Full Review

Premiere Elements 8 is an appealing upgrade for anyone interested in easy organizing, editing, and compiling of videos into attractive, fun movies. Given its underlying power combined with greatly improved ease of use, it's a good tool to have for editing videos on the quick.

Adobe Premiere Elements 8 features easy to use tools to edit and use videos in style. It provides two ways to create movies from video, Instant Movie and manual creation. Instant Movie uses Smart Tags to create a movie with music and transitions, based upon your selected Flash template. Smart Tags guide the Instant Movie away from using static, blurred, or otherwise undesirable clips. In addition, Premier offers tools such as sliders to adjust clip speed and the number of effects that will be automatically applied.

Other automatic tools include Smart Fix, Smart Trim, and Smart Mix. Smart Fix tries to correct imperfections - such as underexposed clips - flagged by Smart Tags. Smart Trim uses Smart Tags to help it determine what portions of a video should be kept and which should be cut, as w

ell as to weigh the interest of various sections. Smart Mix balances different sound sources so that background music doesn't drown out narration or dialog.