I am a new user of Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 (going three months) and I use it for most of my video editing projects. It is, without a doubt, the best video editing software for the consumer! It's like a regular movie post-production studio. But I need help with something...

Does anyone know any good effect plug-in thingies that have realistic filters that simulate elements and stuff like that, such as fire, rain, snow, smoke, etc., sort of like the Bravo Studio Pack for Pinnacle Studio Plus. For now I will do all my high-special effect scenes in Studio Plus 10.7, then export the finished movie effect sequences to Premiere Elements. If I can just get filter plug-ins that can do nearly the same element/Bravo-style effects for APE, I will be fine. Can you guys help me here?

To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't exist; although elements is more geared towards an all in one package, it's origins is Premiere Pro, which is firmly routed as an editing application. To this end, such compositing and effects creation are generally not featured as standard or as a plugin. I may of ocurse be incorrect, but I've never come accorss such plugins for Premiere Pro or Elements.

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All of the effects you've described come under the general heading of 'particle flow dynamic' effects. These are all significantly non-trivial I'm afraid.

Like Marc, I know of no plugin for Premiere Pro (let alone Elements) that will do this. However, if You have After Effects you ciould look at the trapcode Particular plugin. It should (from what I understand of it) be able to do what you want. Ae does have some particle plugins of it's own but these are not likely up to the taqsk of what you want. You might get lucky though so worth a play.

however, for all my own particle effects (fire, dust, smoke etc) I use ParticleIllusion. It's a stand alone app that you can use to 'overlay' your particle effects over your own footage. It has literally thousands of presets and will def do what you want of it. It does work better in conjunction with a compositing tool like AE though.

As a last idea, depending on exactly what you want to achieve, you might be able to find some stock footage and overlay that over your movie. The benefit of this idea (if you can find the right footage) is that you'll be able to do an averagely-ok job in Premiere Elements - assuming 'elements' comes with a similar set of keying effects as 'pro'.

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