Adobe Premiere Elements 2 review

Premier Elements 2 is a cut down version of Premier, Adobe's £500 professional video-editing program - and it's not even that cut down! This software can do lots of things that you just wouldn't expect of a program for home movie enthusiasts.

For a start it allows you to use an unlimited number of audio and video tracks. This means that you can splice together footage from many different files to create really complex montages of video, text and sound. Using a tool called keyframes - markers that you apply to specific frames of your video - you can specify precisely how effects are applied to each frame. Other video programs use keyframes, but Premiere Elements 2 does it particularly well, giving you precise control over how your final video will look. The effects and transition libraries are both stuffed with exciting possibilities, and these can also be subjected to precise control with the ability to define keyframes for every single parameter.

The price of this power is that Premiere Elements can be intimidating, even when trying to achieve the most simple of tasks. You can hide the keyframe view and apply effects simply by dragging them onto clips, but you'll still have to find and expand the relevant list of settings in order to customise them. We also found it harder than it should be to add and edit transitions - Sony's method of simply overlapping clips is far more effective.

Still, Premiere Elements does have some welcome assistance for new users, including a collection of buttons that rearrange the window layout for various tasks such as Capture, Edit and Titles. Strangely though, the six buttons in version 1 have been cut to four in version 2.

At least the other new features in version 2 are more useful, such as better customisation of DVD menus and improved support for video formats, particularly those used by digital cameras and mobile phones. Other new features are limited to tweaks to the interface, which are welcome, but it adds up to a relatively minor upgrade over version 1.

BUYING DECISIONS

Pinnacle Studio would be good for less technical users if it weren't for its stability problems. However, this issue aside, Sony Vegas Movie Studio is still the most welcoming video-editing software for new users to learn and more experienced users will find it extremely quick to use too.

Premiere Elements 2 is the most versatile and precise of the three, so if you want to create complex video montages it's the obvious choice. However, its interface is clumsy in certain areas. Movie Studio 6 is more powerful than its predecessor, and although it hasn't caught up with Premiere Elements, the gap is pretty small. With its superior DVD authoring and the added benefits of the Platinum Edition, Vegas Movie Studio is perfect for budding editors of all abilities.