In the Create Menus section, they’ve put the creation of DVD menus and added more DVD presets for creating your custom DVDs, which is also very helpful. Unfortunately, as with the last release, if you want the Photoshop control over your DVD menus that you get in Encore CS3 you’ll have to move up to Premiere Pro with its included Encore package, since your control over the pre-designed menus is limited in Premiere Elements 4. This doesn’t mean you can’t adjust them, it just means that you can’t add new elements or even delete elements the way you can in Encore CS3.
The new themes option allows you to lay on an entire style on your EDL, including transitions, color looks, and menus.
Finally, in the Share section, they’ve included the ability to burn DVDs (both standard and the newly triumphant Blu-Ray), the ability to convert to different forms of Flash and AVI, the ability to encode for mobile phone/iPod, and, finally, the ability to burn to tape. You can see how a lot of the new features of CS3, especially the mobile output and Flash conversion, have made their way into the more basic products Adobe offers.
Unfortunately, one step backward in the Ease of Use area is another place that Adobe borrowed a page from Sony’s Vegas book, with a separate registration for encoders. In order to even be able to burn any DVDs (or open any MPEG assets), you must separately register your MPEG encoders. While they don’t have as many encoders to register as Sony does, this is still highly annoying. Especially since this window actually locks up Premiere Elements until you activate this silly encoder, with no way to go back and work on another area of the program until you either activate it or give it the three finger salute. If Adobe wishes to prevent piracy in their lower end software packages, they should just use the same activation procedure used in their more expensive packages and don't make us register small sub-sections of the program later on. (We can all remember to register when we first install a program, but having to remember to register an encoder at 4 AM when you need to burn a DVD is extremely exasperating.)
To try and simplify things for newer users, Premiere Elements 4 has gone in a slightly more Vegas-type direction, by keeping audio tracks with the video clips. While the idea is good, I personally prefer to have all my audio beneath a central bar and all my video above it, like in professional editing units.
Depth of Options
As with Photoshop Elements 6, many of the improved abilities of Premiere Elements come in the area of performance and Ease of Use. However, there are some areas in which additional options have been added that don’t squarely fall into either of these categories. That’s why we have the Depth of Options section.
One of the coolest new abilities for filmmakers is the automatic ability to set markers based on beats in your soundtrack. These markers can then be snapped to and make it much easier for you to cut on the beat of a song. This is very useful for action films, dramas, music videos, and slide shows, all of which require a good sense of rhythm to cut them to the soundtrack. Now, if you don’t happen to have a natural sense of rhythm, Premiere Elements will help you with this. Considering they’ve added a number of parameters that can be adjusted, including the duration of the sampled music and the differentiation in volume of the beats, this is a handy little tool. Of course, when it comes to snapping your footage to these new markers, because the “snapping” ability in Premiere Elements still isn’t as spot on as it is in Premiere Pro, it’s a little more hit or miss than I would like. Nonetheless, it’s not too bad.
