Before I put myself in 'self-righteous' mode, I would like to rejoice over the 1000+ views my blog has gotten. Yay me. I can only recall 4 people have actually admitted to me that they've read one or more articles on here and one of them is my sister. OK, so now to the point "Why you should not buy Premiere Elements".

Before I go any further let me give you some background. I searched long and hard for free video editing software to use for my King video. I came across things like t@b ZS4 and Avid free DV. Long story short, things were slow and unfriendly. I also had in my possession a CD that came with a magazine, which I specifically purchased because the CD had a fully functional copy of EditStudio 2. That's a piece of legacy software that is supposedly fully functional. I however managed to make it die many painful deaths as it contorted its inner workings trying to cope with my source footage. Independent of my quest for free video editing software, I decided to upgrade to a newer PC. I ordered a motherboard and CPU on-line when I browsed through the rest of the store and saw Adobe Premiere Elements. I broke down and bought the Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Premiere Elements 3.0 bundle. Hurray for me! As it turns out, hurray for Adobe.

Not posted everywhere is that you need a processor with the SSE instruction set to run the damn thing. No big deal in my case, I just had to wait for my new motherboard, the original of which was DoA. So it gets here, I postpone installing it, I finally do and BAM! The first thing I try to do FAILS! I can NOT change the resolution of my project. The way the presets work at first makes you think you can, but no.. you can't. The parts of the dialog screen that let you specify simple, basic, necessary, important to every project... did I mention simple and basic... parameters like resolution, frame rate and aspect ratio are GREYED OUT. Unable to edit these I was put in a state of disbelief. I go to the support forums and am told you're not SUPPOSED to be able to edit them. They're turned off because you're not a "PRO" user. I was stubborn enough to not wait for an answer and before they told me the bad news I had figured out a way around the limitations: by editing the preset files in a text editor. I wasn't the only one to do so, I did however inform the 'community' specifically on how to change the frame-rate parameter in the preset files, which wasn't as straight forward as the rest. What's the logic? Someone at Adobe must have thought "how do we make people want to pay a lot more for the PRO version?". Making the PRO version better, no, too obvious, we must cripple the mass consumer version. After all, people only ever use it to put together movies of their son's soccer game where he scored that one goal because the opposing team's goalkeeper had the flu and was replaced by the coach's daughter who happens to prefer playing dress-up and having tea parties with imaginary forest creatures. Why else would they take a program, that is ABLE to deal with any type of preset the Pro version can and take away that functionality? They must think "You don't deserve it".

So OK, I happen to be dealing with actual TV footage, captured at 720x480, so I can just use the NTSC preset. Any cropping I can do later. If I had to I could just make a custom preset file by hand and use that, no big deal. So I start messing around with it and I'm happy to see the functionality I liked about old-school premiere I learned to love when I was working with actual DV for a school project. Things like the sound during the scrubbing and the snapping stuff neatly into place. Small stuff that probably isn't much different in other editing software of the same price-range. The satisfaction lasts until I try to export to an AVI file. Wow, what a badly implemented exporting function. The video was broken in ways I can only describe as digital noise. I used several VFW codecs that work fine in any other program I use. How would I use Premiere for more than just kicks if I can't export what I make? Who knows. I don't. I fortunately don't' have to because Debugmode's Frameserver is the savior of humanity and the only reason I didn't punch a hole in the wall. Screw you Adobe, for making something so mediocre and proclaiming yourself to be the market leader. It's like how RealPlayer said it was the number one media player because half the internet was full of people that either didn't know they had a choice or did not know how to un-install it. Of course it's not total junk, I managed to make a good video with it, but god knows I wouldn't have bought it if I knew then what I know now. I won't go on about how Photoshop Elements doesn't even let you make a mask for a regular layer. You have to lie to take two intermediate steps to accomplish something similar. I said I wouldn't go on about it so I'll leave it there.

Don't buy Premiere Elements, look for something else. If you must, learn from my mistakes and actually register and download the trial version before buying it. It's there because either Adobe's confident you'll still want to buy it, or they secretly feel guilty about making something so bad they want to give consumers a chance to protect themselves. I didn't take them up on their offer and for my arrogance I paid.

UPDATE: I just found out that Premiere Elements is one of the few 32-bit programs that will not run under 64-bit Vista. Something about sound coding.

UPDATE2: I can't believe I forgot to mention it the first time, but I have another complaint about what PE does to images you import. For some reason I can't get a pixel for pixel perfect import of my PNG encapsulated image. The result is an image that has a partially transparent copy of itsel super-imposed a pixel or two lower than the original. This meant I couldn't use color keying to matte out the background because parts of the image were blurred. I THOUGHT it had something to do with aspect ratios, but it didn't. I figured out I had to resize the image to 720x480 (size of the project) for it to leave the image unfiltered and untouched.