Adobe Premiere Elements

Rating:
Summary: The most powerful video editor for hobbyists
Review: Adobe's new Premiere Elements is a great video editing program! I was amazed at how rock solid it is.

It is easy to capture your video directly to the timeline, gives you real time editing even after applying all kinds of effects, a live TV preview to see your edits & effects (like you would see in a TV studio) and a great method for automatically generating your DVD with custom scene index.

The product included a complete manual, a full tutorial as well as a DVD with cool training movies on Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. I was really impressed that it was easy to learn, but didn't limit my creativity. Every drag & drop effect is completely customizable.

If you want to mix photos and video in your project you should definitely check out the bundle of Photoshop Elements 3 plus Premiere Elements. The integrations is great. You can organize and edit your stills in Photoshop Elements and send them directly to Premiere Elements as a slideshow where you can do all kinds of cool pans & zooms (ala Ken Burns effect). You can also use Photoshop Element's shape tool to add thought bubbles and other cool effects into your video (think 60's style Batman special effects).

I found Premiere Elements to be much more stable than other video editing applications that I bought and have now discarded. I think you will too!

Some reviews worth googling:
Premiere Elements, Bob Turner
Premiere Elements, Marc Peters
Premiere Elements, James Morris
Premiere Elements, John Virata
Premiere Elements, Joe Lavery
Premiere Elements, Mike Langberg



Rating:
Summary: Limited use - Only for DV and no USB Video Transfer
Review: I got this editor hoping to edit a variety of videos, but it only works for DV - what a joke! You are limited to the size, compression, etc. of standard DV.

Also, I wish it supported the new USB 2.0 video transfer capability (called USB Video Class) being implemented by manufacturers so you don't need to buy a separate FireWire card. I'm thinking of getting a JVC GRDZ7U camcorder which has that feature and would love to bring the video directly into Premiere via a high-speed USB 2.0 connection.


Rating:
Summary: I've been **USING** it - Great!
Review: I have been using Premiere Elements (PE) for several months through several beta releases and have used the final version for a few weeks now. (DISCLAIMER - I am NOT an Adobe employee or shareholder.)

Previously I had bought and used two similar "high end" products and was not very happy with them as a new user and new to digital movie making.

I've found PE for my use to be much easier to use and more suitable than the other companies' products. It never once crashed or locked up my system (WIN XP) as did one of the competitor's products multiple times until I stripped every single program out of my computer, loaded every single update and finally got disgusted.

With Premiere Elements I even used other programs during the process of preparing the movie to be burned and then during actual burning and ended up with an hour of very nice looking video that plays great on both the computer and the DVD player.

I found as I got used to using it that I could produce a usable movie with little effort and as I became more familiar and "explored" other features and options I got to really like the flexibility of processing the sound to remove the noise from my low end Mini DV Camcorder and started to tweak the video in each scene where the shooting conditions weren't optimum.

My personal opinion is that you can't go wrong with PREMIERE ELEMENTS.

***I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS SOFTWARE!***

Why not buy it WITH Photoshop Elements 3.0 in the package also available here from Amazon???

My personal opinion is that you can't go wrong with PREMIERE ELEMENTS and the package with Photoshop Elements 3.0 (which includes the features of Photoshop Album that used to cost extra) is a **great bargain** with this Amazon special deal.

I've been a casual user of Photoshop Elements 1.0 then 2.0 and 3.0 with the combined Album is likewise a wonderful program with some nice new features to make it even easier to use for the beginner while providing some more powerful new features.

***I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PACKAGE !***


Rating:
Summary: I could not modify a simple slide show
Review: I made a simple slide show, with music. Then the trouble started. I could not figure out how to adjust time of each slide and could not adjust transitions. Instructions and tutorials were hopelessly wrong or confusing. After five hours of trying all sorts of combinations, I give up. Its back to wonderful PowerPoint, FlipAlbum and Adobe Album, all easier to use. Is there anyway to change the itme on screen of all slides or the transition of all slides without having to change each of 300 slides manually? The instructions do not work. Sorry but I do not think this is a good product and am disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Good but overpriced
Review: I purchased Adobe Premier Elements a couple of weeks ago and have started using it with my Sony DV Camcorder. I have a number of initial comments.

