Adobe’s consumer division just announced Premiere Elements 14 and Photoshop Elements 14, including many new features. One of the new features in Premiere Elements 14 is its initial support for 4K Ultra HD, among many other features. Those video producers who like Adobe’s products but don’t need the full feature set of the Creative Cloud (CC) may be interested in the new Premiere Elements 14, especially those who are interested in simple creation of DVD and Blu-ray disks, with a total flat one-time price of under US$100 by itself, or under US150 bundled with Photoshop Elements 14. Ahead are some details about Premiere Elements14’s DVD and Blu-Ray creation and supported framerates, the initial support for 4K UHD, and what’s currently missing, based upon the GM (Golden Master) and a brief conversation with the product manager.
Adobe’s consumer division just announced Premiere Elements 14 and Photoshop Elements 14, including many new features. One of the new features in Premiere Elements 14 is its initial support for 4K Ultra HD, among many other features. Those video producers who like Adobe’s products but don’t need the full feature set of the Creative Cloud (CC) may be interested in the new Premiere Elements 14, especially those who are interested in simple creation of DVD and Blu-ray disks, with a total flat one-time price of under US$100 by itself, or under US150 bundled with Photoshop Elements 14. Ahead are some details about Premiere Elements14’s DVD and Blu-Ray creation and supported framerates, the initial support for 4K UHD, and what’s currently missing, based upon the GM (Golden Master) and a brief conversation with the product manager.
DVD and Blu-ray recording
Premiere Elements can very simply create DVD and Blu-ray disks. When I say “very simply”, I mean exponentially more simply than the steps required to encode from Premiere Pro CC via Media Encoder and then wading through all of Encore CS6’s adjustments, as Adobe’s Dave Helmly documented very well in this 18:20 minute video. Evidently, if you invest almost 19 minutes to watch Dave’s excellent video and then invest another similar amount of time to apply what you have learned, you will have better control of absolutely all of the minutia. However, if after editing your video, you would prefer just to verify a couple of details like the desired framerate and whether you are going to use a single layer or dual layer disk, you might be better servied by the simplicity of doing it all in Premiere Elements 14.
Although Premiere Elements 14 sticks to the minimum essential framerates for DVD (29.97 fps and 25 fps, sadly no 23.976 available for DVD, even though the DVD standard indeed supports it), with Blu-ray disks, Premiere Elements 14 is much more complete, including 1080/23.976, 1080/25, and 1080/29.97 fps.
Sreenshot of preparation of a Blu-ray disk at 23.976 fps
Sreenshot of preparation of a Blu-ray disk at 25 fps
Screenshot of preparation of a Blu-ray disk at 29.97 fps
In the case of 25p (progressive) and 29.97p (progressive) source material in a corresponding progressive project, I deduce that Premiere Elements 14 will automatically encode 25PsF and 29.97PsF to match the Blu-ray standard, which technically only accepts an “interlaced” signal for those two framerates, while in the case of 23.976p Premiere Elements 14 should leave it as native progressive, since the Blu-ray standard does accept that for 23.976.
Online sharing to Vimeo, YouTube and now Facebook
The new Premiere Elementes 14 adds direct sharing to Facebook, in addition to Vimeo and YouTube which it had previously.
Although Premiere Elements thankfully offers uploads to YouTube up to 1080p (as shown above), I am surprised to see that it currently doesn’t offer uploading to YouTube at 4K Ultra HD, since YouTube already accepts it. I imagine that Adobe will add it later to an update to Premiere Elements 14, since it does allow editing 4K Ultra HD, which I’ll cover in more detail ahead in this article.
I am surprised to see that when uploading to Vimeo, the maximum spatial resolution is only 720p (as shown above), even though VImeo has been supporting 1080p for many years. I imagine that Adobe will offer uploading to VImeo at 1080p with an update to Premiere Elements 14.
It is not surprising to see that Premiere Elements 14 currently only offers uploading 720p to Facebook, since that is surprisingly the maximum supported by Facebook itself according to its website.
Premiere Elements 14 initial support for 4K Ultra HD
I am glad to see that Premiere Elements 14 is now capable of importing and editing 4K Ultra HD material. I am also glad for the very healthy set of framerates that are supported in 4K UHD in Premiere Elements 14, which include 23.976p, 25p, 29.97p, 50p and 59.94p.
In the above screenshot, we can see that 23.976 is selected. One can select the framerate manually when creating a new project by visiting Create>New Project and then clicking on the button labeled Change Settings. Otherwise, Premiere Elements 14 automatically sets the project framerate based upon the framerate it detects from the first clip, which is the only way that Apple’s iMovie allows it to be set in the current version. I am very glad that Premiere Elements 14 allows setting it manually.
Exporting 4K Ultra HD from Premiere Elements 14
The Adobe Elements project manager explained that Premiere Elements 14 will export 4K Ultra HD from such a project at the exact same framerate of the project and up to 200 megabit per second. That is great. However, the export of 4K Ultra HD is currently limited to only 8-bit, even though the spec for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray is much better. When I inquired specifically about the possibility of Premiere Elements 14 creating 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disks, the immediate response was:
“No, Premiere Elements 14 doesn’t have support of burning 4K content to Blu-Ray. There are still speculations & open questions around availability of 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray player & disk for consumers. Will wait.”
I hope to cover more detailed articles about Premiere Elements 14 and its workflow.
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