The biggest improvement for filmmakers has to be the new inclusion of Smartsound Quicktracks for Premiere Elements. If you have read our SonicFire Pro reviews, you may recall that Smartsound tracks are adjustable music clips that have multiple arrangements and can be fitted to any size video clip. In SonicFire Pro, the resizing of the music is dynamic, so you can shorten and lengthen your clip at any time. (The same is true of the scores used in Adobe's own Soundbooth program which is part of the CS4 suites. With that in mind, I'm not quite certain why they chose to use Smartsound technology rather than a simplified version of their own Soundbooth scores, unless they just didn't have the time to make this a reality by the time PE7 had to be delivered.) However, in Smartsound Quicktracks for Premiere Elements, track length is not dynamic. As such, you must choose a length you want your score to be and then choose your score/arrangement. Once you've done that, it'll save a .WAV file of your score at exactly the length you selected. You can then drop this into your soundtrack area of your timeline and adjust it as you need.
As was the case with Smartsound Quicktracks for Premiere Pro, the version that comes with Premiere Elements is not capable of using Smartsound's new Multi-Track scores that are designed to work with SonicFire 4 & 5. However, they are capable of using the hundreds of stereo Quicktrack scores that Smartsound has created over the years. These additional scores can be purchased directly from Smartsound with the Smartsound Quicktracks for Premiere Elements composer window.
As you can see, while some of these improvements are going to be more useful to filmmakers, they can all be utilized in some way by the low-budget filmmaker with a little creativity.
While the specially composed music for "Instant Movies" has a very polished sound to it, it doesn't alter the actual composition if you specify a shorter clip. Instead, it just chops off the composition rather abruptly. (Raw clips from "The Message".)
Performance
Our primary 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). The overall performance was pretty strong, with few overall crashes.
The one area where most of our crashes did occur was with the “InstantMovie” mode when adding separate audio tracks less than a minute long. For some reason, at random intervals, doing this would cause the software to start looking for a CD that wasn't in the drive and bring up an error. Sometimes, you could click through this error if you clicked cancel about thirty times, whereas other times it would just lock up the entire program and force you to do a hard shut down. This was an intermittant problem that the software techs at Adobe tried unsuccessfully to replicate on multiple machines. As such, it could be just some weird issue in our test machine. In any case, we didn't run into this problem with longer audio clips or the audio clips that are actually part of the InstantMovie themes, however.
For future versions of Premiere Elements, I think it would be good for Adobe to start supporting multiple timelines, as opposed to a single timeline. While I'm sure that Adobe is afraid that support of multiple timelines will prevent people from purchasing Premiere Pro, I simply don't think this is a realistic fear. (The pro line is too integrated and efficient for folks who can afford to purchase it not to do so, no matter how many similar features Premiere Elements may sport in comparison to Premiere Pro.)