This is V1.0 of this software and with all first releases there is a risk you will get an unusable product. That is not true of of this product. Its robust, and I've only had it crash once. When it did it seamlessly recovered from the fault. It looks like Adobe has decided to concentrate on a well tested product rather than expand the feature list. Presumably V2.0 will contain more features.

To date I've concentrated on on the first stage of the process, capturing data from the tape. This works well but is lacking some features. Things I've noticed are:
1. The inability to determine, from the video content, when a scene has changed. Instead this software looks at the time/date stamps on the tape to determine when a scene has changed. This is fine except that for my early tapes I did not set the clock!
2. The inability to capture to any data format other than AVI. However if you only had time to implement one file format AVI is probably the best one. It just consumes a lot of disk space (13GB per 1hr tape).
3. The inability to use any hardware interface other than IEEE-1394 (Firewire). As with my previous comment this is probably the best choice if you can only implement one hardware interface.

I expect to soon start using the video editing and DVD writing features and cannot comment on them at this stage.

I think this software is, for the features it provides, overpriced. It should be around $40 and not nearer to $80.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent digital image processing and management
Review: I purchased this after trying the trial version from Adobe.

I like the interfaces, the controls and the results I am getting on my digital images. The RAW converter was a big factor for me as that is what I shoot with my Nikon D70.

The loading time is a little slow on my pc but not intolerable.

Rating:
Summary: Adobe Premiere elements is the way to go for video
Review: I've been working with premiere Pro since it came out. It is an amazing program and elements takes the most basic parts of that program and puts them in a cheap but powerful version.

One thing that makes Adobe Premiere elements so awesome is its multiple tracks and the effects palette. If you want to do the Ken Burns effect with photomontages (that three take a still image and pan around. So it looks like it's moving) and Premier elements is the way. At a couple key frames and you're good to go.

One thing to note if you use Premier elements. You will not later be able to go to premiere Pro as premiere Pro cannot import elements projects. Not yet at least. Hopefully that will be fixed though.

One other note, if you're thinking of buying the stand-alone version of Premier elements by a bundled with Photoshop elements. I think it's only a few dollars more, but you get Photoshop elements, which is great. That's all I got to say about that.

Have fun and get it done

Rating:
Summary: Good, but could use more
Review: Overall, this is very good software, and some of the tools are shockingly powerful. I used Premiere Elements to transfer a stack of home videos onto DVD, and I was very satisfied with the feature set and the end product.

I give this software four stars because there are not nearly enough menu templates included. Also, the layout of many scene menu templates is nonsensical and severely limits your ability to enter titles. If you are lucky, you have Photoshop and can edit the templates for yourself. If not, there does not appear to be any source for additional templates, and the included editor only works for title screens, not for menus.

As a final note, you should expect to spend some time reading the manual and the (excellent) online help. The common thread among Adobe products is that they are powerful but non-intuitive.

Rating:
Summary: How to fix a bug in a good program
Review: This editor is highly complex but seems quite capable. There is one thing poeple should know, however. If the program crashes immediately upon opening, and you have the popular program Total Recorder, then either uninstall Total Recorder -- it is not compatible with Elements -- or uninstall and reinstall and when re-installing Total Recorder, do not use the "driver" option. I hope you can benefit from a couple hours of frustration I have had. This program is worth the hassle.

Rating:
Summary: Good for DV, but...
Review: This program does not support anything but 720x480 resolution for NTSC or the corresponding PAL resolution. For DV project sources, this is a non-issue. If you've captured footage from your analog camcorder at 352x480 and give it to PE as imported media, it assumes that you want your final project to have a distorted picture with wide black margins on the sides, i.e. it assumes your source has 'missing' pixels. If your using PE for the straight and narrow, (DV in/out or DVD out) it's probably fine. If you're looking for a general purpose movie editor that accepts a wide variety of input formats and has the flexibility to create a wide variety of output formats, don't buy PE.