I hope they stepped up Premiere Elements more than a little. Sony Vegas Movie Studio, now just Sony Movie studio puts a much more powerful tool in consumer hands than the last version of Premiere Pro. Photoshop Elements has had its ridiculous feature removals now and then. But its been an all around good product. In 7 I believe it was they actually removed the ability to resize by pixels in a time when MySpace (lol) would not resize photos automatically it seemed like a basic feature. Its hard to give up Photoshops heal brush for the added "pro" features in Paint Shop Pro. Its such a time saver its the one thing Adobe always wins me over with.
Being as limited in resources as I am I have to get the best for the money. Having used the trial of Premiere Pro I found Elements not even on the same planet. It seemed as if the only thing they had in common was the encoder the one thing Sony raped from their consumer product. I was in search for a replacement for Pinnacle Studio which had always been buggy and horrible and was now finally merged with Avid. Sony's editor makes things easier with more than 1 or 2 tracks like most consumer editors. Adobe made what appeared to be a very easy to use editor. But it also seemed to be nearly as limited as windows movie maker with no abilities carried over from After Effects.
Sony Movie Studio 12 doubled the video and sound tracks to 20 each and brought the GPU accelerated Encoding from Vegas Pro 11. If the GPU acceleration was not still buggy that would be the major of the 2 things for me. But the main thing it brought was the removal of limitations on the encoder. I was frustrated by being bitrate limited and only being able to do baseline with 1080p. All that is gone now.
Adobe's implementation of Main Concepts encoder is still faster on cpu. It uses a ton of ram which I have and Sony seems to have ram usage toned down but if thats on purpose it also seems to slow the whole party down.
I will be sure to check out Premiere Elements even though my mind was made up.
