| | |  | Digital Video | Home » » » » PREMIERE ELEMENTS 7 WIN NO REBATE MB | | | | | | | Description: | | Premier Elements 7 WIN | | | Features: | |
• Stay connected with your favorite people and memories with new Photoshop.com membership
• Get started quickly with automated moviemaking options
• Enhance your stories with knockout visuals and sound
• Share on YouTube, your own website, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and mobile devices
• Protect your videos with automatic online backup and 2GB of storage--enough for approximately 25 minutes of DVD-quality video
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 1.3 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.5 inches | | Product Height:
| 5.5 inches | | Package Length:
| 7.4 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.5 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.5 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 107 reviews |
| | | System Requirements: | | | Platform:
| Windows Vista / Windows XP | | Media:
| CD-ROM | | Item Quantity:
| 1 |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 107 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
86 of 90 found the following review helpful:
 Great for AVCHD! Not so great for MP4 (AVC H.264)Nov 11, 2008
By L. Bradshaw
I am NOT a newbie to video editing, in fact I have been an avid user of Adobe Premier Elements for some time now...with ver. 4 being the most recent before the version 7 purchase. Let me get this out in the open, I was disgusted with Adobe PE7 at first because I was trying to edit and burn footage from my same old camcorders....footage that Adobe PE3 and 4 handled just fine. I have tried MULTIPLE projects now and have yet to be able to render or burn a DVD using the MP4 (avc H.264) footage from my Sanyo Xacti or my Samsung NV24HD. Even worse I cannot keep a project of any size open long enough to do any editing before the program gives me a "low on memory" warning and then crashes! Version 4 was crazy enough, as I was always sure to hit the "save" button many times while editing, but this version 7 is a joke for these formats. I can't even add the MP4 files to the time-line without it crashing. Now for the good part and why I give this release a 4 star. I was asked by a buddy to edit and burn some youth football footage from his newly acquired Canon HF10 with SDHC card. I was excited. Although I had no clue what an .mts file was Adonbe PE 7 not only recognized it and imported it quickly...but I proceeded to edit both video and audio (together and separately)as well as burn to a regular DVD (not BluRay). It was a great experience. The only reason I won't give this a 5 star is that Adobe still shows this PE7 program as being compatible with MP4 and I beg to differ as a user...but if you are going the direction I want to go, AVCHD and BluRay, etc...Adobe did something right in this category. I will add that while i am not a big fan of the GUI of Pinnacle Studio Plus 12 it has handled ALL of my format types without a problem. I am running Vista Basic on a Celeron 1.60Ghz processor (Dell Inspiron 530 desktop) with 4GB of ram.
UPDATE: Now that I have purchased my OWN Canon HF10 AVCHD camcorder (1080 high-def) Adobe PE7 is my go-to program for this type of footage. Again, it handles the AVCHD / .mts file format flawlessly. Check out my other reviews for some other programs I have tried like Corel VideoStudio X2 and Magix - Movie Edit pro 14. If you are going to be working with AVCHD, certainly any of the Canon HF series camcorders that put .mts on sdhc flash cards...then I believe Adobe Premier Elements 7 is the best option.
33 of 33 found the following review helpful:
 Final output very good, but not worth the instabilityDec 08, 2008
By Truth Teller
I was very excited to get the latest version of Premiere Elements and had been looking forward to it for some time. I wanted to do some editing of the 1920 x 1080i AVCHD video captured by my Canon HF10 camcorder. I was let down tremendously by the instability of Premiere Elements 7 on my system. In the end, I created a great looking DVD that everybody complemented, but it was very torturous due to the number of crashes I had to endure.
Crashes aside, the product has most the features for the level of editing that I like to do (more than Windows Movie Maker, but not pro-level). The biggest thing it has going for it is the number of available video formats for both input and output (EDIT: Please see comments as one person didn't think that it had many output formats).
I found it to be mostly intuitive to use, but it is quite a bit less intuitive than iMovie '08 on the Mac and not as sexy either. The file and project organization was kind of difficult to use and quite lacking.
The help system is not as easy or as fast to use as a normal product help system since it simply launches a browser windows to the Adobe site, which does make it a bit slower. However, the great thing about it is that this means you are always getting the latest help content, assuming you have an internet connection at the time that you need the help.
Adobe has added a direct product connection with photoshop.com and this does add some value, but they also have used this as a way to upsell higher level services. I signed up for the basic free account which simply gives you 2GB of online storage. It doesn't include access to additional content, even user generated content. This is definitely a mark against the product since Cyberlink Power Director includes free access to their online community content where there is a lot of great free content. This would be less of an issue, except Adobe continually pushes ads for the premium service in the product. In fact, the main startup screen is little more than an ad which you have to click through each time you start up. The net result of this huge ad is that you get a really lousy startup screen that completely lacks a decent project organizer for existing projects.
