Customer Reviews

Adobe Premiere Elements 7 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(28)

 

 

I am NOT a newbie to video editing, in fact I have been an avid user of Adobe Premier Elements for some time now...with ver. 4 being the most recent before the version 7 purchase. Let me get this out in the open, I was disgusted with Adobe PE7 at first because I was trying to edit and burn footage from my same old camcorders....footage that Adobe PE3 and 4 handled just fine. I have tried MULTIPLE projects now and have yet to be able to render or burn a DVD using the MP4 (avc H.264) footage from my Sanyo Xacti or my Samsung NV24HD. Even worse I cannot keep a project of any size open long enough to do any editing before the program gives me a "low on memory" warning and then crashes! Version 4 was crazy enough, as I was always sure to hit the "save" button many times while editing, but this version 7 is a joke for these formats. I can't even add the MP4 files to the time-line without it crashing. Now for the good part and why I give this release a 4 star. I was asked by a buddy to edit and burn some youth football footage from his newly acquired Canon HF10 with SDHC card. I was excited. Although I had no clue what an .mts file was Adonbe PE 7 not only recognized it and imported it quickly...but I proceeded to edit both video and audio (together and separately)as well as burn to a regular DVD (not BluRay). It was a great experience. The only reason I won't give this a 5 star is that Adobe still shows this PE7 program as being compatible with MP4 and I beg to differ as a user...but if you are going the direction I want to go, AVCHD and BluRay, etc...Adobe did something right in this category. I will add that while i am not a big fan of the GUI of Pinnacle Studio Plus 12 it has handled ALL of my format types without a problem. I am running Vista Basic on a Celeron 1.60Ghz processor (Dell Inspiron 530 desktop) with 4GB of ram.

UPDATE: Now that I have purchased my OWN Canon HF10 AVCHD camcorder (1080 high-def) Adobe PE7 is my go-to program for this type of footage. Again, it handles the AVCHD / .mts file format flawlessly. Check out my other reviews for some other programs I have tried like Corel VideoStudio X2 and Magix - Movie Edit pro 14. If you are going to be working with AVCHD, certainly any of the Canon HF series camcorders that put .mts on sdhc flash cards...then I believe Adobe Premier Elements 7 is the best option.

I was very excited to get the latest version of Premiere Elements and had been looking forward to it for some time. I wanted to do some editing of the 1920 x 1080i AVCHD video captured by my Canon HF10 camcorder. I was let down tremendously by the instability of Premiere Elements 7 on my system. In the end, I created a great looking DVD that everybody complemented, but it was very torturous due to the number of crashes I had to endure.

Crashes aside, the product has most the features for the level of editing that I like to do (more than Windows Movie Maker, but not pro-level). The biggest thing it has going for it is the number of available video formats for both input and output.

I found it to be mostly intuitive to use, but it is quite a bit less intuitive than iMovie '08 on the Mac and not as sexy either. The file and project organization was kind of difficult to use and quite lacking.

The help system is not as easy or as fast to use as a normal product help system since it simply launches a browser windows to the Adobe site, which does make it a bit slower. However, the great thing about it is that this means you are always getting the latest help content, assuming you have an internet connection at the time that you need the help.

Adobe has added a direct product connection with photoshop.com and this does add some value, but they also have used this as a way to upsell higher level services. I signed up for the basic free account which simply gives you 2GB of online storage. It doesn't include access to additional content, even user generated content. This is definitely a mark against the product since Cyberlink Power Director includes free access to their online community content where there is a lot of great free content. This would be less of an issue, except Adobe continually pushes ads for the premium service in the product. In fact, the main startup screen is little more than an ad which you have to click through each time you start up. The net result of this huge ad is that you get a really lousy startup screen that completely lacks a decent project organizer for existing projects.


OVERALL, I found it to be sub-par to the user interface (usability) of iMovie on the Mac and sub-par to the power and quickness of Cyberlink Power Director (Vista). The feature set was simply about par for this level of video editing software. Nothing truly exciting that blew me away. My final rating of it was greatly degraded by the instability of the software, but that only seems fair given that I tried quite a bit to overcome the instability to no avail. I spent several FULL days working with it and it seemed to me that the more complex my project got the more often it crashed on me. Towards the end it was crashing at least once every 15 minutes.


