Adobe Premiere Elements 7 [OLD VERSION]

Adobe Premiere Elements is a decent app, just falls a bit short for me. First, a pet peeve, the launch screen always wants you to sign up for adobe's website, with the goal of charging money for storage and services. I don't want to see that, I wish that could be removed. As with PhotoShop Elements, the user interface is all Adobe's creation, with no real Windows look and feel to it, and no ability to customize, other than turning toolbars on and off. A big gripe is that adobe doesn't include a lot of movie templates, so you are forced to pony up more cash to expand the product. Obviously a trojan horse revenue generator is part of the business plan here, I just find it annoying. I found the app a bit clunky when searching for, and adding, media to be used for a project. I had used an earlier version of Premiere Elements, found it to be pretty awful, but in spite of the criticism in this review, adobe actually improved things a bit. But to go from 2 stars up to 3 stars isn't great, I'm planning to do a free trial of the next version.

I bought the older version *(7) in hopes that the name "adobe" would protect me from garbage.

It did not.

I am in the process of uninstalling the buggy mess from my dual processor Intel with 4 Gigs of memory.

It never did one thing properly without crashing on my up to date not prone to crashing Windows 7 machine.

I feel tricked and 'had' .

The only reason I give two stars is because I assume that I will eventually be able to figure out how to make this product work for me.

I bought this product because I wanted enhanced features in Photoshop Elements and wanted maximum compatibility with PSE when making videos (mostly slideshows). My first disappointment was that I could not open projects created with the previous version of Premiere Elements (I used version 3), so that the slideshows that I update on a regular basis needed to be completely recreated. (Or, what I did was keep using my previous version 3 of Premiere Elements.) My second disappointment was that I finally bit the bullet and created a new slideshow with the new (when I bought it) Photoshop/Premiere Elements package. I have so far been unable to burn this to a wmv or dvd format. A variety of errors. This is basically the same project that I was able to do with my previous versions of these products. The solutions I see to try are not things I needed to do - disable all firewall and antivirus software, for example - with the previous version. One solution is to resize all of the photos I use to a smaller format. They're kidding, right? I understand that creating videos is very memory and cpu intensive process. But I was able to do all this with the previous version of this software.

A summary of my complaints is: (1) apparently not backward compatible with projects created in the previous version of software, (2) much more difficult to burn dvds that could be burned in the previous version of software, (3) enhanced features are available online but only if you pay an annual subscription (at least for PSE), (4) help is now only over the internet, which now makes it difficult for me to find specific help because there is so much help mixed in from all versions of the software.

This version has some serious flaws. But never-mind that. An updated version has been created. However, I do not have that updated version. Potential buyers should read reviews on the new version. No one should purchase this old version.

That says it all.

This software is frustrating to learn. It taxes your machine's powers and is quite disappointing from my experience. I would not recommend using this for editing video.