Depth of Options
While part of the next improvements in Premiere Elements 7 are actually “Ease of Use” improvements, I've chosen to cover most of them here, as they all add to the depth of options for PE7.
The first improvement is the new Smart Tagging feature. Smart Tagging is an algorithm that's designed to go through all of your clips and rate them based on common criteria: faces, brightness, shakiness, etc. I tested this out with a number of clips and found that it did a pretty good job, especially for event/family footage that PE7 is most geared toward. The Smart Tagging session seemed to run at about twice the speed of normal playback and the list of elements that the tagging provide were easy to read and follow.
For use in film shoots where there may be a shake before a take occurs, the tagging algorithm sometimes became a little confused. However, for longer takes, it tried to break them down into separate sections, presumably so it could analyze where shakes/luminance changes/etc. began and ended. Unfortunately, any timecode data showing where shakes, blurring, or brightness variances occurred were not shown after the Smart Tagging had done its job. It would be nice to see this feature augmented a bit more in a future version, so this information could be seen. (At least if the user wished it to be seen.)
Additionally, you cannot currently adjust for certain types of variance, but must rely on PE7's best guess of what it thinks of your footage as based on its own internal presets. It would be nice if you could have a control clip and have the smart tagging check to see how many clips have a similar color temperature/lighting level. Another nice improvement would simply be to be able to list a range of brightnesses that're acceptable, with shots that are too bright or too dark for this range labeled as such. (And, while we're at it, it would be even nicer to make an automated color correction and luma matching algorithm, so it could batch match the color temperatures and brightnesses of clips.)
The new Smartsound Quicktracks for Adobe Premiere Elements will make youre ability to create music for your new films much easier than it has been in other versions of Premiere Elements..
Once you've selected your clips and Smart Tagged them, you can open up the most advertised new feature in PE7: InstantMovie. InstantMovie is designed to create montages, music videos, and intro videos with no knowledge of filmmaking required. Essentially, after your video clips have been Smart Tagged, you can simply choose an InstantMovie layout, select a few things you might want to adjust (like which music is used and whether all elements of the layout are used), and then InstantMovie will create a full film to the music you've selected for the time limit you desire.
I was instantly interested in how this could be useful for filmmakers who wanted to create quick montage clips to open up featurettes on their DVDs. Overall, this seems like a logical way that InstantMovie could be used. However, the options for how you want InstantMovie set up are very limited. For example, you can choose to have InstantMovie use custom music, but you can't replace the music of the intro and outro with the custom music. As such, if you want the look of the intro and outro footage, you have to put up with music at these two locations that may clash with your overall theme. (Obviously, there are workarounds if you want to render multiple versions and mute certain tracks, but that defeats the purpose of an "InstantMovie," in my estimation.) Additionally, you can't choose what order clips are used in, other than the order they were shot in. As most people do not shoot progressively, but shoot in order of location, it's effectively not possible to have a progressing storyline in your montage at this point. As such, while InstantMovie can be useful for certain filmmakers, it's probably going to be of very limited usefulness for most until a few more options get added.
