Adobe Premiere Elements 10 review

It’s easy enough to modify the size and position of each resting point in the animation, but the only way to create curved paths and gently accelerating movement is via the Bézier keyframe tools, which aren’t easy to find. They are worth mastering, but once you’ve done so you may as well design animations from scratch. We’ve commented on this fractured relationship between Premiere Elements’ beginner- and enthusiast-oriented functions before, which makes it hard for beginners to progress to more advanced techniques.

The new colour-correction effects are more welcome. AutoTone & Vibrance makes colours rich and punchy, and there’s manual control if the fully automatic processing doesn’t hit the mark. The Three-Way Color Corrector allows sophisticated adjustments, removing or applying colour casts to the highlights, midtones and shadows using a trio of colour wheels. It would be even better if its controls fitted on the screen without scrolling.

Colour wheels let you add colour casts to your videos, with plenty of fine control

Export options now include AVCHD disc, which puts Blu-ray quality video onto DVD media that will play in the majority of Blu-ray players. You can now upload to Facebook as well as YouTube but, as before, videos are converted to 30fps, regardless of the project settings, thus compromising motion smoothness. There are lots of templates for other export destinations, but their frame rates don’t adapt to the source either. iPad templates use an inexplicably low 640×360 resolution.

It’s this lack of attention to detail – and the sluggish timeline controls – that make it hard for us to warm to Premiere Elements. It remains the only consumer editor that’s equipped to produce complex animations, but for home videos, we’d much rather use the simpler, faster and more elegant Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum.