Customer Reviews

Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Video editing on the PC is more voodoo than artisty - almost every "consumer level" editing program on the market has compatibility problems, the software that comes with the hardware tends to be next to useless (if you can get it to work at all), and customer support is TERRIBLE. Most of what is to be found is geared towards either 1) encoding low-quality video either from TV or cell phones or 2) "dummy-editing" for those that want to get poorly-edited YouTube video on the air. Consumers that want to do high-quality video editing but aren't professionals (read: can't spend thousands on one piece of software) are, for the most part, ignored.

Having messed with numerous products including Pinnacle Studio (very buggy and contains huge compatibility issues), WinTV's Win2000 (comes with their card - lacks usefulness), VirtualDub (free and having huge potential with numerous features, but unless you're willing to spend a tremendous amount of time working with it, have the exact hardware the fan-community is using, and have superior knowledge of the technology, you won't find it useful), etc... in the end, Premiere is the best. It is professionally done, VERY compatible compared to other software packages, powerful, easy to use, and easy to understand. If you want to do video editing on the PC, this is where you should start - everything else just creates too many headaches.

So, what can you do with Premiere Elements 3.0? You can combine multiple video clips into a movie; you can narrate a video; you can create video for your blog (if you have a camera); you can burn professional-looking DVDs with full menus that will blow people away. Whether you are making home movies of your kids, compiling a highlight reel of your best sporting moments, or making a movie on an extremely tight budget, this is the best software out there in the price range.

As to what 3.0 improves from 2.0: To the casual user not a lot. There are a few more minor options, but the big advantage comes when burning DVDs - in 2.0, my sports DVDs looked terrible with a great deal of "jumping" (I'm assuming this was caused by the software not using enough compression keyframes, but don't quote me on that) - in 3.0, everything is extremely clear and smooth. There are also more exporting options and more useable codecs, though the software still lacks the ability to switch to any installed codecs (a major flaw, IMO, but one most other programs at this level share).

Note: In order to make DVD templates (DVD Menus) for 3.0, you need Photoshop Elements 5.0 - earlier versions do not seem to work (or, at least, I can't get them to work properly). While you can make very good DVD menus within Premiere, you can't save them from Premiere for use in other projects. If that is something you might want to do (and, quite honestly, it may not be for many users), pick up the "bundled" version of Premiere and Photoshop and save yourself some money.

Now, a few things that Premiere Elements can't do/doesn't do very well:
- Capture video from "legacy" devices like VCRs. Premiere can capture video from some devices, but it doesn't work particularly well with many capture cards (nor is it really designed to). Either send your VCR feed through a digital camcorder or use another recording method ("Tivo" or a capture card with useful capture software).
- "Mega" special effects. Premiere Elements has numerous effects like dissolve, fade, time-stretching (slow motion), and distortion - it does not, however, do major CGI-effects. You might be able to pull of a Star Trek "beam in" effect, but you'll need another program for most others.
- Post-capture video improvement. Premiere Elements can do some video enhancement, but it is more of a timeline editing tool - if you want to significantly improve the quality of your captured video (removing major noise, massive high-quality zooming, etc..) you'll need another program.

To address a few other negative reviews...

"Just a quick warning: trying to deal with Adobe is a nightmare. I spent 45 minutes on their customer service line today, waiting for someone to answer. Twice, I was disconnected and had to call back."

I've never had to deal with Adobe's customer support, so I don't know whether or not this is true - I do know, however, that CS in other retail companies in this market is terrible.


"I imported some video from a DVD that I made myself, and the program shut down. It said I had to go to a website and type in a 20-digit "encoder activation" and the site would give me another number that I could use to activate the MPEG2 part of the product. But the site won't take the number. I keep getting an invalid code message when I type it in."

This situation is true - you will need an internet connection AND you'll have to register a code to enable certain compressors. However, all you need to do is copy and paste the code from the software window and into your web browser (there's even a button that will copy the code - you just have to paste it in). No one I know has ever had the problem described above - though it could occur.

