Photoshop Elements Vs Premiere Elements

Adobe considers the audience for its consumer-targeted video editing software to be what it calls memory keepers—people documenting special family moments. But really, anyone who wants to create compelling videos without tackling a complex 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-automated tools. The program trails Editors' Choice winner CyberLink PowerDirector in the breadth of effects, rendering speed, and formats it supports, however.

How Much Does Premiere Elements Cost?

You can get Premiere Elements bundled 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 are stamped with a watermark.

Can My System Run Premiere Elements?

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 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 1,280-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

A theme of this year's Adobe Elements creativity software update is bringing AI smarts from its pro tools, Photoshop and Premiere Pro, to Elements users.

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Auto Reframe. This feature made it into Premiere Pro in 2019. The tool analyzes your video clip to determine the subject or what's important and then crops your media to fit an aspect ratio it wasn't originally shot in. It's useful, for example, if you shot a video in widescreen but want to post it as an Instagram square.
Start with Aspect Ratio. A new project startup window lets you choose from among popular social media formats. The format choices come with appropriately sized titles and backgrounds for the project format.
Animated Overlays. Add birds, butterflies, hearts, smilies, stars, smoke, and more around your main video subject.
Shadow and Highlight Guided Edit. Long a staple of digital photo editing (especially when using raw image formats) highlight and shadow adjustment is just as important with video footage when you want to get the lighting right.
New Slideshow Styles. Found in the Organizer module, these include new modern overlay styles, such as the Geometric and Frames templates. Just select some photos or videos and the Organizer creates a slideshow without even taking you to the main video editing interface, complete with background music.
Compress Video Output. This new option lets you shrink the file size of your exported video, showing exactly how big the file will be—handy for destinations with file-size limits.

The 2021 version added impressive mask selection tool with motion tracking along with editing speedup with GPU acceleration, 21 new background music tracks, and two new Guided Edits: Double Exposure, and Animated Mattes. The 2020 version introduced some nifty tools, too, such as Video Noise Reduction, Auto-Tagging, and two Guided Edits: Time Lapse and Sky Replacement.

Other recent additions include Auto Creations and a Home window for quick access to your projects and tutorials. Candid Moments, which picks the best still images from your video clips; Smart Trim, which cuts out boring video sections; Freeze Frame motion titles; and Animated GIF creation round the highlights in recent versions.

The Home screen in Adobe Premiere Elements

When you start up Premiere Elements, you first see the Home screen, a separate window from which you can launch any of the three Elements apps—Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, or Organizer. The Home screen also shows help links, Auto Creations, tips on using features, and recent projects. New for the 2022 update is better and clearer display of GIFs—you can play them inside the Organizer now.

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.

One area where Premiere Elements is falling behind some of the competition like CyberLink PowerDirector and Wondershare Filmora is that it doesn't offer any stock media for its users. This is especially baffling because Adobe has its own repository, Adobe Stock. It's also something that seems eminently desirable for hobbyists and YouTubers. Another action I wish were easier is restricting the gallery to a certain media type—video, photo, or audio. You have to go through the menu to get to this setting, while other apps have simple buttons. Even the smaller version of Organizer that lives within the editing interface has them.

Auto Creations

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.

When the editor launches, you get four main options in the middle: Add Media, Create a Template-Based Movie, Tell Your Story Using Titles, and Learn Video Editing. Alternatively, you can choose File > New > Project from the menus, where you now see a choice of aspect ratios for the movie. If the first clip you place on the timeline has a different aspect ratio, the project takes that, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Luckily, a Force Selected Project Preset to This Project check box avoids that issue. Another issue I have with Elements is that you can't change project properties any time after you create it, even during export.

Choose Project Aspect ration in Adobe Premiere Elements

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, 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, our Editors' Choice pick 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 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.

Auto Reframe

The big new feature for the 2022 release is Auto Reframe. This, as it sounds, changes the aspect ratio of a clip by cropping it. The tool uses Adobe Sensei AI to determine what's important in the frame and crops to show it. In my testing, it worked almost instantly, and unlike my attempts with similar tools in Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut, it worked quite well in my tests, keeping a person centered, as you can see in the sample here. I've shown the clip in its original aspect ratio in the small trimmer tool on the right. If you're not happy with the crop, you can adjust its offset, position, scale, and rotation, from the Applied FX panel accessible on the right side of the interface.

Smart Trim

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 selected Action for my bike-stunt test video, and trim suggestions appeared with no waiting required. You can preview the suggested trims. The app did a good job of selecting the most active scenes, though one short section was dull, and some farther-away bike tricks weren't included. It also removed out-of-focus and shaky sections, which I appreciated. Handles let you easily extend the selections, and you can simply use the Delete key to remove one. If you have long footage of limited interest, Smart Trim is a helpful tool.

