In yesterday’s post I mentioned my desire to add video to more of my blog entries. I’ve been reluctant to do so in the past because I always have trouble with video. I run into issues with codecs, or just not having the right software to edit or even display video.

Best Buy had Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) on sale yesterday. I bought it because I’ve heard very good things about that program, specifically that it is much better than Windows Movie Maker (WMM). I’ve dabbled with WMM a few times and found it to be simple, but limited. If PE7 was anything like it, then I’d be happy.

It’s been about two hours now. I’m trying to apply a transition from one scene to the next in our cruise video (from last year). This is the best I can do:

That looks like shit. Why is the current scene spilling into the transition? Why isn’t it showing the next scene instead? I searched online for help, and everything I could find either was specific to Premiere Elements 4 or required me to start a paid subscription.

I fired up Windows Movie Maker and loaded the same two scenes. It took me five seconds to do what I wanted:

So, the free program I already had does this extremely simple thing better than the paid program. Had I just pirated this app, I would have paid $0 and lost nothing but a few hundred megabytes of hard drive space (which I would have gotten right back after I uninstalled this piece of crap).

If any of you can offer some (free) advice on how to do transitions correctly, I would very much appreciate it.