Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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A few days ago I was in CompUSA doing the usual... walking aisle by aisle as my wife did some shopping in Union Square, and was surprised to find that Adobe had created an "Elements" version of Premiere. Finally, a DVD creating, Video Editing, Movie Making piece of software that does not suck. One of the biggest things missing on my PC is a quality all in one Movie Editing and DVD creation package. Sure, Windows Movie Maker 2 is nice, but it can't burn to DVD. Photo Story 3 is a sweet application for creating movies of your pictures (with unparalleled Ken Burns affect and photo re-sampling as well as music creation) but also lacks the ability to take those .wmv files and then add things like DVD Chapters, DVD templates, and the most crucial step, burning to DVD.
Well for you Mac folks, you have a sweet package with iMovie and iDVD. iMovie is no good for it's Ken Burns affect, and neither package will generate music for you like Photo Story 3 does (you can select a classical composer, like Mozart and the tempo/mood for your Photo Story and it will generate audio for you). However, iMovie and iDVD excel at Capture of DV video, Authoring of a DVD and have wonderful integration.
I have tried Sonic, Roxio and Nero products for doing the above and all have fallen short of my expectations... heck I used a Mac for this stuff so I know where the bar is! But I have to say, THANK YOU ADOBE for giving us an affordable, quality, software package that finally puts Windows on par with the Mac for creating DVD's and Editing Videos. And of course, you can just drag and drop your Photo Story 3 movies directly into Premiere Elements making for a pretty seamless experience.
I'm really diggin the Elements suite of products. I own Photoshop CS, but if I didn't I would buy Photoshop Elements 3 now this supports the Adobe RAW Plugin. Now if Adobe would just update Album to support RAW photos from my Nikon D70 I'd be psyched. You can purchase Photoshop Elements 3 and Premier 1 for $139 and save a bundle.