Another useful addition is a small audio mixer, to mix different channels of your soundtrack and dialogue in a more organic, analog way, rather than the keyframes in your audio tracks. For folks that prefer an organic feel, this is a very nice addition. Personally, I’m a bit more digital and precise, but it’s a nice addition.
Finally, they’ve also add the ability to animate text, which is a nice feature that PE3 lacked. You can now fly your text across the screen in a host of different ways, which is great for creating TV-style graphic slugs, or highly controlled scrolling text.
Performance
Our test machine was our 1.86 GHz Core2 Duo with Windows XP Pro x64, 3 Gigs of RAM, and the nVidia Quadro FX 1500 card (which was kindly provided by the folks at nVidia). In this configuration, the program worked smoothly, although it’s actual load time is significantly longer than Premiere Pro CS3. Additionally, I found that I had more crashes with PE 4 than I experienced with Premiere Pro CS3, which, when combined with a somewhat unpredictable auto save, means that you’ll want to be sure to CTRL-Save often. (I had mine set to auto-save every twenty minutes but, after one crash, found it hadn’t saved for nearly two hours.)
While Premiere Elements 4 will support most of the plugins that Premiere Pro will, a few of them will seem to be supported, but not work properly. (For example, the new Magic Bullet Frames will show up in your FX menu, but not be able to be utilized properly. Same with Trapcode Particular, which is an After Effects plug-in, but for some reason, shows up in the PE4 FX bin.) Now, just because it supports most plugins doesn’t mean they will all work efficiently. While I had good results with many third party plugins from NewBlue, Trapcode, and Red Giant, there were a couple of Red Giant plugins that bogged down the system quite a bit. Most notably, the new super graphic-intensive Looks software came close to crashing my system. (Considering I’ve never used a Windows operating system that is as speedy and rock-solid as XP Pro x64 is, that’s actually saying a lot.) However, that’s a minor complaint, considering that many things work, as you would expect with Premiere Elements 4.
Folks who read my review of Photoshop Elements 6 know that one of the biggest improvements to accelerate performance, in both PSE6 and PE4, is the ability of the Photoshop Elements’ Organizer to see both graphic and video documents, sort of like a lite version of Bridge. Video clips can be opened directly in Premiere Elements 4, from this interface. Unfortunately, unlike Bridge CS3, you cannot actually view the video clips within the Organizer interface. I hope that a future version will include this feature.