OVERALL, I found it to be sub-par to the user interface (usability) of iMovie on the Mac and sub-par to the power and quickness of Cyberlink Power Director (Vista). The feature set was simply about par for this level of video editing software. Nothing truly exciting that blew me away. My final rating of it was greatly degraded by the instability of the software, but that only seems fair given that I tried quite a bit to overcome the instability to no avail. I spent several FULL days working with it and it seemed to me that the more complex my project got the more often it crashed on me. Towards the end it was crashing at least once every 15 minutes.
With regard to the crashes I experienced, I attempted many things to fix it, including uninstalling any other software related to video processing, fully reinstalling QuickTime (required by Premiere Elements, and fully uninstalling Premiere followed by a reinstall. I also went through the Adobe online support site and tried all the suggestions that I found. Nothing fixed the instability. I considered rebuilding my system or creating a boot partition of Windows XP just to see if it worked on XP, but decided it wasn't worth the effort. I am most definitely NOT a novice computer user and I have a system that more than meets the system requirements for this product (Windows Vista loaded on a Q6600 (Quad core) with 3 GB of RAM, a Nvidia 8xxx series GPU, and a 750 GB hard disk. An off the shelf product should work off the shelf.
Since SOME other reviewers do not have instability problems, I must conclude that whether or not you'll experience instability issues is going to be dependent on your exact computer and the software on it. Therefore, I would highly recommend downloading a trial version of the software from Adobe and doing some serious editing before paying for the software. In my opinion, it was probably released before it was fully baked so that it would be available for the 2008 Holiday season and could be packaged with Photoshop Elements 7. As for me, I'll probably be using different software for my video editing.
169 of 195 found the following review helpful:
HEADS UP!! ...READ THIS FIRST!!! as Paul Harvey says, "The rest of the story!"Dec 04, 2008
By Terry Pick
"Expert Mom!"
While this is a nice program, my son, who is currently using Sony Vegas 7 & is familiar with Adobe After Effects, (Both GREAT programs, but VERY $$) says while this is in no way comparable to those 2 programs, it is a good value for what it has to offer, BUT if you are more than an occasional user, you may want to take this into consideration, to see the TOTAL cost, as what you buy here is NOT comprehensive.
FIRST- You HAVE to register in order to use most of the editing features, & as additional kick in the pants they require you to pay an additional $50.00 to use any of the dvd themes, something they fail to mention up front. They show you what the dvd themes look like, (a "preview") but you can't use them...... unless you pay an additional "subscription" (of $50.00) that will give you an additional 20 gb of online storage, & again this is an ANNUAL FEE!
Soooo given this extra info I hope there will be no hidden surprizes & you can (or not!) puchase this knowing what to expect!
59 of 67 found the following review helpful:
A Complete Lack of InnovationOct 24, 2008
By Ron Cole
With this latest release of Premiere Elements, Adobe jumps the version number of its extremely popular video editing software from 4 to 7. This was done to keep Premiere Elements at the same release number as Photoshop Elements - the image editing program that PE7 is often bundled with. So, does this version of the software contain enough new features to justify the big jump in version number? The answer is No.
The primary reason for this release was Adobe launching its new Photoshop website, which is Adobe's attempt to compete with social networking and video/image sharing sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Photobucket. Premiere Elements 7 allows you to directly upload/backup your videos on that site.. or, at least, you're supposed to be able to. I couldn't even get my photos to display properly on that site via Photoshop Elements (the system constantly glitched and told me the images were damaged/corrupted and could not be displayed), and I didn't feel like taking the time to test the feature with a two gig video file after the early failures. Granted, fixes for these sorts of errors will probably be added quickly (they may already have been added by the time you read this review), but it just goes to show that PE7 was released with significant problems.
Besides features based on the new Photoshop website, there's not much new in Premiere Elements 7. There are some new/improved wizards to help you make slide shows and movies, but competing video editing programs have had these features for a while. As well, some of the more common plugins have made their way into the main PE program (SmartSound, etc...), but users of previous PE versions already had access to these. Finally, PE7 is listed as having AVCHD support, but - since I don't currently use AVCHD - I haven't personally tested this aspect of the software.
