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 - Great desktop video editor for the basic userI wholeheartedy echo the comments of L. Louis. I was first introduced to nonlinear video editing in college, when it still required a monster Macintosh, large hard drives, and software packages outside the budget of most families. That was about ten years ago, and I haven't done anything with it since. With our new baby, mom and grandparents suggested we try it again. I certainly expected modern hardware to be more up to the task, but I've been more than impressed with the results thus far. That being said, that's more of a testament to modern computers than Adobe's product. I'm using a P4 1.3GHz machine (lower than the "min requirements" set forth by Adobe) running XP Home, 250GB HDD, 1.6GB RAM, BusLink firewire card and NEC7170A DVD-RW. I have had absolutely none of the compatibility/crashing issues complained about by so many others. For me the software runs smoothly and much faster than I would have anticipated. I have, however, only put together one project to date. Apparently Adobe has some compatibility problems to work out, at least according to all the 1star reviews here. It obviously has less to do with the power of your machine than the configuration, though. For what it's worth, I've installed Premiere Elements on a partition separate from my OS, I keep my registry and hard drive clean and defragged, and I minimize the number of memory hogs open when editing video. My suggestion: respect these other reviews and sample the software on your own machine before buying it--download the trial from Adobe and run through an entire "typical" project before you buy. The only limitations of the trial version I've found are the 30-day limit and the fact that any rendered frames have an Adobe logo in the corner. You should be able to simply enter the S/N from the package when you get it to avoid a reinstall. If you're as lucky as I've been you'll find an easy-to-use, intuitive interface with more functionality and power than most home users will ever need. And at today's price of $62 after rebate, I don't know how you could do better. Rating:  - Crashes over and overI tried loading this on more than one powerhouse machine with different configurations. There is no excuse for the performance of this product, I bought it because I love Photoshop Elements. In the future I will think real hard before upgrading my Adobe software...SHAME ON THEM. Rating: - Technical Assistance left wantingSince I had so much assistance getting 3.0 working properly, I have no interest in throwing good money after bad. I upgraded to Adobe Primere Elements 3.0, since the company seemed to have a good reputation and version 1.0 worked flawlessly on my computer. From the beginning (May 2007) I kept getting error messages when reading in from my camcorder. They had me buy another Gig of memory, load minor patches, get upgrades from Apple, but nothing seemed to work. We checked by loading DVIO.exe and the camcorder would down load just fine, as it would via the windows application. Their technical help said they would escalate this and they would call back. Several months later I called and they had closed my request without a call to me. So we reopened it, re-tried a few things, then escalated it again. Several months later I called again and found out it was closed again without any contact with me. Again, we re-tried a few things, escalated it and NOTHING. It is now January of 08, I called again and the next day they called back and told me to delete everything ADOBE on my computer - then reload the operating system (which means I would have to reload all my software). When I called a talked to a supervisor, I asked if ADOBE really cared if there software ever worked on my machine and he indicated that they really did NOT care if I continued to be a customer. So if you buy an ADOBE product and you have problems that are not simple - you are on your own! Rating:  - Small fontsI downloaded Premiere Elements 4 over the weekend and spent some time playing with it. I generally like the features and it crashed only once, but the program has one big issue for me. I use a laptop with a high-resolution screen of 1920 by 1200 pixels. Premiere Elements does not following Windows conventions, and rendered all its menus and labels in a very small font, almost too small to read. I couldn't find any setup options to change the size of these fonts. I also tried setting Window's fonts to extra large, but this had no effect on Premiere Element's font size. Rating: - Going back to Roxio Easy Media CreatorAdobe Premier Elements 4.0 is one of the most unstable, crash-prone software programs I've ever encountered, even on the latest, most-powerful home computer systems. I've run the software on two computers with two operating systems, XP and Vista, and the results have been the same... disappointing. I suspect this software is only useful for the smallest of video projects. It's virtually unusable for moderately complex projects such as a DVD to commemorate a youth sport team's season with a mix of edited videos, pictures, music, and text. I thought Roxio's Easy Media Creator software had a few bugs but it was a dream compared to Adobe's Premier Elements. My first project with Premier Elements will be my last; I'm going back to Roxio.
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