Additionally, the dockable-frame workspaces found in Adobe Production Studio is alive and well in Elements 3, allowing you to customize and save your favorite workspaces. And, if you screw up a favorite workspace, you can just go to the “Restore Workspace” list to get everything back the way you like it! The DVD creation functionality is both simple and surprisingly professional. Utilizing pairings of a main-menu page and sub-menu pages in templates, it’s simple and effective to create a DVD of your film, complete with linked chapter menus. (You can choose the chapters yourself or it’ll create them for you from your edit points, which probably isn’t useful on most films—unless you’re Paul Thomas Anderson!) Finally, if you want to format your film for download onto PSP or iPod, Elements 3.0 is now designed to help you size your film appropriately for this purpose.
Performance
On a 3 Ghz P4 HT machine with 1 Gig of RAM, Elements 3.0 moved pretty smoothly, but I noticed that it went slower than it does with Premiere Pro 2. When we tested it on the 2 Ghz P4 with 512 MB that we use as our lower end test machine (and which worked fine with Premiere Pro 2), it really had to chug along on a simple SD project. As such, I’m not sure why the specs indicate that a 1.3 Ghz machine with 512 MB is all that’s needed. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend using this program with anything less than 2.4 Ghz P4 HT with 1 Gig of Ram for SD and 2 Gig of Ram for HDV. Other than that issue, the performance is quite good.
Value
For all you can accomplish with this program, $100 is an amazing value. It may not be the cheapest of the consumer editing programs out there, but it’s definitely going to be one of the best ones for training you on the basics of pro-editing without breaking your bank. And, since all of Premiere Pro’s Plug-ins are backwards compatible with Elements, any plugins you purchase with Elements are an investment for when you can afford Premiere Pro 2.
Final Comments
I quite honestly was shocked by how much power you get in Premiere Elements 3.0. While it’s not going to discourage anyone who can afford the upgrade from going with Premiere Pro 2, Elements is a great program for getting started and will serve you well into the future. Truth be told, I would love to see Adobe add the more streamlined text editor, the narration recorder, and the time lapse features from Elements 3.0 into the next Premiere Pro!
Ease
of Use
9.0
Depth
of Options
9.0
Performance
8.0
Value
10.0
Overall
Score
9.0
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
