Uh Oh. Premiere Elements May Have Turned to Crap
For quite some time, I've been a fan of Adobe Premiere Elements (APE). It's the best low-cost solution for editing video on Windows and it's just as good as iMovie. Even does some stuff that iMovie cannot do.
Since APE is relatively inexpensive -- compared to the full, professional version of Premiere -- I've happily upgraded it each time a new version came out. So, when version 4 appeared recently, I was one of the first in line to buy it.
Now I'm wondering if that was a good idea.
First, its interface is slightly different than version 3 and I find it a bit dark and it puts functions where I don't expect them. I guess that's gonna happen with a new UI and maybe I'll get used to it. But it also does not maximize properly. I have a two-monitor system and I put my quick launch bar vertically along the left side. When you maximize APE, part of it slides under the quick launch bar and it does not fill the left monitor completely.
More significantly, APE does not do YouTube like it claims to do. In a review on Amazon.com that was posted just two days ago (10 October 2007), carlamari explains the YouTube-APE situation well:
More to come on this...
Updated, 10/30/2007:
Still no luck uploading to YouTube, but now the error message has changed. Instead of the cryptic, "GetLastError of 12002" now it just says, "Sorry, unable to connect to YouTube. Please try again later." Not quite as cryptic, but no more explanatory.
Clearly, this aspect of PE4 is not ready for prime time. Anyone who upgrades thinking PE4 will facilitate their YouTube uploads is going to be disappointed.
Since APE is relatively inexpensive -- compared to the full, professional version of Premiere -- I've happily upgraded it each time a new version came out. So, when version 4 appeared recently, I was one of the first in line to buy it.
Now I'm wondering if that was a good idea.
First, its interface is slightly different than version 3 and I find it a bit dark and it puts functions where I don't expect them. I guess that's gonna happen with a new UI and maybe I'll get used to it. But it also does not maximize properly. I have a two-monitor system and I put my quick launch bar vertically along the left side. When you maximize APE, part of it slides under the quick launch bar and it does not fill the left monitor completely.
More significantly, APE does not do YouTube like it claims to do. In a review on Amazon.com that was posted just two days ago (10 October 2007), carlamari explains the YouTube-APE situation well:
I purchased this product because I wanted to upload better quality videos to YouTube. The item description for this product states - "Broadcast far and wide by uploading your movies directly to YouTube or your personal sharing page. Adobe Premiere Elements 4 takes care of optimizing and formatting for the specific destination so your movies always look great." Unfortunately, that is completely untrue. The product's presets for YouTube result in a final video stream that is inferior in quality to most of the videos that are currently on YouTube. It is definitely inferior in quality to the MP4 files that I had been previously using. Therefore, it does not optimize for the specific destination. In addition, it does not allow you to adjust the YouTube presets so if you want to upload your file directly from Premiere Elements 4, there is no way to make any adjustments to improve the overall quality.The first time I uploaded a vid to YouTube, it worked okay -- although, like carlamari its quality was inferior to other uploads I've tried -- but the second time I tried it pooped out on me and I got the "GetLastError of 12002" message. It must be a new issue as carlamari's post is the only thing that turns up on a Google search and there's nothing on Adobe's support site about it.
On top of this, I am completely unable to directly upload any videos to YouTube, bad quality or not, since the program keeps giving me an error message that says "Online service encountered an error. The service will now be terminated. 10: unable to send HTTP request with GetLastError of 12002".
Over the past two days I have spent hours on the phone with their technical support staff trying to troubleshoot this connection error. After trying many many different configurations, the problem has not been solved and I can escalate the case to a higher level of tech. support. But of course, why should I bother wasting my time on all of this tech. support if even after the connection issue is fixed, it uploads such poor quality videos? The tech. support staff even agreed with me that the YouTube preset is not of the highest quality or what it should be. Since they are unable to answer alot of my questions, they have referred me to filing a "feature request" on the adobe website and/or emailing their corporate office. So I can waste more of my time being a beta tester on this new product. They really should have worked out all of these bugs BEFORE they released the product.
More to come on this...
Updated, 10/30/2007:
Still no luck uploading to YouTube, but now the error message has changed. Instead of the cryptic, "GetLastError of 12002" now it just says, "Sorry, unable to connect to YouTube. Please try again later." Not quite as cryptic, but no more explanatory.
Clearly, this aspect of PE4 is not ready for prime time. Anyone who upgrades thinking PE4 will facilitate their YouTube uploads is going to be disappointed.
posted by Jeremy Butler at 5:04 PM
1 comments
