New Effects and Still Image Features

Without the new engine, there's far less that's new on offer. Although MacOS users can't benefit from the 64-bit editing, SonicFire Pro's SmartSound has finally arrived with version 10, making it easy to create custom loop-based royalty-free soundtracks for your edits. The most significant additions, however, revolve around improving the look of your video, and there's one option each for advanced users and novices.



For the former, Adobe has included a three-way colour corrector. This separates out controls for brightness and colour shift between highlights, mid-tones and shadows. So, for example, you could make shadows deeper but with a warmer red tinge, or give a blown-out sky more blue. However, this filter doesn't do anything by default, and you will need to experiment with it to achieve optimal results.



The Auto Tone & Vibrance filter, on the other hand, will improve the colour saturation of your video automatically - just drop it onto a clip. However, you can raise or lower the strength of the effect if you want, and even delve deeper to adjust brightness, contrast, and exposure as well as black or white levels separately. The filter is also designed to detect skin tones and leave these more naturalistic. We found that although skin was still boosted, human subjects didn't transform into Dale Winton after a prolonged session on the sunbed - they just looked a bit brighter.



Animating photos has always been a popular device in videomaking, particularly documentaries. Premiere Elements 10 now adds a Pan & Zoom tool, which can automatically detect faces and create an animated pan across them. We found this a bit rough and ready, but you can easily customise the effect, varying the zoom level, and how long the camera view pauses on each spot. You could create effects like this with the motion control and keyframing tools before, but the new tools makes things that little bit easier.