Compatibility, Pricing, Setup

Premiere Elements is available for 64-bit editions of Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 (version 1809 or 1903 recommended) and macOS 10.12 through 10.14. I primarily review the Windows version here, though I have tested the software on an iMac, as well. You can get the program together with Photoshop Elements for $149.99 or as a standalone app for $99.99. These are one-time fees—no subscription needed. Note that Premiere Elements is not a part of Adobe Creative Cloud service. If you’re upgrading from a previous version, those prices drop to $119.99 and $79.99, respectively. A free trial gets you 30 days of full-featured program use, but any videos made with the trial get stamped with a watermark.

Make sure you have a fast Internet connection and a capacious hard drive before installing the program, as it requires at least 6GB of disk space. You also need a reasonably powerful machine with a multicore CPU of at least 2GHz, and at the very least 4GB of RAM and 5GB of available hard drive space. On Windows, the app requires SSE2 support on the CPU and a DirectX 9 or 10 graphics card with at least a 1280-by-800 resolution monitor. When you first launch the program, it asks if you want to send diagnostic information to Adobe.

What’s New in Premiere Elements

There are not many changes in the 2021 version, but the new mask selection tool with motion tracking is impressive. In addition to that, the update gets an editing speedup with GPU acceleration, 21 new background music tracks, and two new Guided Edits: Double Exposure, and Animated Mattes. More on those below.