India tech support meets development effort
It is no secret that every developer was based in India - this is clearly documented on the splash screen. Do you like their tech support?

The fact that Adobe decided to eliminate .MOV support is further proof this product is a distaster right out of the box. They are only able to sell it because you can't return it after you open the box.

RUN AWAY!!!!!!

quality tells
like all adobe purchases i havw done in past "it is of the finest quality"

Does The Job
I loaded this program recently, and found that it is up to the tasks that a 'regular user' - such as myself - will require. The install is easy, and storyboarding, and adding effects are simple.

I have to ask myself though, what does this do that MS Movie Maker doesn't already do? The answer is that you must register and pay a fee $$ to use some of the slicker features.

Powerful but painful to use, I can't recommend it!
I mainly started using PE 3.0 awhile back to upload videos to YouTube and to get my HD movies from my camcorder onto DVD (with a few titles, etc..). I never found 3.0 that easy to use but I got the job done.

I upgraded to PE 7 about a month ago and I have been very disappointed. At first I figured I just needed time to get adjusted to the program, but here I am a month later and today started shopping for another alternative. I plan to uninstall PE 7. Which is hard for me to say. But the program is just too painful for me to use, it is not very intuitive and if you want to deviate from doing things how THEY want you to do it....well good luck.

I also get the lockups that others have complained about. Today was the last straw when trying to make a 3 min .flv movie from HD content. The program kept locking up telling me I didn't have enough memory resources. I have a smokin fast machine with 4 GB of memory...if that can't cut it then I doubt most peoples computers will. Very disappointing.

I love Adobe products normally but this one was a total failure. I suggest you look elsewhere at the many other options for the same money.

Can't read video, can't write video but middle is a little better
I have a fairly new video camera but this product was unable to import the video directly. I had to use the small app that came with the camera to import the data to disk and then "import" that into Premier Elements. The failure message is pretty bizarre and comes attached to a nearly phantom window; this is clearly a gaping whole in the program. Adobe support says that it just might not be able to work with that camera.

After struggling with the clunky interface I finally put together a video that I wanted to burn to DL DVD. However, as soon as I get to that menu the program crashes (i.e., a dialog pops up to send an error report to Microsoft). Adobe support just says to be sure that everything that can be updated (there are no updates to PE 7) is updated—they were.

When I looked into getting a consumer-level video editing program about 6 months ago Premier Elements 4 (they jumped a couple numbers here to line it up with (Photo) Elements) the consensus was what PE 4 was the best of a bad lot. My guess is that with this release, Premiere Elements 7 is no longer even the best of the bad lot. With a product with so many versions, it really ought to work much better than this. I would dub it the Vista of video editors, but even Vista is not this dysfunctional. I expected more from Adobe.