Candid Moments

This tool is available in either Quick or Expert mode, and it lives in the Toolbar's Tools/Video group. Before you can use it, you have to select a video clip or clips. The tool looks for faces that are in focus and well lighted. It did an excellent job of identifying pleasing stills from my video walk around the office. You can use a slider to create more or fewer shots, or simply click on a tool at the cursor to add one on demand.

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 that quick, however. 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 choosing Advanced, where I had a lot of choices, such as smoothness, crop percent, and edge feather. It's a powerful tool, but you 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 overly grainy 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 them all. 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.

There are now 27 Guided Edits in Premiere Elements. Here's a look at the two new ones (the first two here), along with some of the more interesting ones from previous versions.

Adjust Highlights and Shadows

Highlights and Shadows in Premiere Elements

This new Guided Edit takes you through a basic process often used to improve photos, but in this case, it's applied to video content. After having you drop a clip onto the timeline, it points you to the Effects panel's Shadow/Highlight button. This helpfully includes an Auto Amounts checkbox, which may be all you need. Strangely, moving the Highlights slider to the right darkens the image, while doing the same with the Shadows slide lightens it. Adobe Lightroom made sliders consistent a while back, and it would be nice to see the same in Premiere Elements.

Animated Object Overlays

The last button along the right-side of the interface is a smiley face. Tap it to get to graphics that you can add as overlays to your video project. New for 2022 are Animated Objects. These include butterflies, stars, smilies, fire, and more. I tested this feature by adding a storm cloud over Niagara Falls. On choosing the object, it downloaded, which is nice because it means it wasn't taking up space on my hard drive. You simply drag the object onto the preview window where you want it, and overlay tracks appear for both video and audio (though my lightning had no sound). You can resize, move, and warp the placed object to taste.

Double Exposure

Adobe previously introduced a double exposure Guided Edit in Photoshop Elements, and now the effect makes its way into Premiere Elements. It basically lets you play video under a mask, which can be based on a photo or a pre-supplied graphic included in the program. PowerDirector takes this a step further, letting you animate the mask's size and position with keyframes and even supplying motion templates for them.

Time Lapse

For the Time-Lapse Guided Edit, I found some footage of bikers appropriate for time lapse treatment. The Guided Edit takes you through speeding up the joined videos and replacing the soundtrack. I prefer PowerDirector's similar tool, because rather than just speeding up the joined clips, it puts smooth transitions between them and uses masked transparent titles.

Animate Skies

The Animate Skies effect enhances a photo using a dramatic sky background. The Ultra Key effect and prefab graphics do the job. The edit works better if your source photo's sky is very drab, without visible clouds. For my taste, it's a bit dramatic, but I could see it working for some situations.

Animated Skies in Adobe Premiere Elements

Action Cam Fix

There's a big overlap between video editing enthusiasts and action cam shooters. Top adventure YouTubers such as Chris Rogers and Atua Mo'e are good examples. CyberLink PowerDirector also appeals to this audience with its Action Cam Center tool. Like that tool, Adobe's Action Cam Fix Action Cam Footage Guided Edit addresses lens distortion, lighting, and color. The two tools differ in that Adobe directs users to the previously described Smart Trim tool, while PowerDirector adds effects like stabilization, time-shift, and freeze-frame. The Adobe tool does improve footage, but for my money, the PowerDirector version of this offering is more powerful.

Create an Animated Social Post

The Create an Animated Social Post owes its existence to those punchy captioned videos you see on Facebook and Instagram. The guide starts you by directing you to the motion title tool. It also has you apply motion to the main video so that it slides from left to right. Finally, it directs you to the social sharing panel. In all, it's not a very ambitious tool, but some may find it helpful.

Color Pop

The Color Pop Guided Edit replicates an effect that most people first saw in Spielberg's Schindler's List, in which a powerful effect highlighted a young girl in a red coat in the midst of a primarily black-and-white movie. You start with the Color Pop Guided Edit by switching to Expert mode, and then pick the Red Noir Hollywood Look from the Effects menu. Then you open the HSL Tuner tool, from which you can adjust not only the red content, but also that of seven other colors. One weakness of this approach is that it pops everything that's in the specified color. In CyberLink PowerDirector and other apps, you can create a mask or use motion tracking to limit where the color pops.

Advanced Video Effects

The effects we've come to expect in a consumer video editor are all present. There's a wealth of transitions, picture-in-picture, chroma-keying, scaling, opacity, and even keyframe-timed effects. There are dozens of animated and still picture-in-picture presets, but it's easy just to drag a clip above another on the timeline and resize it. And the Graphics tool can insert animated and still objects such as flying birds (and other animals), stars, snow, and speech bubbles. Some advanced effects are GPU-enabled, meaning you don't have to wait for them to be rendered on the timeline to view them immediately.

