Premiere Elements vs. Pro Show Gold

[skicat]

Hi I was reading one of the threads in PSE about slide shows. It seems a few people think the Pro Show Gold is the way to go for slide shows. I just upgraded to Premiere Elements 2, but havent installed it yet. I have had great luck with Premiere 1 for movies, but havent used it for slide shows. The slide show that I made in PSE3 was fine on the preview, but somewhat blurry on the tv screen. I'm wondering if it is worth buying Pro Show gold just for slide shows. I guess after all this rambling, Im wondering how the quality & ease of use compares between the 2 products. I know this is a Premiere elements site, but how does Pro Show Gold stack up?

[Mary]

I don't have Premier because I don't do movies so my decision to buy ProShow Gold was as an option for the slide show feature in PSE.

PSE creates a lower resolution format that can't be burned to DVD (unless you also have Premier) and I was able to get high resolution slides shows direct to DVD's with ProShow Gold.

Sorry I can't give you a comparison between Premier and Proshow Gold.

[Baden]

The recent project that I created in Premier Elements 2 included lots of JPG images that I imported onto the timeline with the slideshow feature. The images were mostly unmodified images direct from my 5 megapixel digital camera.

When viewing the project from a DVD onto my wide screen TV, I can assure you that PE2 has the capability to produce crystal clear images onto a quality TV from sharp JPG source pictures.

If you're getting blurry images on your DVD, it's not because PE2 can't do it.


Baden

[Mary]

Hi Baden - the difference you achieved is because you have Premier and PSE - can't get there with just PSE.

[Baden]

Are you saying that Photoshop Elements is allowing Premier Elements 2 create better quality slideshows on my DVDs? How is this happening?

If I were to uninstall Photoshop Elements, would the same project in Premier Elements render into a poorer quality DVD?


Baden

[GaryK]

HI Baden

If you make a slide show in Elements (not Premier) you can only save at a low resolution (VCD I believe..I might be wrong about the format name) which tends to be blurry on a TV.
If you make a slideshow in Premier you can save at a much higher resolution, which will come out fine on TV.

Skicat

Sorry I can't comment on the two either. One thing for me is that PROshow Gold will run on my computer, where as Premier Elements 2, will not. But thats cuz my Computer is OLD

[Barb O]

If you have a DVD burner and if with that burner (or separately) you acquired software that can make an MPEG2 format DVD, then save your Photoshop Elements slide show as a WMV file on your hard drive.

Then you use that WMV file as input to the software that builds the MPEG2 format DVD and does the burn to the DVD. Basically, you are substituting other software for the DVD creation part instead of using Premiere Elements. My Sony external DVD burner came with a limited version of Sonic MyDVD and that is what I used.

The resulting DVD is very significantly better image quality than a VCD burned to a CD disc by Photoshop Elements when they are played on our 36 inch TV with a progressive scan TV DVD player.

Barb O

P.S. Note that you can not just Burn the WMV file to a DVD and expect that DVD to play on TV DVD players. There is a transcoding conversion process and a certain structure of folders on the DVD that must be performed. So you must have software that performs this process.

[Barb O]

skicat

Since you said you have Premiere Elements 1, why not make a PSE slide show save it as a WMV on your hard drive with DVD NTSC (or PAL as appropriate for your country) parameters. Then add that WMV via Add Media in Premiere Elements 1 and go thru the DVD creation and burn process in Premiere Elements 1.

I have not been able to get Premiere Elements 1 to run on my machine yet, so I gave my WMV file to someone else who had it running and he made a DVD with my Photoshop Elements slide show for me.

If you make this one sample then you can view it on your TV and make your own judgement about the image quality. Next you could evaluate if there are any additional functions that ProShow has which you would find beneficial.

Barb O

[kewTpie]

My two cents:

I have made at least eight slide shows with PSE 4.0. I save them as wmv, then burn them to cd. Then I output them at the highest res. and make a vcd for playback on a DVD player to watch on TV. I have had three of these projected and played at my church (two funerals and one 50th wedding anniversay show) and had great success. I do want to be able to put them directly to DVD, so I bought PE 2 the other day. I haven't installed it yet, but heard several others on another thread say how beneficial it is. I figured I would stay in the same brand since PSE 4.0 is so great.

[Foxhound]

Kristy,

I also create the slideshows in WMA with PE4 but I create the DVD in Premiere 2 since I purchased them together. I like being able to do so much more to the slideshows with Premiere after creating them. I've only done about 6 of these shows and the two programs work so well together. When you do finally install your Premeire you'll be able to modify existing DVD menu's or create your own from within PE4.

Just make sure you have lots of system resources to handle Premiere. I'm running an AMD64 3500+ w/1gig ram so the rendering process is VERY FAST. So much faster than those slow poke pentiums Not to mention you can have the organizer, the editor and Premiere all running at the same time with no noticable loss in performance