Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (PC)

I got Adobe Premiere Elements after trying to cobble together a 200-clip holiday video taken with a new camcorder using the standard issue Windows Movie Maker. Unfortunately, after spending several hours editing it all together, putting in transitions and titles too, I found it refused to encode my movie or burn it to DVD, and a little Internet searching revealed compatibility issues that Movie Maker has with Vista.

So the first thing I have to say about APEv7 is that it is entirely compatible with Vista (and given that compatibility issues with Vista are common, I think this point deserves a sentence unto itself).

For those like me who have used Movie Maker before, the APEv7 interface will seem familiar to you. It is essentially the same: import media (from the hard drive, direct from your camcorder, or several other options I didn't need), then drag the thumbnail into an empty frame. However, that's where the similarities end. APEv7 really is a very user friendly way of editing your videos to exactly the way you can imagine them in your head, rather than the extent of the limits of the software.

Within a few clicks of the mouse you can trim the beginning or end off clips, add music (and cut the beginning or end off those too), insert titles, fades and countless other effects, make a clip run much faster, or slow it right down, and then preview the whole thing, find that music starts a fraction of a fraction of a second too early for the music, and go in at that precise a timeline to sort it out.

That is something I really liked about this software. If you're a perfectionist like me, the option to view your entire movie on a millisecond by millisecond basis, and make changes at that level, is essential. That you're dealing with such precision timing but the software makes it just as easy as dealing with thirty second clips is a testament to its developers.

APEv7 comes loaded with effects and transitions, some of them better than others. In using the transitions I came to my first criticism of the software, in that there is no fade in effect as far as I could see. In Movie Maker I had used a fade out at the end of one clip and then a fade in at the start of the next, to create a notable break between them. In APEv7, however, there's only a fade to black, so the next clip comes up on screen abruptly. I also found this fade to black dissolve to be far too quick, and, unlike virtually everything else, couldn't find a way to slow it down.

Similarly, some of the more show-off-y transitions work by freezing the first frame of the second clip until they've finished, so that actually, rather than making the transition seamless, there's an even more noticeable shift than there would be if you didn't use any transition at all.

Another minor criticism I came to quite quickly is that it's difficult to rearrange titles on the screen. A drag and drop facility would have been much in keeping with the rest of the software's features, but instead you have to enter co-ordinates for both the X and Y axis on screen. There's no grid to tell you where it already is, so this is largely down to guesswork, trial and error. Whilst this is a minor issue on the editing spectrum, I wouldn't have thought it so minor as to receive such inadequate attention.

The box makes much of the software's colour separation overlay feature. Yes, you can now use the 'green screen' technique beloved by Hollywood. Except it's not as good. The 'green screen' (blue will also do) needs to be a constant colour over the entire surface. This is much harder to achieve than it initially sounds. However, it's a fun little gimmick, and shows really just how powerful home video software is becoming.

Reading other reviews, it seems like a few others have experienced the software crashing on them. I haven't experienced this at all, and I have been using it at the minimum necessary specifications.

In a nutshell, APEv7 is not for you if you want really professional standard editing on a budget (though it does come a lot closer than others). It provides more than enough, however, to keep busy the serious hobbyist who's ambitions have been limited by cheaper, less feature-full software.

I've waited long for the ability to edit AVCHD with Premier, having used the earlier DV versions with success. I have upgraded my PC (Quad 2.8GhZ - 4Gb RAM - 9800GT - Vista HP SP1) but I have to be very patient.

It tends to crash if I move clips quickly or click the next action before the last has been executed. Premier 'not responding' is an all to familiar line in task manager

Having said that, my previous experience with Premier, initially was similar but as I became more familiar with the earlier suites, crashes did reduce. Sadly this is not the case with PE7

I've tried to make BluRay DVD's but have failed abysmally. It destroyed two DVD's and I've returned the writer to the retailer (Not Amazon)I'm not sure of the cause.

The PE7 booklet and help are very poor. If I had no experience I would be really have been in trouble trying to carry out simple edits.

In desparation I have today bought Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum and so far it is excellent. Responsive with easy to learn tutorials. No crashes. Bluray? I'll see how I progress.

After having read the review and recommendation in PCPro magazine that this was a good video editing application, and having been impressed with Adobe Acrobat Professional package, I assumed the Adobe Premier Elements 7 software would be a safe bet.

I downloaded the software and started to try and use it. I had about 6GB of data video data to load and wanted to make use of the better video workflow offered by a package like Elements rather than the inbuilt Windows Moviemaker.

Windows Moviemaker imported the 6GB of data without a hitch and was usable. As soon as I tried to import the same data to Elements 7, I started getting error messages that it couldn't decode some of the files, which was strange considering it could do the others from exactly the same camera and were basic AVI's, and that the application was running out of memory(on a system with 8GB RAM). As soon as I started trying to edit the data the application would crash. I uninstalled and reinstalled on 3 different systems, Vista 64, Vista 32, and XP 32 (I really wanted this to work!) but had the same errors on each. Looking at the forums there is a lot of talk about the difficulties in getting the package to work and the poor quality of customer service technical support for this package. I will be using my distance selling directive rights to get a refund for this package. I'm disappointed I had to do so and thought it important you should be forewarned.