Customer Reviews

Adobe Premiere Elements 4 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(37)

 

 

Adobe Premiere Elements 4 is the best of the 2007 enthusiast-level video editing software packages on the market... but that really isn't saying much. Media editing on the PC is EXTREMELY frustrating because ALL of the software at the hobbyist/enthusiast level is either 1) buggy, 2) difficult to use, or 3) both. In fact, it is hard to say that Premiere Elements 4 is the "best" of the 2007-released programs out there; it would be more accurate to say that the other video editors that came out in 2007 perform at levels lower than PE4. A few examples include...

Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8 - Confusing and counter-intuitive interface as well as incompatibility with certain OS-aspects and hardware make this editor a no-go for most.

Pinnacle Studio 11 - Extremely buggy, poor rendering, and reports of system corruption (??? check out the reviews and newsgroup posts!) will keep most away.

Windows Movie Maker - Version 6 (or three if you aren't going by OS numbering) isn't available for XP... just Vista. 6 doesn't have the power and versatility of Premiere Elements, but it is vastly improved over the XP version. Windows Movie Maker 6 is worth checking if you have Vista, because most version of the OS get it for free (XP also contains the older version of both it and Media Encoder).

Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10 - Roxio, best known for DVD and CD burning software, adds media editing to their suite. Sadly, it crashes so often that it creates more frustration than fun. Almost non-existant tech support and months without a patch are signs that this is software to avoid.

You'd think it would be easy to recommend Premiere Elements 4 with such poor competition, but it is not. On release, PE4 has shown itself to be buggy. During the first three days I used it, the program crashed four times and even erased all of the editing I had saved during one event. Turning off auto-saves helped, as did only importing one file at a time (rather than an entire folder). PE3 had somewhat similar crash issues before it was patched, but eventually became extremely stable (Adobe has decent support for their releases, unlike some companies). PE4 also lacks some of the encoding features many of us would have liked - you can't capture from most cards, and the getting video from DV and harddrive camcorders can be hit-or-miss depending on your specific hardware and whether or not it is supported. Finally, PE4 does not support numerous file types "straight out of the box" that it probably should (the best example of this is .flv "flash" files that PE4 can create but that it can not edit nor import).

What's good about PE4? When it works, the interface is easy to understand and work with. The video files produced tend to be top-notch, and there are a lot of "advanced" options for new users to grow into. There are numerous plug-ins available to expand the power of the software, and many support avenues are available (including books, newsgroups, and discussion lists). DVD burning is built in, simple, professional-looking, and can be improved upon if Photoshop Elements is used (Photoshop can build DVD menu templates). There are some great effects that can be used, and you don't have to have a degree in video editing to learn how to use them. There is also a decent (but not complete) range of pre-set file-saving options to choose from, including QuickTime, Windows Media, AVI, MPEG, Flash, and various mobile products.

Summary: Premiere Elements 4 is the best of the 2007 video editing releases, but it is still buggy and could use improvement. I'd recommend waiting for the first major patch before buying, but if you really need video editing software, try downloading the demo from http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/ and seeing if it is right for you (it was available at the time of this writing. Note that many of the other products mentioned also have demo versions available, too).

For those thinking of upgrading from Premiere Elements 3: Once patched, I never had a problem with PE3 crashing - not so with PE4. Wait for Adobe to release a decent patch before upgrading (it was not available at the time of this writing, but it may be up now - check the site). The new look of PE4s interface is nice, but PE3s wasn't bad, either. The new features range from pointless to moderately useful, but aren't groundbreaking: Beat detection (useful in rare instances), improved audio mixer (nice!), ability to burn to Blu-Ray, upload to YouTube function (pointless), improved keyframe control (can be VERY useful), and various new settings/save options (very useful) are included.

I don't usually write reviews for products but I felt compelled to after reading the damning reviews from other users.

PE4 isn't a perfect product but it far surpasses any of the other products in this class that I've used, including several generations of Windows Movie Maker, Ulead VideoStudio, Ulead Movie Factory and Pinnacle Studio.

I'm using an Intel Dual-Core 2.4GHz system with 2GB RAM and a 250GB HDD running Win Vista Home Premium 32-bit. My computer OS environment is definitely not a "clean install" as I do a lot of software development on it as well as a lot of audio / video / photo editing. I had no trouble installing PE4 and it ran fine out of the box. I've been testing the software pretty thoroughly for the past couple of days building AVI's and burning several DVD's from video clips and photos and have had very few problems. The program has crashed and locked up 2 times, once while scrubbing through a complex transition between 2 videos and another time while editing some text for titles. There's no question that this is an annoyance but the high-end features that you get for under $100 are unbeatable IMHO. The level of customization is unparalleled when handling text, menus, audio and motion effects. Some of the interface elements are a little unintuitive at first but a few quick glances at the Help file circumvented any major dilemnas. Most of the interface is what you'd expect from Adobe - professional and slick.

The effects and transitions render well and the text / fonts for titles look sharp and impressive. The supplied templated menus are a little cheesy and the motion-type menus from Windows MM and Ulead are much nicer. I wish Adobe had spent a little more time here to give users a richer, more polished set of menus.