With regard to the crashes I experienced, I attempted many things to fix it, including uninstalling any other software related to video processing, fully reinstalling QuickTime (required by Premiere Elements, and fully uninstalling Premiere followed by a reinstall. I also went through the Adobe online support site and tried all the suggestions that I found. Nothing fixed the instability. I considered rebuilding my system or creating a boot partition of Windows XP just to see if it worked on XP, but decided it wasn't worth the effort. I am most definitely NOT a novice computer user and I have a system that more than meets the system requirements for this product (Windows Vista loaded on a Q6600 (Quad core) with 3 GB of RAM, a Nvidia 8xxx series GPU, and a 750 GB hard disk. An off the shelf product should work off the shelf.

Since SOME other reviewers do not have instability problems, I must conclude that whether or not you'll experience instability issues is going to be dependent on your exact computer and the software on it. Therefore, I would highly recommend downloading a trial version of the software from Adobe and doing some serious editing before paying for the software. In my opinion, it was probably released before it was fully baked so that it would be available for the 2008 Holiday season and could be packaged with Photoshop Elements 7. As for me, I'll probably be using different software for my video editing.

While this is a nice program, my son, who is currently using Sony Vegas 7 & is familiar with Adobe After Effects, (Both GREAT programs, but VERY $$) says while this is in no way comparable to those 2 programs, it is a good value for what it has to offer, BUT if you are more than an occasional user, you may want to take this into consideration, to see the TOTAL cost, as what you buy here is NOT comprehensive.
FIRST- You HAVE to register in order to use most of the editing features, & as additional kick in the pants they require you to pay an additional $50.00 to use any of the dvd themes, something they fail to mention up front. They show you what the dvd themes look like, (a "preview") but you can't use them...... unless you pay an additional "subscription" (of $50.00) that will give you an additional 20 gb of online storage, & again this is an ANNUAL FEE!
Soooo given this extra info I hope there will be no hidden surprizes & you can (or not!) puchase this knowing what to expect!

With this latest release of Premiere Elements, Adobe jumps the version number of its extremely popular video editing software from 4 to 7. This was done to keep Premiere Elements at the same release number as Photoshop Elements - the image editing program that PE7 is often bundled with. So, does this version of the software contain enough new features to justify the big jump in version number? The answer is No.

The primary reason for this release was Adobe launching its new Photoshop website, which is Adobe's attempt to compete with social networking and video/image sharing sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Photobucket. Premiere Elements 7 allows you to directly upload/backup your videos on that site.. or, at least, you're supposed to be able to. I couldn't even get my photos to display properly on that site via Photoshop Elements (the system constantly glitched and told me the images were damaged/corrupted and could not be displayed), and I didn't feel like taking the time to test the feature with a two gig video file after the early failures. Granted, fixes for these sorts of errors will probably be added quickly (they may already have been added by the time you read this review), but it just goes to show that PE7 was released with significant problems.

Besides features based on the new Photoshop website, there's not much new in Premiere Elements 7. There are some new/improved wizards to help you make slide shows and movies, but competing video editing programs have had these features for a while. As well, some of the more common plugins have made their way into the main PE program (SmartSound, etc...), but users of previous PE versions already had access to these. Finally, PE7 is listed as having AVCHD support, but - since I don't currently use AVCHD - I haven't personally tested this aspect of the software.

If Premiere Elements 7 had some innovative new features or significantly streamlined its program, I could recommend it - but neither of these aspects are in the new version. What we've got is a piece of software that is invasive (aspects of PE7 constantly run on your system when you boot up, and altering your config files or startup to shut them down will require you to re-install PE), requires significant system resources to run properly, and just hasn't improved much since the previous version. What's worse, Adobe did not release a patch for the bugs in the previous version of PE (at least not at the time of this writing, over one year since release), so don't expect Adobe to support this version any better.

Possibly the number one consumer video editing suite today, the big news for version 7 is the addition of support for AVCHD, which is a format used by many of the newer HD (Hi-Def) video cameras using solid state storage (e.g. SD cards) vs. tape. I tested this using a Panasonic HDC-SX5 which can record to both DVD and SD cards, using AVCHD for the SD card. PE7 imported my short test videos without any problem. I did not do any extensive testing of AVCHD as I loaded this on a laptop and 2 GHz is not enough CPU for AVCHD. (Most of my video is still SD and SD editing was quick and problem free, for the most part.)

You'll need a fairly capable platform to run this on, as it needs a fair amount of CPU (especially when working with AVCHD files). I did encounter some slow downs now and then on my core duo 2 GHz machine. I would recommend the fastest processor you can afford if you do a lot of extensive editing and use lots of effects and transitions. You'll also need a lot of disk space! I recommend getting some large capacity external drives (especially if you have an eSata port). (Amazon carries a wide selection at good prices.)

