When Adobe launched Premiere Elements 1 just over a year ago it got a rapturous reception. After all, here were all the best bits of Premiere Pro, Adobe’s professional video-editing application, at a fraction of the cost.

But despite Adobe’s reputation for easy interfaces and its success with Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements 1 had the feel of something stitched together and didn’t work in the seamless way we expect from Adobe products.

With the release of Premiere Elements 2, Adobe has addressed those issues, extended support for input from video-capable devices other than DV camcorders and enhanced some of the existing features to make them more accessible to first-time video editors.

One of the biggest criticisms of version 1 was the amount of screen clutter generated by seemingly unending floating palettes.

The redesigned interface locks all the panels together, so changing the size of one automatically resizes all the others and you can’t lose some panels underneath others.

This isn’t as rigid as it sounds and you can still rearrange the panels by dragging them, but although workspace defaults are provided for capture, editing, titles and DVD authoring, you can’t save your own workspace arrangements.

The capture applet has the usual scene detection options and can now be used to capture DV over USB2 from camcorders with a USB port as well as the more usual Firewire link. There’s no support for HDV though.

Adobe clearly doesn’t share the view of Pinnacle, Ulead and Cyberlink that HDV camcorders will quickly drop to a price that will make them affordable for the masses. So, for now at least, if you’re an HDV camcorder owner, Premiere Elements isn’t for you.