Adobe is undoubtedly king of the PC prosumer video editing market with its ever evolving Premiere series. Now on Premiere Pro 1.5, this popular editor is complimented by the equally powerful Adobe Encore and combining these two products makes a home PC into a powerful and sophisticated video editing machine.

Despite its popular appeal, Premiere Pro was never designed as a beginners application: its often unforgiving to the casual user and represents a serious investment in terms of initial outlay and the time required to master. Despite this, beginners are often attracted to Adobe's pedigree, background and end user support. What if Adobe took advantage of this burgeoning beginners market, stripped Premiere down and included the basic tools of Adobe Encore. My friend, you'd be looking at Adobe Premiere Elements. Adobe Premiere Elements is Adobe's first step into the lower end of the video editing market. So just how does it stand up in this highly competitive market?

After opening Premiere Elements, you'll be presented with the image on the left. Let's start by setting up our project. Click on Setup on the top right and you'll be presented with four options: PAL or NTSC; Widescreen or 4:3. If you're from North America or Japan select NTSC or select PAL for the rest of the world. Now select save as default and you won't ever have to enter this screen again (unless you switch cams that is!) I'm capturing widescreen PAL, so that's the project setting I've chosen. We now need to capture footage to use in our project. (If you've already captured footage, we can jump straight to a new

Project and import video from your hard drive). The new project next dialogue screen is the next step, so choose a location and memorable name for your project. Remember that digital video is a hard drive consuming monster, so make sure you have plenty of space free. If you have a separate hard drive, save your project here as all files will be created in the project directory.

Clicking OK will bring us directly to the capture screen of Premiere Elements. The top area show how many minutes of footage we can capture to the current drive.

Clicking the more button in the top right brings up the capture options. The main settings here are scene selection and capture to timeline. Scene selection automatically splits your clips according to the timecode in the camera - every time you pressed the record button on your camcorder was logged and premiere starts a new clip at each point. With capture to timeline selected, your clips will automatically be placed in the time line. For the beginner, I would suggest keeping these as the default setting of on. We're now ready to start capture, so let's click capture and begin - making sure you camera is on and set to the play mode! If you're not using scene detection, you can manually name each clip by typing in a name in the top left box before capture. Other wise, select a name and when using scene detect, each clip will be suffixed sequentially.

Once you've finished capturing, close down the window to view the editing space. (Alternatively click edit on the toolbar below)

To import video, select add media from the toolbar and browse to your select media. If you haven't selected capture to timeline, you can drag clips from the media window to your timeline. You can select multiple clips by left clicking and dragging your mouse down the list of clips. These multiple clips can then be dragged into the timeline and will be placed chronologically on the timeline:

An aspect of the Adobe Premiere Elements edit module is the gapless timeline feature - whenever a clip is deleted or edited in the timeline, subsequent clips are shifted along to fill the gap in the timeline. To test this, fist select the pointer tool (this is the first tool in the following set:

If you select the end of a clip in the timeline and drag towards the left, you can eliminate any unwanted footage before the end. Notice that the clips then move into place. You can also select a clip by clicking once on the clip in the timeline and then press delete on the keyboard to remove it. The next tool is the razor. This enables you to split clips on the timeline. Select the tool and click on a clip to test. Finally the stretch tool enables you to speed up or reduce the speed of a clip. Just as you moved the clips end point with the pointer, you can move the end points to slow down or speed up the footage. You can also do this by right clicking and selecting time stretch.

You can scroll along the timeline using the navigation bar and your footage will be displayed in the timeline monitor. You can either press play in the monitor window or press space bar to play the timeline. If you want to view a particular clip from the media window, just double click the clip in the media window. To view the timeline again, simply click timeline in the monitor window.

The monitor window can also be used to output your video to your TV. How? Well if you select more in the monitor window, you see a range of playback settings. If you hook up your camcorder to your TV in the normal way and have a DV in connection to your camcorder, the image in the monitor window will also be displayed on your TV.

You can add an extra audio track, for example background music, by adding the music to the media library, then dragging it to Audio 2 on the timeline:

You can then adjust the volume in both tracks by clicking the yellow line in the middle of the clip and dragging it up or down. To delete the original sound of a clip, right click on the video and select unlink audio and video, then delete the audio. You'll also see from the image that you can zoom in on the timeline by moving the zoom selector at the top of the timeline.

Now that you've edited your video, you can add a whole range of effects and transitions. So click effects in the top menu bar to bring up the effects window in place of the media window. There really is an exhaustive range of effects here, so I suggest you have a play! I really am shocked at the list of effects available (almost an exact copy of Adobe Premiere), and these can be manipulated in a professional way by down clicking on the effects button on the menu bar and selecting Advanced Effects. Video and audio effects are applied by dragging and dropping the effect to the clip in the timeline, whilst transitions are applied by being dropped between clips.

You may also want to add tittles and again Adobe Premiere Elements comes up trumps with a whole host of title presets.

The text on the presets can easily be altered, especially if you're familiar with word processing packages. Moreover, there's enough templates and options available to make every video unique! You can also select alternatives such as a scrolling title by clicking and holding on the title button on the menu bar to bring up a drop down box.

Finally it's on to DVD creation. Again, this is simple yet powerful with a complete wizard driven interface.

Your clips will automatically be converted into DVD chapters and presented as a scene selection option with thumbnails. You can also add chapter points in the timeline. Again, you can preview the final DVD via your DV camera on a TV and there are a whole range of menu templates which can easily be edited. Finally, the quality of your video is set automatically so that no matter how long or short your video, the entirety of the DVD is used. Automatic quality is on as default and I would suggest you keep it that way. Adobe quote a time ratio of 7:1 when creating and burring a DVD. You can also output to WMV, MPEG and

And there it is. Adobe Premiere and Encore stripped down and presented as a single package at a fraction of the price. But to the average user, the stripped down part of this sentence is irrelevant. Even in this state, there's enough editing features to last the casual user a lifetime of editing. Moreover, Adobe include an intuitive smart help system as an integral part of the workspace, and a user friendly interface to guide you through from capture to edit. Add one of the most user friendly DVD creation modules I've ever seen, and Adobe have a winner.

I really can't fault this package. If I was to find one fault it may be the lack of a storyboard editor, but then the gapless timeline feature makes this redundant. If you can't afford Premiere, I'd strongly advise Adobe Premiere Elements. And because it's so closely related to Adobe Premiere, you'll find the transition to Premiere a breeze if you do ever upgrade. A thumbs up to Adobe and a solid 9/10 from this reviewer.