PE7 has a fairly straightforward and very attractive interface. It will take you awhile poking around to figure things out. But, that's OK by me, because this is a capable product with lots of high quality features. Some may find all the features a bit intimidating, but there are a seemingly endless number of books and web sites to help out, so don't let this dissuade you! PE7 includes a bunch of tutorials and more are available online using the 'inspiration browser.' This is a nice feature.

Adobe is really pushing their web services these days. No problem, as they are useful, but I found the constant in your face references annoying. I get it already! Personally, I have little use for their web services, but maybe you will?

PE7 supports all the usual output formats, of course. To my surprise, PE7 can also output in DivX format if you have the codec installed (I purchased DivX Pro awhile back and highly recommend it.) It can also output to all the popular portable media player formats which is *very* useful. And you can produce video for web use, MySpace, YouTube and so on as well.

If you've ever used the "Muvee" product, often bundled on computers these days, you'll be familiar with the idea behind the PE7 InstantMovie 'wizard' which will analyze your vids and create a movie out of them automatically using your selected theme, complete with transitions. You can add music and titles as well. This might be OK for quick family vids, but most people will probably want to take more control and just edit their stuff directly. (Personally, I like "Muvee" better for this sort of thing. But maybe that's because I'm more familiar with it. I found PE7's wizard more trouble than it's worth.)

There is a new VideoMerge feature but it seemed like more of a gimmick than anything to me. I did not bother to test it. There is also a 'quicktracks' feature, but as with other products like this, I found the music generated less than inspiring. With so many good sounds out there, I'm hard pressed to see much use for this. It feels more like a check box on the features list aimed at making PR7 more competitive with Pinnacle, Sony and others.

The editing features all work as expected and I had no problems. I like the layout. If you mainly want to load your clips, do some basic effects, transitions, titles and burn a DVD or generate other output formats you'll be happy. There are more effects and transitions than you'll ever need. Nothing spectacular compared to other products or Version 4, but good, solid and easy to use.

I did have PE7 hang and crash on me a few times when I pushed it hard, especially if I tried to click too fast on multiple actions. But the rig I'm using for this review is a very low powered machine and not something I would normally use to run this (2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, ATI 1100 video). This barely meets the minimum requirements. I plan to use it on a more capable rig and I will come back and update this review later. (All video editing software has similar requirements, by the way, so this is not specific to PE7.)

How does it compare to some of its competitors such as Pinnacle Studio or SONY Vegas? Well, it does not nag you to constantly buy plug-ins like Pinnacle Studio (reason enough not to use PS in my opinion). Compared to SONY, well, I have more experience with Sony Vegas and so I find myself preferring the Vegas interface (now that I know it well). PE7 is a bit too "friendly" too me and I don't have much use for the web services, wizards, and what not. Still, it's the quality of the output that matters and there PE 7 does as well as Vegas from what I've seen so far. I plan to work with it more so I can get more acquainted and perhaps I'll update this review once I have used it longer.

Finally, if you only edit std. def DV video and not AVCHD, If you like to edit directly, don't plan on using the web services, wizards and all that, then you might want to look for some closeout sales of PE4 (the previous version). It's got most of what's here that's really useful and would be a viable choice. But if you need AVCHD, then this is the way to go!

I mainly started using PE 3.0 awhile back to upload videos to YouTube and to get my HD movies from my camcorder onto DVD (with a few titles, etc..). I never found 3.0 that easy to use but I got the job done.

I upgraded to PE 7 about a month ago and I have been very disappointed. At first I figured I just needed time to get adjusted to the program, but here I am a month later and today started shopping for another alternative. I plan to uninstall PE 7. Which is hard for me to say. But the program is just too painful for me to use, it is not very intuitive and if you want to deviate from doing things how THEY want you to do it....well good luck.

I also get the lockups that others have complained about. Today was the last straw when trying to make a 3 min .flv movie from HD content. The program kept locking up telling me I didn't have enough memory resources. I have a smokin fast machine with 4 GB of memory...if that can't cut it then I doubt most peoples computers will. Very disappointing.

I love Adobe products normally but this one was a total failure. I suggest you look elsewhere at the many other options for the same money.

