Adobe Premiere Elements 10 Review

Rating 4 out of 5

Adobe Premiere Elements 10 is a pleasant surprise in many ways.

For years, Adobe’s programs seemed to rule the world of consumer video editing but over time they sadly fell to the back of the pack, staying alive on the coattails of earlier glory rather than any particular innovation.

By the time version 9 was released, they were almost at the point of embarrassing themselves.

With the debut of Adobe Premiere Elements 10, Adobe has once again proved that they can make a quality video editing program that stands up to its peers.

However in spite of the improvements Adobe Premiere Elements 10 has made over its predecessors, the program is still lacking in some respects especially when you stack it up against other comparable programs.

If you have read any of my other reviews or articles you would be aware that I do not like how any video editing software company touts their improvements over a previous version as a reason to buy their new product.

This is especially true when those so called improvements are really just corrections to earlier mistakes.

Whilst I appreciate the way that Premiere Elements 10 has improved on its earlier versions, dominating version 9, in my opinion, is not much of a success story. It needed to be dominated to make this product even worth looking at.

So in the spirit of this website’s stated purpose to keep things as simple as possible for you to choose video editing software let me make my position on Adobe Premiere Elements 10 crystal clear.

Adobe Premiere Elements 10 has all the cool effects and features you could possibly need and is easy to learn and to use effectively but there is nothing here to make it stand out from the crowd.

If you have already decided you are interested in this product then I would say go for it. Use the free trial and if you like it, stop your search there and don’t fall for the trap of thinking that you may be missing out on something better.

All the products in this category I have reviewed are almost identical and the differences between what I consider to be “the best” as opposed to the rest are very minor. In all reality the average user would probably never notice them.

I have intentionally excluded a whole bunch of video editing software products from this site to keep it simple and Adobe is included because it is a good product. You could blindly choose any brand of software here and still make a good choice!

The improvements that you can expect to see with the Adobe Premiere Elements 10.

If you ever tried version 9, you may be well aware of how difficult it was to run more than one AVCHD stream at a time. In some cases, running two AVCHD streams at a time or a video from a high resolution digital DSLR camera would make the preview program just stop dead in its tracks.

Version 10 has managed to avoid this annoying problem by rewriting the program as a 64 bit application. In fact, I found that it is possible to run up to seven AVCHD streams at a time as well as up to four other high resolution digital video streams.

And in case you are wondering, yes, the program runs perfectly fine on 32 bit systems.

This is a massive improvement and Adobe should get a pat on the back for beating version 9, but only a little pat on the back because let’s face it, Version 9 was pretty awful and not too hard to beat.

This improvement brings Adobe Premiere Elements 10 up to the same standards as most of the other decent consumer editing software in its class and is essential for anyone who wants to make complicated title sequences or animated shorts.