Adobe Premiere Elements

Although my principal interest has always been in still photography I'd always wanted to experiment with video; and so late last year, just before the holidays, I purchased a GoPro Hero9 from B&H Photo.  At about the same time, Adobe put on sale for $89.99 its Premiere Elements / Photoshop Elements bundle, down from $149.99.  Knowing I would never become deeply enough involved in video to need the full version of Premiere, which in any event is only available through a Cloud subscription plan, I went ahead and purchased the bundle.

Since I've never used the full version of Premiere I can't say how Premiere Elements compares to it, but it's obviously a stripped down app aimed at casual users looking to add a bit of style to their You Tube videos.  For all that, though, it still possesses some fairly sophisticated features.  Using Adobe's Sensei AI technology (how I abhor such cultural appropriations) the editing process can be almost fully automated in Quick mode with the user needing to do little more than select the area of the frame(s) to which to apply effects and fixes. With social media in mind, the app also allows the user to change the aspect ratio to make the video more suitable for viewing on a smartphone and provides the ability to compress videos to make them easier to share.  There are any number of effects - such as animated overlays and mattes, double exposures, freeze frames, and bounce backs - that are fun but of limited usefulness.  There are also themes for those seeking to give their videos a more cinematic appearance, but these are necessarily of the most basic sort.  Of more serious value, it's possible to adjust highlights and shadows and to reduce noise.

In conclusion, Premiere Elements, especially when used in Quick and Guided modes, can be a viable choice for those with no knowledge of video editing who do not have the time or inclination to learn any and who want the least expensive product available.  The expert mode does provide a good deal more control but even here is limited.  As a basic video editor, Elements falls far short in my opinion of Corel Video Studio, the app on which I intend to do my own video editing, and which even in its Ultimate version is, relatively speaking, not that much more expensive, at least for those with a serious interest in video editing.