I purchased Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 just so I could edit the HDV footage from my new HC-7. I've found it appears to have a lot of problems that I've never seen in any of the earlier versions of Premiere that I've used (6.5 is the current one on my video editing machine).
On the positive side, it is almost crash proof compared to my experience with earlier versions. I've only had it freeze up twice on me. It captures my HDV footage to a 5,400 rpm hard drive without a problem (big surprise, although I will add the 7,200 rpm USB hard drive to it soon... just been using it for other projects).
HOWEVER, here are some of the problems I've seen editing with Elements 3.0:
1. If you edt in the view finder (defining in and out points there and dragging the clip to the timeline), it strangely cuts the clips at sub-frame levels! I have no idea how it does that, but when I place two clips together in a butt edit, there is a subframe level gap between them that I have to go back in and trim on the timeline. Once these gaps are trimmed out on the timeline, everything is fine, but this adds an extra step to the editing process just to clean up this error.
2. If I am not careful in placing a new sequence on the timeline, it is fairly easy for the placement of that sequence to clip the previous or following sequence, creating tiny (or very large if I'm not careful) slivers that also have to be edited out. When editing this way in Premiere 6.5, I don't remember ever having this problem. Perhaps there is a default I should change so it can't happen?
3. When exporting portions of the timeline to AVI, MPEG or other files, I find that even if I am very careful to place the in and out points at the beginning and ending of the clips to export, I get one frame from the preceeding sequence in the exported portion. This requires that I edit the one frame out at the beginning of each exported segment when I do any final production. Never happened with earlier Premiere versions (unless I was very careless in defining the in or out points).
I'll have to look at my notes on a computer at home to come up with the rest. I'm compiling a list since I intend to write tjhe appropriate people at Sony to ask about these issues.
"Other than that," Premiere Elements 3.0 has worked pretty well... but these are significant issues to me.
Oddly enough, I did just get a call about a video I shot last month. It was an awards acceptance speech for the recipient who could not attend. Apparently, some members of the audience want more copies of the DVD for use as a training tool and one for a historical society.
