The other day I wrote about purchasing Adobe Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. This morning I finally had an hour or so to play around, so here’s my quick 30 second review based on my initial impressions.

Importing video from my DV camcorder was a snap except for one minor annoyance: when I switched away from the capture window into another window in Premiere, video capture stopped. Manipulating media in the timeline (cropping, cutting audio, transitions, etc) were a breeze.

I was shocked at how bad the help system is. Due to the ActiveX security on Windows XPSP2, I had initially ignored the installation of the additional help controls, which made the system pretty useless. I don’t understand why companies just can’t use the standard Windows help system.

Exporting my final movie was fairly straightforward, however I was a bit surprised at the lack of ‘hires’ export formats for WMV. This was no big deal really, I went in and added a few widescreen (I’ve been shooting video in 16:9 lately) templates which worked without incident. One cool note - export to Smartphone was already installed by default.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with my first ‘experiment’. There’s a lot of power in this package, I just hope I can figure it all out and make some cool home movies.