"No web support or patches on Adobe site to date. "

There are numerous plugins available on the Adobe website and a patch - just go to the updates section of their webpage.

In conclusion: Premiere Elements is the best software out there for most users. Other reviewers should feel free to post if there is a better software package available.

I have been frustratingly using Pinnacle for years. I started with Pinnacle 7.0 and had problems with it locking up. When Pinnacle offered Pinnacle 9.0 with claims that all its problems were solved I bought it. It was as bad in fact worse than the 7.0. It had many features that were locked and could only be opened using a credit card.
I received Adobe Pinnacle Elements 3.0 from Amazon this week and it is perfect! It has many features Pinnacle lacked and works perfectly! No locking up and the sound is synchronized with the video unlike Pinnacle which usually ran a ½ second off. You would hear the hammer on its upstroke. Speech was irritating too.
I have had good luck with Photoshop Elements for several years and when Adobe offered a product for video editing I was happy to get it. Adobe is a class act.

Having used Pinnacle9 and NeroUltimate7 and a few other video editors, I was ready for disappointment and frustration when I masochistically bought yet another video editor Premiere3.0, and I was not disappointed. I have a fast laptop with lots of hard disk and 2G of ram but it barely is able to run this program. I have been able to make actual DVDs with it, using collections of 30 second AVI clips from a digital camera, but it is a tenuous process and you never know if you will be able to get all the way through without something going kaflooey. Some observations:

1. DVD markers dont stick with the scene, when you add stuff you have to move the markers all over again to sync up with the scenes. This is positively boneheaded, yet is described in the manual as a 'feature' not a bug.

2. RAM usage goes up pretty fast. Once you get more than 30 or so 1 minute clips in the workspace you could easily be up over 1.4G of RAM usage, incredible as that may sound. At which point Premiere will tell you it is getting low on memory (on a 2G RAM machine) and warn you to shut down. (It is hard to believe any of the Premiere software developers ever actually used the application for anything other than 1 minute long projects, as it seems barely able to handle an hour-long project with lots of clips and still jpgs etc.)

3. Editing the DVD menu text is painfully slow, the CPU goes to 100% and response time is like 30 seconds when you try to do a simple thing like change the menu text of a DVD menu screen.

4. Adding clips to the workspace is painfully slow, it must process each clip for scene detection and can take tens of minutes for adding like 20 1 minute long AVI clips. I am not sure what their assumptions were about typical content users might use, but 20 1 minute long AVI clips seems not an unreasonable amount for a DVD, yet it brings Premiere3 to its knees.

5. 3.0 Crashes on Vista. A patch must be downloaded, which I didnt find out about before deinstalling it from Vista, so I dont know if it works at all, and am not tempted to try it again on Vista.

6. DVD and MPEG export require a web page authorization scheme which is locked to your PC. One authorization, maybe is OK, but no, there are at least two and who knows maybe more. Try to export to mpg, up pops the authorization, so I do it, then go to export to DVD and voila another authorization! Oh joy. I guess this means you cannot install 3.0 on multiple PCs as the keys are locked to the PC MAC code.

7. It is fairly easy to crash. I have a 20 minute long project, nothing fancy, no transitions, no narration, just 30 or so 30 second clips and some titles. It will crash after about a half hour of working on the project, even with nothing else running on the PC. So I am nervously saving every minute or so and rebooting the PC every hour to start over again.

8. Project save does not work after two or more saves. Fails with some meaningless error and requires you to do a 'save as' with a new name.

9. All that griping aside, there are a lot of neat features not found in Pinnacle9 or NeroVision7, and the program menu structure is fairly easy to use. I am just a nervous wreck when using the program never knowing if all my editing will be suddenly lost when it crashes.

10. Update: after my last experience of trying to make a 40 minute dvd with about 50 short avi clips, I would revise my review to 2 stars if Amazon would let me. I got numerous low memory warnings loading my project (with 2G of ram), it sat there for minutes at 100% cpu before I could even select a menu option. So I stopped trying to edit the content and just burn it before Premiere went up in smoke, it started the encoding ok, at 1.4G of ram used, finished encoding a mere 4 hours later, then started the burn, and a mere 1 hour later finally crashed with a meaningless 'unknown error' message. Oh what fun!

