Adobe Premiere Elements 9 review

While preview smoothness is generally better, the timeline controls have become much less responsive. Zooming in and out was instantaneous in version 8 but now it can take a couple of seconds for the timeline to redraw. That might not sound like much, but we found that it had a major impact on the speed of operation.

Other new features pale into insignificance next to the revamped playback engine, but they’re welcome nonetheless. The NewBlue Cartoonr Plus effect turns clips into block colours and bold outlines for a cartoon-like appearance. Conceptually it’s fairly gimmicky but technically it’s surprisingly sophisticated, with a huge range of controls plus presets to get you started. Six new audio effects provide various ways to clean up soundtracks, including noise reduction. It couldn’t combat loud wind noise or traffic but it successfully attenuated gentler hisses and background noises.

The disc-authoring module can now export Web DVD – a Flash animation that replicates the menu controls used for DVD and Blu-ray production. It’s a great way to share home videos with friends and family, but with no integrated web hosting, we doubt many people will find much use for it. It’s possible to upload to YouTube directly from the software, but although HD resolutions are supported, none of the export templates offer a 25fps frame rate and new templates can’t be created.

It’s these lacks of attention to detail – the de-interlacing problems and sluggish timeline controls being other examples – that make Premiere Elements less than pleasant to use. There’s nothing here to change our view that Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 is a far more elegant and rewarding video-editing program.