Over at TCS Daily this week, I noted the growing popularity of video on the Web. For those who'd like to get into the game, Adobe's Premiere Elements DVD-authoring program has managed to combine a variety of attractive features at an extremely affordable price - it streets for about a C-note. All of which makes the program suitable for a wide range of applications and users. It's certainly easy enough for beginners to plug in a camcorder and transfer and edit their first DVDs, but it's powerful enough to create some surprisingly professional looking finished discs.

However, as I wrote in PC World last year, there were several areas where the program lacked horsepower, especially when compared with more full-featured programs (not the least of which is Premiere Elements' own big-brother,Adobe Premiere).

Several of these areas have been rectified with version 2.0, which we'll address in a moment. But first, an overview of the basic concepts of the program and the minimum horsepower a computer needs to run it.

Minimum Requirements

With a program like Premiere Elements, it helps to have a fairly speedy computer and a fair amount of RAM. Adobe recommends running the program on a Windows XP PC with an Intel Pentium 4, M, D, or Extreme Edition or AMD Opteron or Athlon 64 and 256 MB of RAM; anything beyond those minimums would be all the better. I used a machine with 2.5 gigahertz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM, and the program ran very smoothly.

A FireWire card and a FireWire-equipped digital video recorder are both fairly essential elements for getting the most out of Premiere Elements; the program is tailor-made for them. (If your PC lacks a FireWire card--as mine did until earlier this year - installing such a card is a breeze; for most computers, only a screwdriver is necessary.) Having both of those components will make importing video a surprisingly seamless task.

Essentially, the DV camcorder and Premiere Elements merge into one component. Pressing fast-forward, play or rewind on Premiere Elements' GUI sends those commands to the DV camcorder, which responds accordingly. And another button on the GUI will capture the camcorder footage and import into the PC and into Premiere Elements. (And of course, if your camcorder has A/V inputs, a conventional VCR can be connected to it, and then via the FireWire cable, video can also be input into Premiere Elements).

A new feature of PE 2.0 makes the program compatible with camcorders and PC's supporting the USB 2.0 standard. Otherwise, it's possible to import video via a video-USB interface such as Pinnacle Systems' Dazzle 150, or a comparable device.

PE's Great GUI

Once data is imported, Premiere Elements' graphical user interface is extremely intuitive, and makes editing, then inserting special effects a snap.

Premiere Elements stores all of a project's video in its media window. These elements can then be dragged and dropped into the program's timeline, where they can be edited and modified.

By clicking on "File" then "Interpret Footage," it's possible to set the aspect ratio of any clip stored in Premiere Elements. This is useful both to ensure that all of a project's footage is in the same aspect ratio (whether it's 4X3, 16X9 or 2:1, all of which are supported by PE), or to customize your DVD for a specific play-back format.