I cannot believe Adobe has any software QA department at all. How this program could have ever been released is beyond me. How the phrase 'rock solid' ever got into the blurb hype above is also beyond me. It may be, as others have said, that this app only runs on certain hardware. Also, it appears that for lengths greater than 10 minutes one must use the strategy another reviewer described of making multiple sub projects, exporting them to mpg, then merging them in a separate project, or even a separate program ie one of the numerous simpler DVD authoring programs out there that actually work for hour long compositions.

11. Update - AHA! apparently there is some fine print somewhere saying that it only works with Intel processors. I have an AMD CPU laptop which may be the problem. This should be made more obvious to the average consumer. I will try it on my Intel desktop, hoping that the web authorization will allow a second install.

12. Update #2: Reinstalled it on a new HP Vista PC, with 2G ram and dual core Intel CPU and fast hard drive. The program now is actually usable as far as GUI responsiveness compared to running it on a laptop. I was able to burn a 20 minute long DVD of AVI clips with no problem. However, the program locked up and I had to kill it with task manager when I tried to do an hour long DVD with about 50 AVI clips.

Despite reading the reviews that said that it had many powerful features, I purchased Premier Elements (PE) expecting a fairly basic, wizard driven application. The out of the box experience was indeed simple. My first DVD project was about as basic an experience as using Windows Movie Maker (pretty easy). After doing more projects, I have come to realize that PE really does have numerous high-end capabilities.

Adobe has done a good job of hiding the more advanced capabilities beneith the surface until you are "ready" for them. For instance, the default view for the project is "Sceneline", which is a very basic, clip by clip representation of the movie's progression. Much of PE's power, however, lies in the "Timeline" view, where multiple audio and video tracks can be composed. Title, audio, and video clips have properties that can be associated with keyframes, the "tweening" done between points in time. For instance, to have a title gradually grow larger between points in time, a keyframe is inserted for the size property at one point in time, than another keyframe is inserted after navigating to the second point in time. Once the text is enlarged at the second point, PE will grow or shrink the title between the points. The same principle applies to other base properties such as position and opacity, as well as properties based on effects that can be placed on each clip. Though I know the full version of Premier has many more bells and whistles, such as particle effects, PE seems to have the essential elements (pardon the pun) to compose professional looking videos. Another surprise was the variety of output options. Though the software has great DVD support, it can also export DVD image files (I don't mean photos), several video file formats, as well as just video, audio, or stills.

A final point of raving for PE is for the quality of title and DVD menu templates. Most of the templates are cleverly conceived, and thankfully they are truly templates in the sense that you can pretty much re-build or adjust about anything you might need to. That said, don't expect full blown DVD menu authoring, the program *is* limited to the basic play movie/scene selection paradigm.

Down sides: Adobe has always had a way of building user interface "gizmos" that are less than intuitive. There are several-not-so obvious user interface scenarios among the more advanced features of the software. I am not too critical of Adobe over these, however, because everything about the basics of using the program is quite simple.

Stability has been a bit of a problem, but only since I installed Vista (RTM). Both times PE crashed, its auto-save feature prevented me from losing any work (if I had lost work, I would feel obliged to dock a star). Hopefully Adobe will release a patch to address this.

Probably thanks to inheriting code from the full version of Premier, it is clear that PE represents many man years of effort, something that anyone in this products price range will have a difficult time competing with. All I needed was a program to help me transfer my Mini-DV tapes onto DVDs; what I got was a surprisingly rich application. Everyone likes a pleasant surprise.

I do a pretty good bit of video production. I have used let's say most of them in the quest of finding a video editor that would do the real things I need. Ulead Video Studio 10 Plus is pretty good, but it lacks in the audio section. Pinnacle: not worth the bucks I paid for it at Best Buy. Magix: nice but seriously lacking the depth needed in the audio section.
I had used Premiere Pro before and liked a lot of the features provided in it but the price, my god, was just too much. I found Premiere Elements on Amazon and hoped that it would do the job. It did.
Elements 3 has almost and I say almost features as does Premiere Pro. Some features have been streamlined for the amateur but learning to use Elements has been fun and productive.
I would recommend Adobe Premiere Elements 3 to any intermediate to advanced video editing person.

