Adobe Premiere Elements 2 - Product Review

A transition is a quick and easy way to smoothly tie together the scenes that make up your movie. You will find many professional quality video transitions to choose from including Gradient Wipe, Image Mask, 3D Motion, Page Peel, Slide and Wipe. Each transition has a thumbnail animation that shows how the effect will look and to apply any of them, you just drag it from the Effects and Transitions panel to the spot on the Timeline where you want the transition to occur. You also have many artistic effects to choose from including Alpha Glow, Bevel Edge, Drop Shadow, Edge Feather, Lens and Flare Distortion. All of these transitions and effects can be used as is or customized in the Properties panel and saved for future use. Unlike those family movies from my childhood, Premiere Elements has great Dolby® Digital audio support. Using the Media panel, you can easily create an audio track and keyframes for coordinating the music along the Timeline.

When I use my DVD recorder to burn the DVD after I tape my favorite TV shows, all I get is a generic looking menu with a bunch of ugly squares representing the scenes. With Premiere Elements, you can do a much better job using the many predesigned templates from the DVD Templates panel. You can choose from theme-related templates such as Entertainment, Seasons, Sports, Travel and Party Celebrations. Once you choose a template to match the theme of your movie, you can easily change the text and graphics and add style with the many text styles in the Titler Styles panel. If you can use a word processing program like Microsoft ^R Word, you will have no problem customizing your menu from the templates.

Now that you have your masterpiece completed, you will want to preview your movie in the Preview DVD panel or on your television. And because nothing has been finalized yet, you can go back to make refinements. Finally, you are ready to burn your DVD. Premiere Elements automatically chooses the best quality settings to match your media and the Project Archiver stores all the project media files in one place for you. You can burn your DVD to a single-layer or dual-layer disc in the PAL (Europe and Asia) or NTSC (America and Japan) formats.

Adobe Premiere Elements 2 can be purchased alone or bundled with Adobe Photoshop^R Elements 4.

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