Tips for Adobe Premiere Elements 14

Adobe has released Premiere Elements 14, but the Mac App Store is still selling Premiere Elements 13 for some reason, so you need to go to www.adobe.com if you want to get the new version 14.

The £79.10 price tag also includes the Adobe Organizer program, which helps you to organize all your photos and videos. The latest version of Organizer includes a handy split-view option that allows you to ‘pin’ photos and videos that don’t have GPS data to a specific location on the map.

And, unlike Apple’s Photos app, the Organizer is also useful for storing and sorting audio files, such as background music or voice recordings that you might want to use in your video projects.

Video-editing can be a complicated business, as you may need to work with multiple video and audio files, as well as photos and maybe even animated graphics, all within a single project.

To help gather all your media files together, the Organizer now includes a new ‘bulk import’ option that allows you to quickly import multiple files – including audio, video and photos – all at once.

By default, the Organizer adds all new files to your existing library of media files, but you can also create ‘catalogs’ – a bit like Albums in Apple’s Photos app – that store files for individual projects that you might want to keep separate.

Like Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements allows you to work in four separate modes, which you can choose simply by clicking the tabs that run along the top of the main editing window.

The first time you launch the program you’ll see the eLive page, which is a good starting point for first time users and also for people who are upgrading from an older version.

The eLive page includes an introduction to the new features in Premiere Elements 14, as well as tips on many important techniques, such as stabilising shaky video clips or creating time-lapse effects.

As well as its Quick, Guided and Expert editing modes, Premiere Elements 14 also includes a new Audio View that provides instant access to its main audio tools.

Click the Audio icon on the editing timeline and Premiere Elements will display the audio wave-forms for all your video clips.

You can adjust each audio track individually, or use the Master control to adjust the volume for the entire project.

You can ‘solo’ any audio track – muting other tracks so that the solo track plays on its own – and there’s a Narration button that lets you record your own voice-overs and insert them into straight into the timeline.

The Action bar down in the lower-right corner of the editing window normally shows video effects and transitions, but when you’re in Audio View those video tools are hidden and the Action bar just displays audio tools and effects, such as ‘delay’ and the ‘noise reducer’.

There’s a Smart Mixer option that attempts to automatically balance audio tracks, either fading them into the background or bringing them right up into the foreground. If you want more precise control you can open the main Audio Mixer, which allows you to manually adjust the volume and left/right balance for each individual audio track.

Premiere Elements has always included a number of predefined options for adding titles and text to your videos, but version 14 beefs up its titling tools with a number of new ‘motion titles’.

These are organized into categories such as ‘formal’ and ‘fun’ and may include both text and graphics elements, such as flags and banners that are automatically animated so that you don’t have to spend hours trying to master the program’s rather complicated keyframe animation tools.

You can modify the motion title templates too, selecting different graphics or colours to suit the mood of your video projects.

Most of the motion titles include simple text effects, such as scrolling text that you can use for title credits at the beginning or end of a video.

However, there’s also a set of Typography effects that allow you to work with multiple text elements.

Just drag a motion title from the Titles menu into the main timeline and then double click on the title to open the Adjustments panel. This allows you to select different typefaces and sizes, as well as effects such as transparency and shadows. You can also select different animation effects, including fades, crawls and rotating text.

Last year, Adobe introduced a feature called ‘colour pop’ into Photoshop Elements. That proved really popular, so they’ve now introduced a video version of the colour pop effect into Premiere Elements as well.

This effect converts the video image into black and white, but leaves one element of the image still in colour so that it ‘pops’ out and becomes the focus of the image.

The effect uses a filter called Red Noir, and by default it leaves red as the primary colour that stands out in the image. However, you can also use the colour controls to highlight other colours as well.

Premiere Elements has a special ‘time remapping’ tool that can be used to create slow-motion or fast-motion video effects, but it can be a bit tricky for newcomers to use so version 14 introduces a new guided-edit option that walks you through the basic steps for using the time remapping effects.

Click the tab at the top of the screen to enter Guided mode, and then select the Slow Or Fast Motion option from the menu. You’ll be prompted to create a ‘time zone’ that alters the speed of a specific section of video, and you can increase it up to 8X, or slow it down to 1/8th normal speed.

Exporting video can be a tricky business, depending on whether you want to play it on a TV screen, mobile devices, or upload it to the web, so Premiere Elements 14 includes a new Export And Share panel that makes it easier to save your video projects in different formats.

There’s a Quick Export option that will attempt to create a single file that is suitable for most devices, but you can also select more detailed settings depending on your requirements. You can create high-res video files with up to 4K resolution for TV or computer screens, or reduce the resolution and file size for uploading to web sites such as YouTube or Facebook.

Read next: Essential Tips and Tricks for Adobe Photoshop Elements 14