Overall, however, I was really impressed with the fine control you have over everything from the audio mixing and video editing to motion trails (complete with Bezier paths) for the motion effects. This level of control extends to DVD creation as well. In other products, when creating a DVD menu, it is often frustrating setting the text you want in the place you want it or deciding exactly which main menu and scene menu items to include and display. With PE4, you can fine-tune this to your heart's desire.

I haven't tried uploading to YouTube so I can't comment on that function, nor have I tried working through a High-def workflow. However, if you're primarily working with standard-definition video or creating slideshows, I have no hesitation in wholeheartedly recommending this product.

I hope someone finds this review useful and gives PE4 a shot. For me personally, I'll be abandoning the other video editing software I've used to this point. The best thing to do is to try it out for yourself by downloading the free trial version to make sure it works on your system. You can find the trial at Adobe's website.

I bought this software to replace my older Pinnacle 10 software because it had poor DVD quality when viewing on the new LCD flat screen TV's, kind of like watching through Venetian blinds. I re-made some Pinnacle 10 videos using PE4. The DVD quality is now excellent.

When I first used the capture feature, I had trouble with it. I didn't find any info in the troubleshooting or knowledge base, so I called customer support. They connected me with a guy who really knew his stuff. He walked me through some tests and after removing some stray files from the pinnacle 10 uninstall and fixing a windows registry, all was well. A+ for customer support!

As of now, I made five DVD videos using all features without crashes. I like how you can add as many audio and video layers in the timeline as needed. You can pre-render sections with multiple layers to allow for smooth preview. On my older machine, this really helps. I don't have an HD camcorder, but I did import a MPEG4 HD file made off my HDTV wonder tuner card just as a test. I was able to edit it and burn to re-writable DVD. The picture quality wasn't HD, but as good as any store bought DVD.

Hardware/Software:
Camcorder- Sony, DCR TRV950 using IEEE1394 DV capture
Computer- 2.8GHz Pentium 4
Memory- 2G DDR
Video Card- ATI, Radeon 9800 pro w/128M RAM, 8X AGP
Tuner- ATI, HDTV Wonder
Hard Drives- Two 250G EIDE
OS- Windows XP home edition
Video capture and editing- Adobe Premier Elements 4
Still picture editing- Adobe Photoshop 6
Vector drawing- CorelDraw 11

I'd give it zero stars if one could choose that.

The product is not worth the money or the frustration. It is very `buggy' and nearly unsupported. When using standard definition video, it is somewhat stable but still prone to crashing. So, much so that after nearly every operation, one will become a habitual clicker of "Save" because without developing that habit, a lot of work is lost.

Just to be clear, my machine meets the standards on the box for HD video. To rule out issues with installed software and such as their useless Technical Support documents will blame, after having a lot of problems, I took a blank hard drive, loaded XP (to avoid known issues with Vista), all the XP updates and then Adobe Premier. I then started to create a 15 minute movie from AVI files created by converting MOV file with the codecs found only after the XP and PE 4.0 installations.. All the errors occurred here as well. I had to use AVI files because the software crashed consistently when using MOV files (Quicktime files, and no matter what it says on the box about support for them, it is not really true).

The problems get far worse and more frequent when using HD sources of 720i or more. When using HD video the software will crash often with projects greater than 10 to 15 minutes. The crashes can be very frequent and more so when editing titles.

Playback is also problematic and has obvious `memory leaks, because when run too long or too often, the playback will freeze the video and sound will continue. This makes one wonder how much testing was done prior to release of the product since it is obvious that no memory testing could have been done of this would have been found.

The use of various video formats rely on codecs that Adobe does not supply nor does it maintain total compatibility with them. Even something as common as Quicktime (MOV files), which Adobe does not support without a download of the Quicktime software from Apple, is problematic causing crashes when rendering a project or attempting to "Share" (output to DVD or other format). All of the files that were used in project that crash in PE 4, play fine in Quicktime itself. So, they need to be converted, usually to AVI but the code does not link to the Quicktime DLL correctly and crashes.

Another odd thing is that one of their support documents will tell you that if you have problems, to "Share" your project video as DVD AVI. For HD, one would assume this means DVD AVI Widescreen, the most obvious choice. However, this does not result in a full HD AVI, in fact is rendered at only 720 X 480, and actually saved in 4:3 but played back in !6:9. There are no option to change the settings for DVD AVI. You will loose the whole reason fro using HD, resolution.

The HD "capabilities" of the software are not really there, but just added on top of some old C++ code from prior version and it does not work.

Examples of common other failures that Adobe does not address on their web site nor acknowledge follow.

Premier Elements errors when opening some projects after creating all graphic views in the TimeLine, and this while Task Manager does not show any spike or near limit use of memory or page file:

"Adobe Premier Elements is running low on system memory. Please save your project and process with caution."

How Premier is making this determination is beyond me but what is obvious is that it is the first indicator that even their software engineers knew it was about to crash and did this so often, they needed to warn you of the impending doom created by their poorly written code. What is is really saying is, "the code is a bit lost right now and because we've no error handling in the code, it will soon crash but please don't be upset, we warned you!"

