Great features, If only would stay running
Great features but it's extremely slow to load and is terribly buggy. On an HD project with four layers and keyframes, it's utterly unusable due to crashing. I've gotten weird behavior, errors during renders and, worst of all, shutdowns. It is unusable since it now takes approximately 2 minutes to load and I get a major crash within a few minutes of trying to do anything useful.
I've got three fast hard drives and 3 Gb of RAM on Win XP so you'd think that would be enough.
It would be an incredible program if it could keep running.
Absolute junk
I purchased this software for use on XP and have since reinstalled it on Vista. On XP it was buggy yet usable. On Vista it is buggy and useless. Your projects cannot be exported to DVD/CD or PC, at least in any of the formats I tried. All of the problems Premier Elements 4 has are well documented yet Adobe has never patched it. Are you a sucker? If not, don't waste your money. Windows DVD Maker is plenty for the home user and way easier to use.
Don't waste your money
I wish I would have read the reviews first. I upgraded from Premier Elements 2 to 4...and that was a big mistake. The program crashes and takes FOREVER to load video...I just deleted it and lost out on my money. Never will i go Adobe again.
Fun While It Lasted
Awesome, a low-budget version of the professional Adobe Premiere Studio, what could sound better? Warm pancakes? Maybe...but Premiere Elements could have turned into a classic software, great for students, beginners, and inspiring film-makers who can't afford the average $799 price tag for the full blown version. The Adobe Elements series as lasted this long, solely on it's prime series of Adobe Photoshop Elements. I work full-time as a MultiMedia Production Specialist, doing video-editing, graphic designer, and various other MultiMedia duties. I tap into the Adobe group every single day to do various aspects of my job, and I have loved what I have worked with.
Coming from a very big dollar company, we can afford the full blown ... Read More
Good Overall
A good product overall. Exclellent features, especially preview and scanning of clips which can be shaky with similar products. It was not running well to begin with, though. I called tech support and it seems I had a problem with my WinTV card competing for the same codec. But the tech support guided me through the solution quicky and with great expertise. 5 stars for tech support (located in Oregon, not Calcutta or Hong Kong!)
Now it's working very well. But 4 stars vs. 5 as it's a little weak on menu creation. I am running on a 2.4 GHz computer, 1 GB RAM and 3 hard drives (1 for the OS and product install, 1 small drive reserved for temporary scratch data which makes it run much faster and the other for the imported videos)