Adobe Premiere Elements 7 review

It's taken well over a year for Adobe to catch up with its rivals in supporting the now commonplace AVCHD high definition camcorder format, but it's been worth the wait.

Taking a quantum leap from last year's version 4 to version 7, to synchronise it with its sister product Photoshop Elements, the package has gained new features to entice the video novice as well as keeping the enthusiast happy.

If you're new to video editing and authoring, you'll love features like Instant Movie. This analyses a group of video clips and manages to put them together into a surprisingly good movie without human intervention, complete with music and effects, which it then encloses in one of many available InstantMovie Theme templates. Of course, you can re-edit the results to your heart's content.

Managing your media is another essential function of modern creative software, and, like Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements 7 lets you use tags to classify and catalogue media files, making it quick and easy to log and retrieve all your imported footage, whether from MiniDV or HDV tape based camcorders, hard disk models, flash memory cards, or even mobile phones and mobile devices. Smart Tag, as the feature is known, takes a bit of getting used to, but once you're familiar with its quirks it's a very effective means of keeping tabs on what you've shot, where it was filmed and who's in the clip.

You can tag footage with a wide variety of preset meta tag labels, or create your own. Smart Tagging will even use face recognition to auto detect the number faces in clips and whether a shot is in focus or not. It's very clever, and results in very fast searches when you've got a potentially confusing amount of content built up.

Cut out and keep

Videomerge is a version of chroma keying, where you shoot actors against a green or blue background and then replace this with a second video clip. Its inclusion is bound to provide hours of fun for anyone who fancies floating in space or walking on a desert island, especially younger users. And if you want to give your edited movie project a backing soundtrack, the included Smart Sound package enables you to generate musical accompaniment in myriad musical genres without having any copyright permissions to worry about.

Perhaps Premiere Elements 7's most notable feature, if one that's rather overdue, is that new ability to import and process AVCHD clips from the ever expanding range of camcorders that use this format. It also supports the JVC .TOD format. Though straightforward for the user, AVCHD is notoriously demanding of computer processing power, and you'll need a decent PC to edit your high definition footage smoothly. (The system requirements listed below aren't Adobe's, but our more realistic recommendations for smooth editing.) Once you create a project in 1920x1080 HD, Premiere Elements' built-in export wizards make it easy to burn it to a Blu-ray disc at full quality, given the appropriate drive. For standard definition output, currently a more likely scenario, it takes just a few clicks to export projects to tape, DVD or hard disk, or upload video to online media portals such as YouTube, MySpace and Vimeo.

Premiere Elements 7 is great value on its own, and even better with Photoshop Elements 7 for around £120. On a sufficiently capable PC, it handles HD very well indeed, and its solid editing tools and fabulous range of effects make it the current package of choice for beginners and video enthusiasts alike.