RISCARIO INSIDER: WHERE ARE THE CUSTOMER RATINGS FOR ADVISORS?

July 9, 2011

WHERE ARE THE CUSTOMER RATINGS FOR ADVISORS?

I've been looking for a video editing app that's easy to use and reasonably powerful. My video loving friends recommend Sony Vegas Platinum or Adobe Premiere Elements. These are lite versions of professional tools. Both are similarly priced and have learning curves.

SONY Vegas Platinum

My son "volunteered" to test out Vegas and created this video (The Living Legacy of Goodyear Toastmasters). The main changes were trimming, cropping and boosting the volume. Vegas kept crashing and was unintuitive. Adding/editing a title was not "obvious". Vegas does not use storyboards, for instance. We weren't satisfied.

ADOBE Premiere Elements

Another friend recommended Adobe Premiere Elements combined with Photoshop Elements. Since I don't have a great photo editor, I liked this idea. There was a caveat: I needed a powerful computer. My ThinkPad X200 tablet is designed for portability, not performance. There's very little free disk space for new apps on the zippy-but-tiny 128 GB solid state hard disk.

Gutsy

TopTenREVIEWS gives Premiere Elements 9 a bronze star. That's pretty good. I went to the Adobe site and saw user reviews. The average of 11 reviews is 2.7 out of 5. That's bad. Customers complain about the slow speed and crashes. Those customers are lighthouses. They are being proactive within their circle of influence.

Why would Adobe allow critical reviews on their site? They must realize that customers can leave comments on many places. Maybe that's why they allow reviews on their site. When you do this, you can't censor.

Since Adobe knows about the problems, they will probably release an update (if they haven't already). There's no real downside to experimenting because there's a 30 day free trial. No credit card required.

Sony doesn't have reviews on their site. Because of Adobe's openness, I'm tempted to try out Premiere Elements anyway.

Other Places

I visited Amazon.com and found 153 reviews for the combo of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements (amazon.ca has only 4 reviews). The results are inconclusive. Opinions vary widely. Issues may be arising because of hardware (especially video).

The Financial Anomaly

The financial world sells many products and services. Try finding customer reviews or ratings of the advisors. Couple that with low financial literacy / numeracy and you'll see that you're at a disadvantage when researching.

You don't get free trials either. You're in the world of buyer beware. When you buy an investment, you'll have trouble returning it for the price you paid. With life insurance, there's typically a 10 day money-back guarantee. That's far from 30 days. However, the process of getting your application approved can takes 2-3 months. That gives you the opportunity to change your mind during the process. It's unlikely you will if you have solid reasons for your purchase.

Also, you've been guided by your advisor. Where would you get a contrary opinion?

Podcast 125 (4:33)

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PS Since video processing requires a fast computer with lots of memory and disk space, I'll need an upgrade first. I hope my family isn't reading this post ...

RISCARIO INSIDER