There are a few upgrades to Premiere^R Elements 7 that the novice movie maker will enjoy. These upgrades are geared toward automating the steps for creating your movies while still giving you options for customizing the results.

The first thing you will notice when you open Premiere Elements 7 is that there is a fourth tab at the top of the workspace. The Organize tab and panel contain controls for filtering and organizing your assets including video, audio and still images. At the top, you will see drop-down menus for selecting albums and setting search criteria (called tagging). You can also set up Smart Albums, which are dynamic lists of your assets. Once you set the criteria for your Smart Album, Premiere automatically adds any assets to the album that match your criteria.

You will also see four large icons at the top of the workspace for the major tasks. The Get Media icon opens a panel for downloading clips from your camcorder, still camera, webcam and mobile phone. You can also choose clips from the folders on your hard drive and AVCHD or TOD tapeless camcorders.

Another icon is for the new Smart Tagging feature. With this new feature, Premiere will do the work for you when evaluating and organizing your assets. The program will analyze the selected clips for audio, focus, contrast and quality and give you the results along with a star rating and status. You can set the criteria for the Smart Tagging from the dialog box. Of course, you still have the option to rate and tag your assets manually. Just click the Tagging icon to open that dialog box.

The fourth icon is for the new InstantMovies feature. This new tool automates the process of creating theme-based movies with your clips. The first step is to select the clips you wish to build into the movie. Next, choose from the many theme-based templates. These templates have everything to give your movie a professional quality including transitions, music, titles, effects, overlays and more. The only thing the template is missing is your video clips. The InstantMovies panel contains thumbnails for each template that, when clicked on, show a preview of the sample movie. The last step is to customize the movie. You can change or omit any of the built-in presets. For example, you can replace the default music with your own audio.

Videomerge is another new feature that you can have a lot of fun with. You begin with a video that contains your subject against a solid background. Premiere will remove or mask the background and add another video that will show onto the background.

Premiere also comes with a new feature for your audio needs. SmartSound^R comes packed with a Maestro of royalty-free audio files called Quicktracks^R. Once you choose the music, SmartSound will automatically match the audio to the length of your movie.

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