I rated this with four un-deserved stars because it basically is a great program when it works with some computers. You see even if you have a fast computer with super charged daul-core processor and 2 GB of RAM, most of you will still have problems. It will tell you after around 15 minutes of work and doing some fades, pans, zooms that you have a memory problem (you really don't; it's the poorly programed software working with Windows XP). Save your work now before it crashes" type message box comes up. You better stop quick and save it or lose it. Some computers might be totally compatible with this Premier Elements and have no crashes (these lucky ones will tell you it's something wrong you did; don't believe them); most computers will have problems.

The Adobe programmers must have not tested this software with any video past 20 minutes long. Did they take Windows XP seriously? I doubt it. Maybe after 5 minutes of testing these young kid programmers padded themselves on the back and did the longer video testing on a MAC. They need to hire an older programmer that has been around the block that can program this software to handle windows memory problems and fire all them x-hacker kids with the tatoos and earrings in their nose to program this software. You know, pay for an older expert programmer worth his salt to re-write the program so it can handle Windows XP memory problems. Then we could all boast about all the good features this software has.


OK I have a work around. It works with me every time. Here's what you do. After you spent a considerable amount of time and you have almost 20 minutes length, with all your fades and pans and such; save it now. OK, after that go to FILE, EXPORT MOVIE and go and export to to a new folder you have created. It allows you to rename the file and you go ahead and it export a .AVI clean file. Yes, a clean .AVI file that has none of your fades, wipes, pans, or linked files of all your videos and photos that is hogging up your memory and system.

Now after that, you exit Premier Elements. Then you open up Premier Elements again and start a new project linked to the new folder you created with that .AVI file of the whole movie. Bring in the .AVI file and then you can make a DVD without crashing and saying there is an error and it takes much faster to burn a DVD movie. Now if you want to make an over hour long DVD, then do this every 20 minutes. Or export an hour long movie and bring it in again as a new project and make a two hour long video or longer. It seems stupid, but it works and it's the stupid people at Adobe not looking out for us non-professionals who want to make a professional video without the software crashing; and saying it's our fault (like not buying a dumb MAC). Do they make sure the software doesn't work that well with our IBM compatible computers to force us to buy a "stinkin" Mac? I don't need your stinkin mac!!!

Again this is for most of us that even have a fast running computer that Adobe Premier Elements doesn't like anyhow (like most of our computers). Man, if these Adobe people could find out a way to love Windows XP by programing Premier Elements correctly to fix the memory errors, it would sell like hot cakes.

After using this product for over three months I'm convinced I will never use Adobe product software again in my life.

Let me explain my situation. I sit down to edit a movie, I own a Dell XPS with more than enough memory, hard drive space...etc. to handle any computer software on the market today. You'd think that Premiere Elements could manage to behave itself just like the other countless software programs on my PC. But noooooooooo, not Adobe.

After editing over 4 hours of video (including all the menu screens with all the little texts and buttons just the way I like 'em) I decide to burn my two days worth of editing to a DVD. Let me assure you (to those of you who are convinced this a continous human-error on my part) that I know my way around a PC and the software. The first thing I do is disable my Internet connection, my spyware software, and my anti-virus software. So the only program running on my PC is Adobe Premiere Elements. I then tell the software to burn my production to a disc. This is where it gets fun.

I burn my productions to 8.5GB discs for better quality and with over 4 hours of footage the extra space is convenient. Adobe then goes to work encoding my files. This is an 8 hour process, which by the way is ridiculous. With all the this new, laser-fast technology being developed we still don't have a computer editing program that can break a snail's pace.

This program then proceeds to push my PC to the limit trying to get this simple disc burned. I can actually hear the cooling fan working overtime in there. Anyway, about 7 hours into the burn the DVD abruptly pops out of the drive with a nice little message form Adobe..."Error".

