But, if you want the easiest-to-use program, buy Adobe Premiere Elements 8. Serious amateur video enthusiasts will probably stick with slightly more sensible-looking programs, such as CyberLink PowerDirector, Corel VideoStudio or Pinnacle Studio. Our only disappointment is that there seems to be no single-click way of showing just your movie clips on their own - they're permanently jumbled up with your photos and audio files. It performs well, and you can allow its Auto Analyzer feature to tag your footage automatically by quality and even content. One last word goes to the improved Elements Organizer, a cheerful-looking utility for browsing, tagging and categorising your media files. These rely on templates, so your options are limited, but the idea is good and we hope to see more templates being made available in the future, assuming Adobe isn't too busy inventing more bloody transition effects. In addition to CDs, DVDs, iPhones, YouTube and so on, you now also have the option to generate Flash-based 'online albums'.

One thing Premiere Elements 8 is very good at is exporting your finished movies to a wide range of formats. Be honest: how many of the little buggers are you ever going to use? All video-editing-software companies seem obsessed with inventing more transition effects, and we don't know why. Adobe has also boosted its variety of transition effects.

Adobe premiere elements course