Adobe Premiere Elements
by Adobe
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List Price: Category: Software See more product details and other editions |
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Software Reviews of Adobe Premiere Elements
Customer Review: A disappointment, as most first versions are!
Summary: 2 Stars
I was disappointed in this first version for what it leaves out versus Sony's, Ulead's, and Pinnacle's (both Liquid Edition and Studio v9) digital video editing software. I own all five plus the full version of Sony's Vegas and Adobe's Premiere Pro. I evaluated the five entry level applications in order to purchase the "Best" for my middle school. Sony was the winner for us. Its handling of Flash (SWF) was a large plus since we teach beginning Flash in our courses. The built-in tutorials are excellent as well for beginners. In second was the Pinnacle product - Studio v9 (easy to use) not Liquid Edition (powerful but more complex). Premiere Element's next version may be able to compete.
Bottom Line: My students love the Sony software and find it easy to use and powerful enough to do most everything the better students desire. Its a perfect lead-in to our high school's video classes (they use Apple and Avid video editing software). Adobe needs to do more than rely on its name.
Customer Review: Premiere Elements does not handle mpeg files
Summary: 1 Stars
Warning to others, altough the user's guide and help says that it can process mpeg files, it does not handle it at all. I checked the Adobe User Forums and many others have run into the same problem. Looks like Adobe is not planning to fix the problem. If you need to edit mpeg file, I recommend that you try
Arcsoft Showbiz DVD2 or Ulead Video Studio 9. Both of these products work fine with mpeg files.
Customer Review: Great product!
Summary: 5 Stars
Great alternative to the full version of premiere. I just need a solid program that can handle my home video capturing and editing. The burning process works great on my computer. Once you get the idea of how the program works editing is a breeze. Powerful tools for a very low price. The only problem that I can find is that the DVD templates that are preinstalled are very limited. But, there is an undocumented way of creating new ones in PS or PSE. I would highly recommend buying in the PSE 3.0 and Premiere Elements combo pack.Customer Review: Does a lot of nice stuff but had a lot of problems.
Summary: 2 Stars
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.
Customer Review: Had same problem as below, but PremiereElements worked great
Summary: 4 Stars
I ran into the exact same problem after trying to bring in media from a Sony DVDCam over USB. You can bring the files in just fine using the ImageMixer software they supply. It appears to create MPEG2 files.
However, putting those files into PremiereElements caused a problem in which the sound did not work in the editing timeline. After trying several different approaches to file conversion, different utilities, etc., I was nearly ready to give up.
Then I found a menu option in ImageMixer in which you can "Convert to MPEG-2" (right click on the content icons). I realized that unless I ran this conversion, the files were not actually MPEG-2 files - they only had the file extension for MPEG.
From this point on, PE worked fine. My daughter and I finished her school project, putting in titles, sound effects, adding a blooper section, and even burning a DVD.
I've been very pleased with the software. Very reliable and easy to use, once you learn it. Have now finished 5 projects.
My only reasons for not giving it five stars:
1) The manual is not very helpful for a person learning digital video editing for the first time. It is more of a reference manual. I solved this by getting the PremiereElements Classroom in a Book, which was great but cost $35.
2) The flexibility of DVD creation is not great. All of the DVD templates are fixed and not editable.