Customer Reviews

Adobe Premiere Elements

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

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

Let me start things off by saying that I have a Dell 8400 with a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz processor, dual hard drives at 7200 rpm with seek times below 10ms and 1GB DDR2 SDRAM of memory. More than enough power and speed to handle any video project.
You can do a lot with this software. Unfortunately there are a lot of bugs in it. I managed to burn a very small project, under a half hour in length, to get the feel of the product without any problems. It worked well. Then I moved on to a bigger project and that's when it happened. The program became a nightmare of problems. For example I mistakenly added two brightness adjustments to the same clip along with numerous other changes to my project. When I tried to save the project the program would not let me save it and just crashed. It does not tell you why it crashes and does not save the project. It took two weeks for me to figure this out. After you create your project you more than likely won't be able to burn it to a DVD. Originally I thought it was just me and that I was doing something wrong but after going to the Adobe Premiere Elements user forum I know it is definitely the product because too many other people have the same problem. There is a work around to the DVD burning problem by burning the project to a hard disk and then using some other software such as Nero to burn the DVD but who needs the headache. They need to do something fast to fix this software because they have a lot of irate customers who will likely buy some other product next time around if they don't. If I were you I would look around for something more stable. What good is the software if you can do a lot of great things but can't burn a DVD or save your project?

Since writing this original review after many, many hours of frustration and hard work I have finally determined the reason for my burning problem. It turned out to be my Mcafee Virus/Firewall software interfering with the burn. After speaking with Mcafee and adjusting some options everything has been great. No more burn problems. Because of the original burn problem I started to test various other burning software and have not found anything that comes close to Elements. I have changed my rating to four stars. The reason I don't give it five stars is because of the vague error messages Elements gives out when a problem occurs and there are some other minor bugs. The error messages are no help in solving problems and you don't get much help from Adobe either. If you try this product and have burning problems suspect interference from one or more of the other programs on your system.

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.

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 !***

I have spent the past 8 months using Adobe premier Elements. I have used Vegas Video and Ulead in the past. Premier Elements is hands-down the best editor I have ever used and one of the most user-friendly programs of any sort I have used. Installation was a breeze, the supplied tutorial was helpful to get started and I could get to work without once reading the manual. It has never once crashed or stalled on me.

I should stress that Premier Elements is for a specific group of users: home video editing for non-profesionals, with a standard DV camcorder (not MPEG or DVD camera), who want really polished results.

The Interface is very customisable and easy to use. real-time rendering shows you any edits and effects you make instantly. The titling mode is extrememly customisable. Slideshows from stills are very easy to do and the pan and zoom capabilities are great. DVD burning has been effortless and the results look absolutely great on a big-screen TV.

Its great to have all this functionality (capture/edit/title/DVD design and burn) within a single package.

My only gripe with the software is that the included DVD menus are very limited, cheesy/cliched and there in no way to add your own menu layouts with customised backgrounds or buttons. There are ways to hack the included menus but it requires Photoshop 7 or CS. Perhaps version 2 will add this functionality, or at least a wider selection of DVD menus.

Please ignore those reviewers who haven't taken the time to learn the software. Every new software has a learning curve. PE is easier than most. You can get a simple DVD made in a flash, and as your skills improve, you can learn the more advanced features. Depite being a very competent computer user and moderately competent video editor, I am glad to say it is me, not the software, that is the limiting factor in the quality of my work.

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.

I gave this a 3 star because of all the problems I had before I was able to finally burn a DVD with this program. After I had mastered it, I should give it a 5 star.
It all began when the program would not recognize my 2 LG 16x burners. Solved this by downloading new firmware. Second problem was after spending 10 hours putting together a project it would not burn, as it kept going into error after 1 hour and 30 minutes assembling the info. I read on a review that this problem might be caused by there being no burn speed set control in the program so you would be forced to use a DVD with the same burn speed as your burner. i.e. 8x burner with 8x disk. So I spend 3 days looking for 16x minus (program seems to only recognize minus). Problem still persisted. Then I went into Adobe site and went through all of their recommendations to no avail. Another 5 days gone. Finally, while playing with pop up menu's I found "delete unused tracks". After doing that the rain stopped, the sun came out, the birds started singing and the darn program burned my disk. Lucky for me I didn't follow some of the advise on the internet from reviewers that said "wait for the next release, this one has too many problems". I just hate giving up on a problem.

Last June I bought a bundle package of Photoshop Elements 3.0 and Premier Elements 1.0 at Fry;s Electronics after reading a very good review from PC Magazine. I installed Photshop right away and have not encountered any problem. However, when I tried to install Premier Elements 1.0 yesterday I kept getting the massage " User name or serial number are not recognized ...." I called Adobe today and was told that since Adobe has just released Premier Elements 2.0 I will no longer have Adobe's complementary support, and the agent asked me to either buy the new version or pay $39.95 for tech support. This is not right. I cannot even installed my 10 months old Premier Elements 1.0 for the first time and Adobe has a nerve to ask me to buy a new upgrade version or pay for support. So this is my last Adobe software. And also there is a warning to all people that don't buy old Adobe software because if you need support you will be out of luck. Furthermore, if you buy a current version software you must install in your computer right away and try it out as much as you could. Adobe's complementary support will be expired as soon as Adobe releases a new version.

Binh

It is not labeled as such - but this is the old version of Adobe Premiere (v. 1.0). Instead one should buy the Adobe Premiere v. 2.0 which is more current and is also listed at Amazon.

I was delighted that Adobe decided to enter this market. The product is promising, but there are a number of critical problems that make me wish I'd waited for the next version.

1. The documentation is poor. Although there is a great training video included, this only covers the basics. Good luck trying to figure out how to use the rest of the options, particularly the Advanced Effects and key frames.

2. There is limited ability to handle video originally from non-digital source since timecode is absent. The only scene detection method is based on timecode.

3. The encoding process is relatively slow. Although you can encode to a folder. Apparently you can't make a DVD from the folder that will play in a regular DVD player. If you want to burn directly to DVD, there is no way to set burn speed (a problem if you have 8X drive and 4X disks).

4. The number of title animation options is limited to two, scroll and crawl.

5. There are stability problems during encoding. The program can freeze and the problem is sometimes difficult to fix. See Adobe web site FAQ.