Selections in Effects

Under the effects entry you now see a Draw button, with options for using a Pen, Circle, or Rectangle. The Pen is what lets you create masks for irregularly shaped objects such as human beings, so is probably the most useful. You can tune your selection with feather, opacity, and expansion sliders. The best part is that you can use motion tracking on them without opening a separate tool. The Pen selection is touchy compared with selecting in Photoshop: The cursor would often unexpectedly and undesirably change into a rotation cursor before I'd finished the selection. You can make multiple selections, and from the menu you can invert the selection—useful for when you want to apply the effect to everything outside your selection. If you want to apply multiple effects, a Copy selection option eases that operation.

Effect Selections in Adobe Premiere Elements

The tracking worked as well as standard motion tracking tools. For my test, the cyclist subject disappears behind a truck momentarily, but after a few tries I was able to move the mask back over her and retrack for some semblance of continuity. Note that selection only appear with actual effects, not with corrections such as lighting or color.

Video Collage

Elements' Video Collage feature is basically a set of templates for Picture-in-Picture Mode. Available from the Create menu, the Video Collage interface does make it easy to drop clips into prefab templates that even include animated motion. It's a lot easier than messing with keyframe editing! You can also add thematic background music with a button click and choose whether to play the component video clips all together or in sequence. Cleverly, the background is lowered during speech in the clips (an effect known as ducking), and it stretches to fit your movie.

Chroma Key

The app's chroma-key works well, with good control over opacity and chroma threshold. At one point while moving the threshold slider, however, my background in the preview switched to blue. When you add a clip with a solid background to your timeline in Expert mode, a dialog asks if you want to use the Videomerge feature, which makes the background transparent. You can even use Videomerge on non-green-screen clips, for a degree of overlay transparency.

Film Looks

You get several spiffy NewBlue effects (as you do in PowerDirector), including Film Look, which adds damage, sepia tint, and jitter with a choice of wear patterns, to make your movie look like it was shot in Charlie Chaplin's day. Frankly, my interest in photos with retro effects long ago wore as thin as the image on a hundred-year-old negative, but I'm sure many still find them charming. The FilmLooks effects offer a variety of looks, including a bright and blurry Dreamy, Hollywood Movie, which pumps up colors, and Pandora, which gives your movie the cool color cast of that title. These effects, however, are not always adjustable—some are either on or off. And applying a FilmLooks effect removes any other effects adjustments you've made to the clip.

A powerful tool in Premiere Elements is the three-way color corrector. This lets you pump up a selected hue separately for midtones, highlights, and shadows.

Titles and Text

The app includes over 20 preset Motion Titles in categories like Contemporary, Formal, Geometric, Decorative, Typography, and Fun, along with a custom option. These are very professional looking, and most offer opening, ending, and lower-third options. You also get good customizability with fonts, background image (including transparent through to your video), and you can even change the animation type—wipe to center, fly in with twist, and so on.

There have also long been attractive themed-titling options, like Prime Time, Aquarium, Coming Book, and Ladybug Picnic. Most offer four templates, for credits, frame, lower third, and title. I had to download some of them before I could use them in my testing, but that's pretty painless since installing the content is all handled within the program. WYSIWYG editing makes customizing the text a snap. But you're not restricted to the present templates. You can choose from a huge variety of fonts and sizes, choose a color, drag the text anywhere on the movie, and apply any of 38 animation styles.

Title masking in Adobe Premiere Elements

Premiere Elements' title masking lets you show moving video behind your text titles—a cool effect, for sure. The procedure is far from taxing, and once you've gone through it, there's ample opportunity for customization. The screenshot above shows the look you get, although here it's static.

Audio Editing

Premiere Elements' Music Remix tool works with any MP3 file and is the default for sound you've placed in the Music track on the timeline. In several tests, it worked acceptably, though there was often extra silence at the end.

The audio-only view in the timeline opens the Master volume control. You see waveforms on the standard timeline, and yellow line in the middle helpfully lets you raise or lower a clip's volume graphically. The Adjustments menu includes volume, balance, and treble and bass boost, as well as AudioGain, which normalizes audio to match sound levels of all your sources. From the Effect menu (the same one from which you get all the video effects), you can choose Audio Effects, which include DeNoiser, delay, dynamics, and more. You get some powerful NewBlue audio effects, too, such as Audio Polish, which eliminates most background noise, a hum remover, and a reverb adder that lets you change the room size.

