Digital Home Thoughts: Adobe Premiere Elements 7 Reviewed

"Our biggest problem with Premiere Elements is that it suffers a host of problems (both minor and major). The first glitch occurred when we were trying to capture HDV footage via FireWire from a Canon HV10. The app's preview screen would simply stop showing the preview footage. The content would capture, but we could not watch it as it was captured. OK, not a show stopper. More serious was our inability to burn more than one hour of HD footage to a Blu-ray disc. The app would either hang or reboot Windows Vista 64-bit. And it's not like we didn't bring enough firepower. We tested using this month's Gateway FX6800 (page 76), which was equipped with a 2.93GHz Core i7-940, Radeon HD 4870 X2, and 6GB of RAM."

Reading this review, I could only nod along with their findings - Premiere Elements 7 has a lot going for it, but it's ultimately plagued by bugs, strage behaviours, and limitations around codecs and file formats. I recieved a copy for review months ago, but my review notes read like a product-bashing session because I found more wrong with it than right. Believe it or not though, I'm still using it to produce the videos you see here - that's largely because I've set up templates in it and having to re-create those templates in another program would be a pain. Ultimately, Premiere Elements 7 as a program has a lot of potential, but it doesn't live up to it.