We never doubted that Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, hewn from professional editor Adobe Premiere Pro, would be exceptionally powerful. Our concerns going in were related to usability and the availability of consumer-oriented features. While Version 2.0 makes good strides in both departments, Pinnacle Studio remains a better choice for making simple home movies. But if you're seeking a highly capable, inexpensive program for more ambitious projects, Premiere Elements is the way to go.

The initial version of Premiere Elements placed a consumerish veneer over Premiere Pro and added DVD-authoring capabilities with gorgeous templates (but minimal navigation options or customizability). There were some bright points, like elegant canned titles that matched the DVD templates and strong integration with PhotoShop Elements, but scratch the surface and Premiere Pro showed through.

This meant a cluttered, floating-window interface; advanced, often obscure controls designed for professionals rather than consumers; and libraries of effects and transitions more suitable for business projects than home movies. In some areas this approach paid dividends, as with Adobe's awesome shadow/highlight tool (the industry's best for curing back-lit videos) and great chroma-keying quality.

On the other hand, if you wanted to stabilize handheld video, insert champagne popping transitions between wedding scenes, or add custom-length royalty-free island music to your beach vacation videos, you couldn't do it. Also unavailable were an audio mixer, narration tools, and the ability to create an MTV-like video production automatically and synchronize it to background music.

In Version 2, Adobe addressed usability, enhanced DVD-authoring capabilities significantly, and added video import support for a range of video devices. But effect and transition libraries are largely unchanged, though some third party options are available. While showing definite improvement, the program still trails Studio in usability and consumer-oriented features.

The most significant interface tweak is a change from floating windows to an adjustable embedded-window arrangement, which lets you drag any window to the desired size without introducing clutter. The default view, with six open windows, is too busy for our liking, but the program supports nested windows selectable via tabs. If you drag the Effects and Effects Properties panels into the project window and close the History window, you're down to an exceptionally clean three-window interface, though most configuration screens remain scarily reminiscent of the professional controls of Premiere Pro.

Adobe drives workflow with four function-specific taskbars (Capture, Edit, Titles, DVD), each with a custom interface. We adore the organizational capabilities of Premiere Elements' content bins, which are far superior to Studio's libraries, but wish they could match Studio's ability to split and annotate video files before dragging them to the timeline.

Once on the timeline, you'll find Premiere Elements' editing tools a model of precision. For example, with Studio's pan-and-zoom controls, you set one key frame for zoom and position, while with Premiere Elements, you control these parameters separately, which simplifies complex effects. Premiere Elements lacks a real-time audio mixer, however, one of the few tools removed from Premiere Pro that would be truly useful to a home videographer.

Adobe also added a Media Downloader module for downloading video clips from digital still cameras, cell phones, and the like. As with Studio, Premiere Elements can now retrieve videos from non-copy-protected DVDs, an increasingly useful feature now that most video projects are rendered to DVD.

On the DVD authoring front, you can now add either a still image or video background to any or all menus in the project, and add background audio. You can also animate and change the location of any button in a menu and change the font, font size, color, and location of menu titles and text buttons. Also new is support for Dolby Digital audio output as well as for Return to Menu flags, which send viewers back to the main menu after playing sections of the video. While Premiere Elements doesn't match Studio's flexibility in DVD design and navigational, its design templates are far superior, and users seeking to create a DVD from a canned template will find Premiere Elements easier to use.

Test results were mixed. In chroma-key trials, Premiere Elements removed the key color more effectively and produced smoother edges. But Studio's color correction proved superior to Premiere Elements, though Adobe's shadow/highlight tool proved more adept at fixing back-lit video. Since Premiere Elements still doesn't offer image stabilization, Studio won these tests, as its automatic function eliminated most shakes without the distortion inherent in other techniques.

Studio edged Premiere Elements in slow-motion quality, with a slightly sharper image and less ghosting. The results were reversed in pan-and-zoom tests, where Premiere Elements showed less flicker, but only after we enabled the flicker-removal switch in the Field Options dialog accessed by right-clicking the image on the timeline.