4 stars (NICE AND AFFORDABLE TOOL FOR HOBBYISTS) - For the non-professional artist and/or film-maker, this is as good as image-making gets. The combination of Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Premiere Elements 2.0 let you take your hobby to the very top without breaking the bank.
Despite running much slower than the 3.0 edition, Photoshop Elements 4.0 has a number of new improvements going for it: particularly when it comes to enhancing and arranging images. Flexible range of manipulative features were included in this regard. Still, I was disappointed that Adobe decided to remove the useful file-browser feature, (which was present in the Photoshop Elements 3.0 edition).
Also, Premiere Elements 2.0 is capable of handling any amateur video and audio assignment that you may want to assign to it, but be warned that it is memory-hungry. Running this video-editing application on any computer with less than 512MB of RAM may end-up testing your patience to the fullest. Unless your patience compares to that of the biblical Job, do consider it wise to upgrade your RAM (if it is less than 512MB). In terms of processor, any Pentium 4 (or its corresponding equivalent) will deliver a decent performance. The same applies to dual Pentium III equivalents. A single Pentium III processor (or its equivalent) is not the best option here!
Finally, another good thing about this software bundle is that they support a wide range of digital photo cameras and video cameras. The learning curve for both Applications is not that steep. For the average person, one week of dedicated studies (and practice) will get you mastering upto 90% of their capabilities.
5 stars (Tnx to Adobe providing best software for Hobbyiest User) - Thanks to Adobe for giving lots of features that I want for my need in single box so called Adobe Premiere Elements 2.
It's good to resize all panels in single click and no need to take care about other panels, they automatically arrange.
I recently bought Canon Optura 500 that support USB DV streaming and I can capture via USB without a glitch.
Feature wise I like much awaited feature customize DVD template so now I can change fonts, resize or move buttons, change their positions and add Video/Audio/Image in background of DVD Menu and can use as motion menus.
In Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, It's nice to have latest formats (VOB, MOD, 3GP, AC3, ASF..) import supports basically I did yesterday some VOB editing and its working fine.
Overall it's easy and fairly quick to make a video with Premiere Elements; and it's really very easy to create motion DVD menu and burn them on DVD as well as on hard disk and now we can create DVD with Dolby stereo.
Pros: Lots of file format import supports, Resize Panels, Customize/Motion DVD Menu.
Cons: No HDV support but I don't plan to buy a HDV camcorder until their price going down or market grow :)
5 stars (I think PSE4 is a nice upgrade from PSE3, or for a new user) - I've been using PSE3 heavily for the past year, and now have PSE4. It's a nice improvement over PSE3 in some cool new features, plus several basic areas, notably documentation, startup speed, and scrolling speed.
First, the documentation has been completely rewritten. You know get a good-sized User Manual with many how-to's this year. I wish Adobe had more color in the guide, but least there is a full-color section at the end.
Second, the performance has been dramatically sped up. The slowest launch time of the Editor is down from 28 seconds to about 8 on my laptop. This should really sing on a much faster desktop drive! Also, the scrolling speed in the organizer is really smooth now...you get this really smooth continuous scrolling even in a very large catalog. (My catalog is >13,000 photos and videos.)
Finally, some of the new features are pretty amazing. While the File Browser is gone, I don't miss it because the Organizer is so cool. "Face Tagging" automatically finds the faces in your photos, and lets you tag by dragging tags onto the faces themselves, instead of onto a batch of images.
The Magic Selection Brush is pretty darn cool, letting you just mark "keep this" and "don't keep that" without having to do laborious selections. This is great when you want to take one person out of a picture, but you can also use it to select an area and then do all your color adjustments only on that area. It doesn't always work, but it's really cool -- especially since they linked it up to the great Quick Fix panel, and you can select with the wand, then edit just those pixels in the Quick Fix panel, instead of the whole image like in v3.0.
Overall, this is a really nice set of improvements, and I'm glad I got the new version! |
