Others say...

"My favorite video editing program"
I've used pinnacle studios and Adobe premier (old version) and version 4. Version 4 is wonderful, easy to use, and very reliable! Finding a camera to be compatible with the format premier needs was difficult, but stick with HDV and you will have no problem! I just filmed my cousins wedding and had the entire 2 hours of video edited in about 3 hours! The program has built in HD themes and really dressed up the video nicely~

My favorite editing program to date!

If you are a youtuber, this program is a must have! It converts and uploads directly to youtube!

"Adobe Premiere Elements 4"
This is a fairly powerful video editing program for less than $100. It's very useful for video archiving projects and such. However, for a software that seems aimed at the "video editing beginner", rather than an advanced user, I encountered a lot of glitches. I would think it would be more important to have less glitches in a "beginner-level" product because those users might not necessarily have the knowledge to figure out what's wrong or seek out answers. I was able to work around or figure out pretty much all of the problems I encountered, but I had to do a lot of research on Adobe's forums and a lot of time-consuming troubleshooting (such as rendering dozens of clips in a project separately to figure out what was causing transcoding errors...). I would say that I wouldn't recommend this for beginners, but I don't have any experience with competing programs of this type; maybe they're as bad or worse. I purchased this because I've always loved Photoshop and I couldn't afford the "Pro" version of Premiere. It has done what I've wanted it to do so far, but it has also wasted a lot of my time. All that being said, I'll probably be getting the "Pro" version soon...

"Crash, Crash & Crash "
I used PE4 to create some training videos for my company. It froze up many times during editing and very often crashed during the convert to file portion. In other words you'll wind up with a project file that you can't use for anything. I created 4 videos, the three shorter ones (under 5 minutes) converted fine. A 15 minute video with many scenes, transitions and effects is now held hostage in my computer. I spent over a week on it and luckilly got one good burn of the file off before all hell broke loose. Now the file can't be burned to any format or edited. It crashes at every attempt. I gave it two stars only because 3 of my videos came out great. If it doesn't crash it works great but IT WILL CRASH.

"Love Adobe products, but think twice about this one..."
I have experienced several crashes and losses with this software. It is very powerful, but the crashing really drives me crazy. Have not yet explored other options, expecting that my previous experience with AE 2 (which was great) would follow with this product. The Adobe help (online) could really be better too. It had nothing to really resolve the crashing...only told me to "get rid of conflicting programs" and reinstall... Not much help for me.

"Fun, Fast, Intuitive"
I love creating video slideshows of my friends and elements has always been my number one choice. I am also a 3D animator and I use APE4 for all my pet projects. The new version has a bunch of new transitions and effects and the layout is easier to navigate. I have never had to read a manual for this software. Once you upload your media onto the interface, it's pretty much click and drag.

I had been using 3.0 for the last 2 years or so and a few months ago I upgraded to 4.0. I am running it on Vista with no problems. I have a 2.6ghz quad core, 8800gt graphics card, and 4g RAM so that might have something to do with it. Just make sure you have a good processor and a decent amount of RAM and you should be fine. Another great thing about this program is that when you're ready to export the file, you can burn to DVD, Blue-Ray, upload to an FTP server, save to your desktop, format for e-mail or iPod, iPhone, etc. With just a few clicks in the "share" menu. No more guess work. Of course, you can still go to advance settings and do all the fine tuning yourself. For what I do (home videos, short film, animation) this is the best thing I've come across for editing.