberately dropping frames. Stick instead with the Detailed mode, which doesn’t drop any frames. It also produces steadier results than the old Stabilizer effect in version 12 and produces preview's of the stabilised footage that play more smoothly.
Premiere Elements 13 is a great improvement over the previous version. Its export options could be friendlier and some of its advanced features can be fiddly to use. However, no other video editor caters so well for both beginners and advanced users.
VERDICT
Classy and sophisticated video editing for all skill levels.