This wouldn't be that big of a problem if you ignore the fact that this has happened over 8 times in the last 30 days. Or if you can calmy come to the conclusion that you have just wasted (and over-worked your computer) for nothing for over 7 hours.

Low and behold, another costly coaster for the collection! Thanks Adobe!

Oh, there are other times too. For example when the product decides it has tortured me enough to allow me one burn process the whole way through, only to find out 8 hours later...there is no sound to my production!

I am running Windows XP NOT Windows Vista so there is no compatibility issues, just a really bad product form Adobe. A fair warning my fellow consumers.

A near perfect program in my opinion. Only downside is that it's a total memory hog...thus, 4 stars and not 5.

If you like to make videos and are detail oriented then I would say that this is the consumer video program for you. I tried Nero out and the default Movie Maker that comes with many pc's and found this one to be so much better. There is a lot of versatility regarding sound (you can fade, add, remove reduce or increase audio options, have multiple layers) and video (multiple overlays for introductions, fading, transitions, effects, etc.). I've only made one video but the project required a lot of detail in order to make it slick and seemingly authentic. A classmate and I did a skit for our graduate school class based on a movie. With an image I found on the internet I was able to recreate the DVD Menu, select scenes, mix in the soundtrack onto our video, fade all audio and video transitions and have rolling credits at the end. The versatility of this consumer video program is right up someone's alley if they are looking for many ways to express their creativity. A bonus feature that Nero did not allow, you can put in still photos into your video and determine how many seconds it plays. However, it should be noted that I didn't have the Nero Ultimate addition. Overall, I'm very happy about the use of the program. My only complaints are those below.

I'm running a Dell "productivity" laptop. I had not intended to get into video editing but recently took it up. I have a 600m with shared video memory (can't upgrade :( ), 597 Mhz - 512 RAM, 1.80 GhZ, 40 GB hard drive (16GB free). Unfortunately, this is not nearly enough to make the program run smooth. I would recommend maxing out your machines...well, everything, if it's cost effective. If you don't mind having to take a little more time with the program you'll be able to do pretty well with it. When you're done with your DVD/Movie and want to burn it has to encode the information before burning. For a 16 minute video with a few audio tracks this took about 35-40 minutes. Once this is done then copies burn as fast as your drive. I did work in Word while the video was encoding and nothing froze but this was pushing it. Sometimes the video or sound would cut in and out or go choppy because my machine's memory just wasn't enough.

SPECIAL NOTES: You can download a 30 day trial from Adobe, DO IT! You may decide it's just not for you but beware, the download is 700 MB so be prepared with your highspeed line and your patience. To make it go faster don't use wireless but hook up your LAN line...it transfers quicker.

If you do get this program, congrats! But two things to note...plan out how many DVD's you want to burn because you have to enter this number before you burn the project. Also, read the manual or be willing to be make mistakes on your first video. Some of the default settings (like that for widescreen) cannot be changed after you begin a project. This rendered my project in 4:3 instead of the native 16:9 the camcorder shoots in. If you order directly from Adobe you can't download it and Best Buy sells it for 100 so don't go there unless you have too. Good luck!

After more than a year of frustration (crashes, bug patch after patch, poor technical support) with Pinnacle, switched to Premiere Elements 3.0/ Photoshop Elements 5. Installed on fresh XP MSE SP2, 3.2 Ghz P4, 1GB memory- no problems at all with install. Created first 30-40 minute video with lots of transition effects, multiple audio tracks, embedded slide shows, non-motion menu in 3 hours (including learning curve- but remember that I already had a very good idea of what to do and the new Elements 3.0 SCENELINE interface is similar to Pinnacle interface which I already knew). Highly recommend Premiere Elements 3.0 for home video users.

This Premiere Elements 3.0 is great; I think it's one of the Adobe products with an outstanding value. With the function it has--especially with multi track video capability--to me it's really superb, for the price. The only effort that you need to unlock the MPEG export capability is to connect to internet. Thanks to Amazon for quick delivery and to Adobe for their quality product.