Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 (PC)

• Reviewed by: bumski111

  Strengths: Goes well beyond the needs of most home video editors to include features that professional editors would find helpful in editing commercial video projects. Very feature ladden, and all on one screen

  Weaknesses: Because it is so feature ladden the learning curve is steeper than some of the more home oriented video editing software. Like most Adobe programs, remembering where you last found an item is a little

  Overall: Anyone looking for a program that has as many features as some costing far more than Adobe Premier Elements has come to the right place. I used Pinnacle's Studio 10 prior to this, and there is no comparison to the stability of Priemier Elements. Crashes are few and far between with Elements. Everything you need is on one screen in multiple windows. You get the big picture of your entire project and access to all the features pretty much on that one screen. Everything works like it is supposed to. Because it has so many features, the learning curve is pretty steep, but then you don't have to uses all the features on your first project either. Like most Adobe programs, remembering where you last found an item is a little like playing a game of concentration. I still say, "Hats off to Adobe!"

• Reviewed by: MrGeode

  Strengths: Allows user defined backgrounds and music on memus. Rendering to burn DVD is about 10% faster than V1.0

  Weaknesses: slow loading a previous project that contains lots of images.

  Overall: My main reason for getting this program was for the DVD Slideshow with music. I have used ULead and Showbiz and neither would allow me to load more 100 images. A downside is reloading a saved slideshow project as it takes a long time to load all the images back in. You need to scan the timeline for missing images before burning a DVD or it may miss some. My last project had 545 images in a 34 minute presentation. It took around 5 minutes before I could burn a DVD. Premier Elements 1.0 did not have this issue. I suspect it may have something to do with the new catalog scheme that is used with Photoshop Elements 4.0.

• Reviewed by: shawhan

  Strengths: Stable - doesn't lock up during DVD creation

  Weaknesses: Not as fully featured as Pinnacle Studio

  Overall: I'm a long-time Pinnacle Studio 9 user who is tired of the system lock-ups that occur when rendering a full length DVD and lousy tech support from Pinnacle. I'm getting used to Premiere Elements pretty fast. Pros: Hasn't locked up .. just burned a 90 min DVD (took 7 hours on P4 2.4, 1 gig, X700 card). Better support for additional video/audio tracks. Great online support forum (tons of folks helping solve problems). Cons: It lacks features that I liked from Studio such as: - Music video creation - Intro movies (short clip before the DVD menu appears) - Ability to capture other than digital streams (i.e. VHS analog through capture card) although this is easy to work around using Pinnacle to capture - Ability to burn a DVD from previously created content. You have to either go "all the way" with a disk in the drive or use another program to burn the Video_TS files to a DVD. I like being able to burn to drive first to check the finished product before expending a disk. Still .. versus constant memory errors, this is a lot better than the buggy Studio.