Elements can pump up your digital movie's aural impact with scores and sound effects. The Scores feature includes dozens of musical backgrounds to fit different moods, but the cool part is that they dynamically adjust their length to your movie. Scores are grouped into categories such as Ambient and Urban, as well as genres like Country and Rock-Pop. You can check the fit-to-entire-video box, and then choose whether to delete existing clip sound.

There's a full selection of sound effects—from Air Conditioner to Wire Bunched Hitting Hollow Wood. And a Foley group of sounds—such as Bottle Cap Screwing on and Cell Phone Battery Inserting—can give your video a true Hollywood touch of faux reality. I easily timed an explosion sound effect with a bike jump in my test movie.

You can find most output options in the Organizer app, but there is an Export & Share button in the editor at top right that can send your cinematic creations to DVD, computer files, or the web. Upload directly to Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, choosing HD or SD quality. Saving files for use on Apple and other mobile devices is also simple. The app offers all kinds of control over your output files. You can choose Flash, MPEG, AVCHD, AVI, WMV, or QuickTime, with options for all standard resolutions and bitrate targets, both maximum and minimum.

Output options in Adobe Premiere Elements

The Animated GIF export option is a godsend if you're sharing a very short video to a destination (like a photo spot on a website) that doesn't accept video. There's not a big obvious choice for it, though. On the Export panel, you need to choose Devices, then Custom, then tap the Advanced Settings button, and then select Animated GIF from the format drop-down. It's best to keep the video as short as possible—definitely under 10 seconds—and to choose a lowish resolution. Otherwise, your resulting file will be too huge to use on the web.

Quick Export, which outputs to a highly compatible MP4 format, gets a great new feature in the 2022 update: It has a Reduce File Size checkbox and a slider that lets you choose the file size of your exported media. This feature is super handy for sharing to services that only accept limited file sizes.

Performance

Premiere Elements feels quick to start up and when performing the standard video editing procedures. For rendering speed, I tested by creating a movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to 1080p30 MPEG-4 at 15Mbps, H.264 High Profile. Audio was MPEG AAC Audio: 192 Kbps. I tested on my home workstation, a PC with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro.

Premiere Elements only supports a very particular set of Nvidia graphics cards for rendering acceleration, and I updated the GPU in my test system specifically to one that Adobe supports. This time the rendering test took it 3:41 (min:sec), well behind Corel VideoStudio's 1:12 and CyberLink PowerDirector's 1:15, even with the supported video hardware. During export, Elements does show you a progress bar with the percent elapsed and time remaining, but not the elapsed time, current frame, or a video preview, as some other editors do.

Adobe Premiere Elements for macOS

As mentioned above, Premiere Elements is compatible with macOS 10.14 and later. It runs natively on Intel-based Macs, and those based on Apple Silicon processors such as the M1, but only using Rosetta emulation. Unlike Adobe Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements is unfortunately not available from the Mac App Store for easy installation; you need to install it via an intermediary downloader/installer that you download from the Adobe website.

Happily, the Mac version offers all the same tools and features as the Windows version that you can read about elsewhere in this review, though the Windows version supports a few file formats that the Mac version doesn't. It can't import WAV, WMA, or WMV files nor export AVI, WAV, WMV, or WMA. By comparison, CyberLink's newly released macOS version of PowerDirector, though offering a good helping of the features found in the Windows version, still lacks a few features.

Working with the timeline in Premiere Elements was reasonably responsive on my test 3.1GHz MacBook with Intel Core i5 and 8GB RAM and Intel Iris Plus 650 graphics. In a quick video rendering performance test, however, using the same media I use for the Performance section below, Premiere Elements (as with its Windows version) performed poorly compared with the competition, even with graphics acceleration enabled. It took 7:31 (min:sec) to render the project, compared with 57 seconds for PowerDirector and 1:32 for iMovie.

Ready for the Red Carpet?

If you like the integration of the Elements Organizer and Photoshop Elements, Adobe Premiere Elements is a good choice. It has great features that guide you toward learning how to create compelling projects. It is not, however, the most powerful or fastest enthusiast-level video editor, and it's far from the fastest at rendering projects. Elements is also behind when it comes to support for more-recent standards like 360-degree VR content as well as advanced features like multicam editing. For those, look to our enthusiast video editing Editors' Choice winners, Corel VideoStudio and CyberLink PowerDirector 365 on Windows, and Final Cut Pro on MacOS.

Adobe Premiere Elements

The Bottom Line

Adobe's consumer video editor is easy to use and offers plenty of help. It trails the competition when it comes to features and rendering performance, however. New for 2022 are the Auto Reframe feature, more aspect ratios, and additional guided edits.

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