Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. Elements doesn’t make it as easy to import media as iMovie does, and you’ll have to download much of its additional content, like music scores, individually.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. Of course, if you’d rather work completely manually, you can.

So, press the Fix button and it will apply image stabilization and other ‘fixes.’ If you want to be more involved, a guided mode prompts you with onscreen tips. Even here, however, the emphasis is on letting Elements do the hard work for you. So, for example, Quick mode takes the clips and other media you’ve imported and throws them together on the timeline, you can then re-order them, trim them and add transitions and other effects.

The other main difference is that Elements is set up to automate much of the process of creating your movie masterpieces. For a start, while iMovie is free, Elements costs $100. But Elements and iMovie are two very different apps. The simplest way to describe Premiere Elements is that it is to Premiere Pro what iMovie is to Final Cut Pro.

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