I see Adobe has jumped this program from Version 4 straight to Version 7, I suppose they've done that because they like to bundle it with Photoshop Elements 7 and I suppose that makes sense from their point of view. Also, now this program is very in tune to the world wide web, but to get a decent amount of storage (50GB) on their site [...] you'll have to pay fifty bucks a year. You can get 2GB for free, enough room for photos, but not for videos. I'm only mentioning this in case you're the kind of person who stores his stuff online. I have a phobia about that, so I don't do it.

Finally Adobe has brought support for AVCHD camcorders to Premiere Elements, so if you've been holding off purchasing it because of that, now you can. I have no problems at all importing video from my Canon camcorder.

If you're an absolute beginner, you might like a new feature of Version 7 called InstantMovie. After you've imported your video, all you have to do is start the wizard, select it and choose one of the included themes. Okay, I tried it and wasn't all that happy with the results, but then I'm not an absolute beginner, If I was, I think I'd've been pretty impressed with myself.

One feature I really like about Premiere 7 is the SmartTag wizard which analyzes your videos and lets you know which one are out of focus, blurry or too dark. And, of course, you can add music to your movies, however you can only edit in stereo, okay for me as I listen to my music in stereo, but if you're a surround sound person, you should know that you can import footage with 5.1 sound, but you can't edit it. And for you YouTubers out there, uploading to YouTube is very easy

All in all, for me this is a nice program and one I'll use a lot. The only downside I see, and it doesn't effect me, is that surround sound editing business. If they fix that, then I think this would be a good program for anybody with a camcorder and a computer.

"Adobe Premier Elements 7" is a fairly good BASIC movie making package with some great effects and transitions, but has a high learning curve for what you get. Having used two other versions of Premier Elements, I was able to get the software installed and working with little trouble but I'm not sure that someone new to video software would have the same luck. The software has a lot of great features, once you get used to using the interface, including:

* Easy upload to YouTube
* Chromakey ("Green Screen") support
* Tons of effects and transitions
* Great Theme templates (be sure to install them from the CD menu)
* SmartSound automatic music scoring (really nice)

There are also some things I really do not like:

* The opening menu always shows the "photoshop" online site invitation and login screen
* The editing controls are hard to navigate on most of the tools (text is very badly handled)
* The timeline is too simplistic and makes working with multiple clips very hard

If you are upgrading from an older version, you will have no problem picking this one up and running.

If you are new video editor looking for a fairly basic editing package and have a lot of time to learn this program, this package will allow you to make some very impressive movies. Otherwise you might want to consider Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro Pack (my favorite) or Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Version 12 (also a very good entry level package).

I can recommend "Adobe Premier Elements 7", but only for existing users of previous versions of the software or people with some video editing experiance and some learnig time on their hands.

I have tried many packages. Nero9, Power2Go, PowerDVD, Toast - Adobe blows them all away. I loaded it on my Vista machine and it runs flawlessly! Loads of FREE menus and music are included. Editing .vob,.avi,.mpg, .mp*, .wav and many more files is a snap, I mean 20-30 splices in one 5 minute clip. Software allows as many tracks both audio and video as you desire. This software is very intuitive and easy to use. I don't impress easily and there is a lot of crap out there. If you have a HEALTHY and POWERFUL machine as the specs show you will not be disappointed with this software. There are a couple of items I do not care for. All media for all projects are shown in your "media collection," makes it difficult to work on multiple projects. Software stores project files in multiple directories instead of a directory for each project - designed by a programmer not a user. One note to vista users - ANY visual software will have problems with vista if you run the "Aero Glass Effects" disable and all of your WINDOWS crashes will go away.Bottom line- for the money it cannot be beat!!

I have a fairly new video camera but this product was unable to import the video directly. I had to use the small app that came with the camera to import the data to disk and then "import" that into Premier Elements. The failure message is pretty bizarre and comes attached to a nearly phantom window; this is clearly a gaping whole in the program. Adobe support says that it just might not be able to work with that camera.

After struggling with the clunky interface I finally put together a video that I wanted to burn to DL DVD. However, as soon as I get to that menu the program crashes (i.e., a dialog pops up to send an error report to Microsoft). Adobe support just says to be sure that everything that can be updated (there are no updates to PE 7) is updated—they were.

When I looked into getting a consumer-level video editing program about 6 months ago Premier Elements 4 (they jumped a couple numbers here to line it up with (Photo) Elements) the consensus was what PE 4 was the best of a bad lot. My guess is that with this release, Premiere Elements 7 is no longer even the best of the bad lot. With a product with so many versions, it really ought to work much better than this. I would dub it the Vista of video editors, but even Vista is not this dysfunctional. I expected more from Adobe.