An occasional crash when saving a project:

AppName: adobe premiere elements.exe AppVer: 4.0.0.0 ModName: kernel32.dll
ModVer: 5.1.2600.2180 Offset: 0001eb33

A common crash when editing titles. I get this one every 15 to 30 minutes and sometimes after editing titles 3 or for times no matter how much time has passed. Could be just a few minutes.

AppName: adobe premiere elements.exe AppVer: 4.0.0.0 ModName: medialayer.dll
ModVer: 4.0.0.0 Offset: 0033bfb8


There are also C++ runtime errors, indicating also that a lot of the code is legacy cove from MS Visual C++ and even way back then they did not include any error checking or handlers in their code!

You'll get no place with this and if you read their forms and other multimedia forums, you'll find these errors are very common.

Avoid this product.

I purchased this product with high hopes of making movies of my kids and other family members. My goal was to make simple movies using the advertised "fun" templates and so on. I have a Vista machine with an AMD FX processor and an 8800GTX video card, which should be more than enough horsepower to run the program. What I can say is this program does NOT work well with Vista or at lest my install. Other programs on my machine work fine but this program is terrible! It crashed on me over and over when trying to add an end title to an eight-minute movie. Then when I went to encode the movie (without the end title because I could not add it without the program crashing over and over), the encode took 20 minutes and then when I played the movie it was full of very loud static and white lines all over the movie. Basically it was worthless and I deleted it. I suppose it is possible that Adobe will come out with a patch to this software but at this point in time I do not recommend this product at all. Be warned.

I downloaded the trial version of Premiere Elements 3 and it worked great. I have a JVC Hard Drive camcorder that records in mpeg format. Elements 3 worked great for it and was able to create some cool videos. When I was ready to buy at the end of the trial, Elements 4 was out and was the only option to download from the site. I purchased it. Bad move. Every time I try to upload more than one file at a time it crashes, and when I try to generate a final product to video it always crashes during rendering. I haven't completed one project. I have ended up using the software provided from JVC lately to do some things I had to do, but would like to use a more advanced program.

I have complained to Adobe through phone and email and have not received a refund or any help for that matter in resolving my issue. One time on the phone they had me re-install the software and wouldn't wait on the phone to do it. They said to call back if I was still encountering the issue. This is after I told them I already tried that more than twice before calling. I am very literate in software and had tried that and many other options before calling.

I got this program as part of the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Premiere Elements 4 bundle (which I think is one of the best values for the home photo/video editor). I use a fairly pricey video editing (Sony Vegas) package at our business, but needed a powerful yet inexpensive (a relative term, I know) package to use at home. Here are my observations:

Premiere Elements 4:

Since most of my editing is done on higher dollar packages at work, I was just looking for a home software package to quickly assemble clips, make photo slide shows, and to convert clips for upload to YouTube. This package surprised me with it's drag and drop ease of use. It is fantastic for the home user and does exactly what it says it is going to do. One note about the YouTube integration, it is nothing short of fantastic! I had a clip that was just too big to upload and my expensive work software just was too hard to get the file size and quality they require. Using Premiere Elements, I was able to drop in the large clip, indicate it was for YouTube, and the software did the rest...Including logging in and uploading it to my account right from inside the program. No muss, no fuss, just as advertised!

I have a fairly powerful PC: Intel Dual Core, Vista Ultra, 4 Meg RAM, 1 T HD, etc. So perhaps my set up is keeping me free from the crashes that other reviewers have experienced.

I am very pleased with it for my purposes.

After updating my Premiere 3.0 with Adobe's updates and having the system totally die, I decided to buy 4.0. Mistake. The install required me to do some system clean up due to its large footprint. Once installed, it took so long to even come up I went and did laundry. After it came up and I loaded a 3.0 project, which allowed me to do some more laundry, the software caused my system to do the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). I literally had only entered in some text, when the system crashed. I decided to uninstall 3.0 and reinstall it without any updates and went back in order to finish my project. I would strongly suggest waiting until they figure this one out before purchasing it. I only gave it 2 stars instead of 1 because I think for the brief time it was up that the design will be better than 3.0, but then again my experience was so brief I could be wrong about that.

This is probably a real nice program like all other Adobe programs, but you can not work with the new High Definition AVCHD format that the new flash memory video cameras produce. Unfortunately I had to return this software to Amazon, and received full credit. I gave this one star because I couldn't use it.

I purchased this as part of a Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements bundle. After spending some time with the Photoshop program and being generally satisfied, I tried giving Premiere a shot. I wanted a solution to create MPEG-2 videos playable on my TiVo and I'd been doing this in Windows Movie Maker and then converting the WMV files using ffmpeg. This works, but it is not the most straight-forward solution.

All I can say about Premiere is that it was simply too slow to be worthwhile. I tried to import two 1 GB clips which I wanted to trim & then splice, but after 20 minutes of disk churning, the second clip still hadn't fully imported. What's worse, something about the installation screwed up my Windows Media Player installation so that I couldn't view DVDs or MPEG-2 files in WMP.

I've uninstalled this program and will not use it again.