What happened to Elements 5 and 6? Well for some reason (probably to make it easier to package with the new Photoshop release of the same name) the good people at Adobe decided they were superfluous and have gone straight to 7. I am an avid user of Elements 4 and have always found it to be a very simple and easy to use piece of editing software. Anybody that has used a editing program before should have no trouble at all in transfering their skill set. It is first and foremost aimed at the home user but the software itself is actually very powerful and can be used in a professional enviroment. We have been using Elements 3 and 4 for creating Podcasts for our corporate clients for the last few years and have found to be a very flexible program. We often combine the original film recordings with Camtasia (Techsmith) for a polished and finalised product.

I have been keeping an eye on the development of this software for the last few months for a personal reason. I recently purchased a Canon HD camcorder after doing my usual amount of in depth research I somehow managed to miss that Premiere (or any other editing program for that matter) will not import AVCHD. This is one of the newer formats of HD and i found almost immediately after plugging the Canon into my PC that it had no idea what to do with the footage. Fortunately it was just holiday footage and not work footage. There were workarounds but this would have involved buying a separate piece of software, importing the footage into it from the camera, converting it into a format Premiere understood and then re-importing it into Premiere 4. A real pain in the proverbial not to mention an unwanted expense.

There are other new features in this release, notably ‘InstantMovie’ feature which takes your video clips and puts together your movie for you, including titles, transitions, credits, etc, but in my opinion that kind of takes away the whole point of the ‘editing’ software. There are a few other bells and whistles but fundamentally it is not much different from the previous release.

If you already have Elements 4 and a older camcorder then in my personal opinion I wouldn’t bother with the upgrade, (£64.62 for the Upgrade or £76.38 for the full version) but if you are new to the world of video editing or have just purchased a HD Camcorder then this is a highly recommended piece of software, easy to use and quietly very powerful.

For more information visit Adobe.