Depth of Options
The big improvements that have been rolled out with Premiere Elements 8 are largely there to simplify clip creation and to expand the creative options for the user. The biggest aid to simplifying clip creation is the new SmartFix and SmartTrim options. The clip Auto-Analyzer was rolled out in Version 7, which enabled Elements to analyze video clips and provide tags for different video clips based on qualities like light level, motion, and subject action. Well, SmartFix is Premiere's attempt to fix problems it determines are in the video, such as low-light or shake. It does this through its included plugins, so you can adjust things after the fact. (For example on one of my clips, it sensed camera shake and then applied a camera stabilizer plugin to it.) Even though it doesn't give you many options on what it applies, the fact that you can tweak whatever plugins it applies actually makes this a fairly useful feature. SmatTrim is essentially the lifeboat conclusion to SmartFix. PRE8 decides that areas in which movement isn't happening are considered to be boring, so the program will cut them out. You can adjust how rigorous its standards are, which could make it convenient for some filmmakers. However, most of our users would probably prefer to carve up their clips themselves.
The next addition that's based on the Auto-Analyze feature is the new motion tracking module. Essentially, this analyzes movement in your video and then attempts to create a tracking frame to follow that movement. You can then attach graphics, icons, and text to a person walking―or skipping―or in any way moving. This can be helpful for adding text bubbles to people's heads for eclectic style, or, for creative filmmakers, to have a title track with a walking character for an innovative credit sequence. While it's not as robust as the data that After Effects makes available to you when it analyzes scenes (nor does it permit you that level of control), it is a nice freshman addition which can only grow more refined in further releases of the software.
The final augmentation that's been added to Premiere Elements 8 is the inclusion of more Themes. As many of you may remember, PRE7 had a number of pre-edited themes that could be applied to a timeline to create a stylistic family or home video. While it's not hugely useful to filmmakers for most things, it can be an easy way to create a stylistic intro sequence to DVD extras. The number of Themes has been increased, which is nice.
The Smart Trim Options allow you to determine whether you want to manually adjust what it trims on each clip or use preset choices to automatically trim them.
Performance
While new things keep getting loaded into Premiere Elements, the one unfortunate side effect is that the performance of the program, most noticeably when loading previous timelines on initial startup, seems to continue to get bogged down.
Our test computer is a microbudget-designed 2.5 Ghz i5 system with 8 Gb of DDR3 RAM, a 1 Gb DDR3 nVidia 9600GT video card, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Since the system we used to test Premiere Elements 7 was a 1.86 Ghz Core2 Duo with 3 Gigs of RAM, a 256 MB QuadroFX Card, and Windows XP x64, I had expected some improvement in performance when we tested Premiere Elements 8. Unfortunately, it seemed to be just as sluggish during initial start up, despite the fact that the power of the machine had nearly tripled. I know that Adobe can't put all the system optimization into Premiere Elements that is in Premiere Pro, but there does need to be some more work done here for optimization. (With that said, after you open the program and load a timeline once, future openings are much faster if you do so without restarting your machine.)
Additionally, I did run into a number of stability issues with Elements Organizer, as well as a greater than expected numbers of crashes with Premiere Elements 8 itself. My guess is this is just due to the fact that the optimization for Windows 7 isn't quite perfected yet and it will be improved in subsequent updates. (Apparently, there have been some issues with some nVidia video cards, since all my drivers were up to date, I turned off all the hardware acceleration features on our card and re-tested. While the overall stability seemed to be aided, I still never had reliable results with Organizer. Hopefully these kinks can be worked out in the near future.)
