Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0

Considering Adobe’s resources, it’s hard not to expect more from its products. The excellent Premiere Elements 3.0 does nothing to taint such expectations. In fact, by adding a storyboard-like Sceneline tool and HDV (import and editing) support, PE3.0 may be the best video-editing / DVDcreating app now available for home users.

Adobe bills Sceneline as being easy as aking a slideshow, but it has truckloads ore flair and potential. An alternative to he Timeline, Sceneline lets you arrange ideo clips, stills, audio, and narration with rag-and-drop ease. Transitions are a rightclick way, while effects, enhancements, title templates, and audio clips reside inside intuitive menus that refrain from shoving very bell and whistle down your throat.

Elsewhere, the Monitor is a great addition hat lets you edit and preview from one window. Overall, the wide-ranging weaks you can apply to individual frames dd considerable pro-level touches to projects. Besides splitting / trimming frames, adding text, and doing basic photo fixes, you can configure motion and opacity raits, set transition durations, add borders, and much more. There’s plenty here to keep you entertained, including new stopaction tools, which won’t make you Wallace and Gromit worthy but are great fun.

Additionally, creating and burning DVDs (3GP, AVI, H.264, JPEG, MPEG-1/2/4, uickTime, Windows Media, etc.) was roblem-free, although creating an SCVD ook several attempts.

Obviously, the beefier the rig the better, but even on a midrange 3.2GHz Intel P4 WinXP system with 1GB RAM, speedrelated performance was acceptable. Other than my first project crashing repeatedly at load, PE3.0’s performance was smooth on various test systems. A 250-page manual offers broad support and helpful tutorials, and Adobe sells PE3.0 with Photoshop Elements 5.0 for $150. The integration between the apps lets you do such things as record narration in PE3.0 to audibly liven up slideshows built in PSE5.0. Integration with YouTube or other video sites is missing, but you can now transfer video to iPods, PSPs, and mobile phones.

PE3.0 was released before Vista was final, but Adobe has a free upgrade and Vista-compatible version planned.