Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0

A few days ago I was in CompUSA doing the usual... walking aisle by aisle as my wife did some shopping in Union Square, and was surprised to find that Adobe had created an "Elements" version of Premiere. Finally, a DVD creating, Video Editing, Movie Making piece of software that does not suck. One of the biggest things missing on my PC is a qualityall in one Movie Editing and DVD creation package. Sure, Windows Movie Maker 2 is nice, but it can't burn to DVD. Photo Story 3 is a sweet application for creating movies of your pictures (with unparalleled Ken Burns affect and photo re-sampling as well as music creation) but also lacks the ability to take those .wmv files and then add things like DVD Chapters, DVD templates, and the most crucial step, burning to DVD.

Well for you Mac folks, you have a sweet package with iMovie and iDVD. iMovie is no good for it's Ken Burns affect, and neither package will generate music for you like Photo Story 3 does (you can select a classical composer, like Mozart and the tempo/mood for your Photo Story and it will generate audio for you). However, iMovie and iDVD excel at Capture of DV video, Authoring of a DVD and have wonderful integration.

I have tried Sonic, Roxio and Nero products for doing the above and all have fallen short of my expectations... heck I used a Mac for this stuff so I know where the bar is! But I have to say, THANK YOU ADOBE for giving us an affordable, quality, software package that finally puts Windows on par with the Mac for creating DVD's and Editing Videos. And of course, you can just drag and drop your Photo Story 3 movies directly into Premiere Elements making for a pretty seamless experience.

I'm really diggin the Elements suite of products. I own Photoshop CS, but if I didn't I would buy Photoshop Elements 3 now this supports the Adobe RAW Plugin. Now if Adobe would just update Album to support RAW photos from my Nikon D70 I'd be psyched. You can purchase Photoshop Elements 3 and Premier 1 for $139 and save a bundle.