Smart Trim

Adobe Premiere Elements 10 has a feature called the Smart Trim mode, and what it does is it goes in and takes a look at your videos on the Timeline and picks out clips that may be too shaky or dark, or just that have problems with it that the analyzer thinks has problems. So, it's kind of going to be like your overlord looking at what's going on within your movie in case you missed something. So, let's take a look at how that works. So, the tool is actually right here. It's called Smart Trim mode. And don't get it confused with our Split Clip tool, which are both a pair of scissors, but one's going to the right and one's going to left.

So, we'll take a look at Smart Trim mode down here, and I'll click it once. It brings up a new panel here, Smart Trim mode, and a dialog box will pop up telling you that it's analyzing the clips. It actually takes a little bit of time, so I've sped things up and done it prior to this movie. And look at the options. It allows me to choose my Quality Level. If you go the right, that's higher quality and to the left, it's lower quality. So, it'll actually look for more problems on your right and less on the left, and same with the Interest Level.

Now, one thing that's key here is you never want to have Automatic chosen, as far as I'm concerned, because it'll go in there, it'll analyze it, it'll pick clips it doesn't like, and it'll cut them off automatically. You have no say over them. So, I don't recommend that. Always keep it into Manual mode and then just choose Save. And at the end of it what you'll see are these little lines that are on the clips that it thinks is really bad. So, let's go over. Here's a clip of these handles.

So, right away, if you look at it you might think well, it's blurry right here, but that's the look I was looking for, this depth of field. So, the analyzer doesn't know that, so it's thinking it's probably pretty bad. So, let's see what it says for my notes. See, it says Suggested Trimming, Blurred, Low Contrast. So, yes it's blurry, and maybe it's not as contrasty as it can be, but that's what I wanted. So, I'm not going to listen to it. But had I wanted to listen to it, I could go right here and go wow, that's a great idea. So, let's see what Smart Trim, you're brilliant, I'm going to go here and right-click and choose Trim.

It's going to trim that clip out. Everything is going to go back to the left. It's going to ripple edit, as we've seen in other videos, and that's gone. So, it's trimmed that for me. And I can go to the next one. Let's see what that is. That's the dance studios. It's looking blurry here. I'm sure that's what it says. Let's see. Blurred and Shaky. So, let's just play that, and definitely blurred and shaky. So, if I don't want that and if I go, my god, the people are watching this, they are going to be angry that it's going to be blurred and shaky. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to select it, right-click, and trim that as well.

So, if you're done with your movie and you want to just test out the Smart Trim mode, go ahead and run it and then take a look and see what kind of suggestions it's made, because sometimes they might be correct. So, you can always make your movie just a little bit better.