Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"SAN JOSE, Calif. - Sept. 21, 2010 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe(r) Premiere(r) Elements 9 software for both Windows(r) and Mac. Available for the first time on the Mac platform, Adobe's No. 1 selling consumer video-editing software* enables users to turn raw video footage into professional-looking movies in minutes and share virtually anywhere with friends and family."

I have a real love-hate relationship with Premiere Elements. On the love side, it's incredibly easy to use and generates excellent quality output. It's flexible in terms of output formats - I can create MPEG4 h.264 files at 1080p with two-pass VBR encoding at whatever bit rate I want...many consumer-level apps can't do that - and does basically everything I need it do. I find the user interface easy to figure out, the text tools are nice, and I have a nice, fast work-flow when using the program.

On the hate side, it crashes...a lot. I've never seen an application crash as often as Premiere Elements does. It crashes when editing a video, rendering a video, editing text, even exiting the application. I haven't seen an application crash this often since the days of Windows 95. It's been like this for years - check out this post of mine from 2008. Premiere Elements crashes so much that in version 8, Adobe introduced an error reporting wizard that asks you what you were doing when the application crashed, asks you for your email address, and presumably sends them crash information. I say "presumably" because in all of the crash reports I've submitted - and I'd estimate I've submitted at least 50 of them in the past year - I've never heard back from Adobe tech support. Worse, Adobe as a rule doesn't release patches or updates for their Elements software - if it has a glaring bug, it will not get fixed. Adobe simply expects the user to buy the next version of the software that has the fix. Appalling, isn't it? Read more...