If Premiere Elements 7 had some innovative new features or significantly streamlined its program, I could recommend it - but neither of these aspects are in the new version. What we've got is a piece of software that is invasive (aspects of PE7 constantly run on your system when you boot up, and altering your config files or startup to shut them down will require you to re-install PE), requires significant system resources to run properly, and just hasn't improved much since the previous version. What's worse, Adobe did not release a patch for the bugs in the previous version of PE (at least not at the time of this writing, over one year since release), so don't expect Adobe to support this version any better.
17 of 17 found the following review helpful:
Good choice and now has AVCHDJan 10, 2009
By Bron
"Bron"
Possibly the number one consumer video editing suite today, the big news for version 7 is the addition of support for AVCHD, which is a format used by many of the newer HD (Hi-Def) video cameras using solid state storage (e.g. SD cards) vs. tape. I tested this using a Panasonic HDC-SX5 which can record to both DVD and SD cards, using AVCHD for the SD card. PE7 imported my short test videos without any problem. I did not do any extensive testing of AVCHD as I loaded this on a laptop and 2 GHz is not enough CPU for AVCHD. (Most of my video is still SD and SD editing was quick and problem free, for the most part.)
You'll need a fairly capable platform to run this on, as it needs a fair amount of CPU (especially when working with AVCHD files). I did encounter some slow downs now and then on my core duo 2 GHz machine. I would recommend the fastest processor you can afford if you do a lot of extensive editing and use lots of effects and transitions. You'll also need a lot of disk space! I recommend getting some large capacity external drives (especially if you have an eSata port). (Amazon carries a wide selection at good prices.)
PE7 has a fairly straightforward and very attractive interface. It will take you awhile poking around to figure things out. But, that's OK by me, because this is a capable product with lots of high quality features. Some may find all the features a bit intimidating, but there are a seemingly endless number of books and web sites to help out, so don't let this dissuade you! PE7 includes a bunch of tutorials and more are available online using the 'inspiration browser.' This is a nice feature.
Adobe is really pushing their web services these days. No problem, as they are useful, but I found the constant in your face references annoying. I get it already! Personally, I have little use for their web services, but maybe you will?
PE7 supports all the usual output formats, of course. To my surprise, PE7 can also output in DivX format if you have the codec installed (I purchased DivX Pro awhile back and highly recommend it.) It can also output to all the popular portable media player formats which is *very* useful. And you can produce video for web use, MySpace, YouTube and so on as well.
If you've ever used the "Muvee" product, often bundled on computers these days, you'll be familiar with the idea behind the PE7 InstantMovie 'wizard' which will analyze your vids and create a movie out of them automatically using your selected theme, complete with transitions. You can add music and titles as well. This might be OK for quick family vids, but most people will probably want to take more control and just edit their stuff directly. (Personally, I like "Muvee" better for this sort of thing. But maybe that's because I'm more familiar with it. I found PE7's wizard more trouble than it's worth.)
There is a new VideoMerge feature but it seemed like more of a gimmick than anything to me. I did not bother to test it. There is also a 'quicktracks' feature, but as with other products like this, I found the music generated less than inspiring. With so many good sounds out there, I'm hard pressed to see much use for this. It feels more like a check box on the features list aimed at making PR7 more competitive with Pinnacle, Sony and others.
The editing features all work as expected and I had no problems. I like the layout. If you mainly want to load your clips, do some basic effects, transitions, titles and burn a DVD or generate other output formats you'll be happy. There are more effects and transitions than you'll ever need. Nothing spectacular compared to other products or Version 4, but good, solid and easy to use.
I did have PE7 hang and crash on me a few times when I pushed it hard, especially if I tried to click too fast on multiple actions. But the rig I'm using for this review is a very low powered machine and not something I would normally use to run this (2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, ATI 1100 video). This barely meets the minimum requirements. I plan to use it on a more capable rig and I will come back and update this review later. (All video editing software has similar requirements, by the way, so this is not specific to PE7.)
How does it compare to some of its competitors such as Pinnacle Studio or SONY Vegas? Well, it does not nag you to constantly buy plug-ins like Pinnacle Studio (reason enough not to use PS in my opinion). Compared to SONY, well, I have more experience with Sony Vegas and so I find myself preferring the Vegas interface (now that I know it well). PE7 is a bit too "friendly" too me and I don't have much use for the web services, wizards, and what not. Still, it's the quality of the output that matters and there PE 7 does as well as Vegas from what I've seen so far. I plan to work with it more so I can get more acquainted and perhaps I'll update this review once I have used it longer.
Finally, if you only edit std. def DV video and not AVCHD, If you like to edit directly, don't plan on using the web services, wizards and all that, then you might want to look for some closeout sales of PE4 (the previous version). It's got most of what's here that's really useful and would be a viable choice. But if you need AVCHD, then this is the way to go!
See all 107 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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