Adobe premiere elements for 2 camera wedding videography

Question

I am currently a user of Pinnacle studio 12. I do wedding videography part time and find it fairly easy to edit a wedding shot with two camcorders. I place video from the main camcorder on the main track and video from the second camcorder on the overlay track. I do pip with the overlay so I can watch video from both tracks at the same time. If I don't like what is on the overlay I make it 100% transparent or delete it(if I don't need the audio).
Are their any PE 7 users that are also Pinnacle users or that edit weddings with PE 7. How do the programs compare? Are they equally easy to work with? Which one produces the sharpest video to DVD?
thanks

Answer 1

David,
I've used PE of various versions to do projects of 1 hr length (2.8 GHz / 2GB RAM / 2x500GB HD) One project was even 2 hours.
However, even if I *could* do a project that long, I now purposefully choose not to. I will do a project of 5-10 minutes, export the result to .AVI, and when I'm completely finished, create a final project that incorporates all of the finished .AVIs and creates a DVD menu. (I didn't come up with this workflow, it was advice I followed here on the boards).
Rather than being a pain, I find several advantages:
1) The biggest is that if your project ever becomes corrupted (or deleted or whatever), you lose 10 minutes of video and how much ever time it took to create it - not your entire thing. Basically, you're not putting all your eggs in one basket.
2) I find it easier to deal with smaller projects - working with a 5 minute timeline is much easier than a 1-hour timeline
3) It's somehow mentally satisfying to complete a section, mark it as "done", and move on.
4) The intermediate AVIs act sort-of as a backup of the original footage. I think Project Archive accomplishes the same thing, but this way it's backed-up as you go rather than after you're finished. Of course, my entire machine is backed up, too, so it's just extra protection.
5) For me, the DVD menu function has always been the flakiest part of PE (followed by the Titler). If the DVD project gets hosed, it's brain-dead simple to re-create - I just pull in all my AVIs and start over.
6) And, yes, it's easier on machine resources.
So, bottom line, now that I have my "5-Minute Workflow", I've really come to like it and wouldn't do an hour project. For me, it's not a pain, it really works well. My 2 cents.