Hi, I have just bought and installed Premiere Elements 4.0 and am finding it so slow as to be almost unusable. I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ dual core processor with 2GB RAM. The video card uses 128MB of motherboard RAM. I have XP SP2 and 160GB HDD. SO I think my hardware spec is OK. But I have just imported 25 minutes worth of video from my Canon DVD recorder, and spent most of the evening waiting for the hour glass to go away. I have shut down all the unecessary applications and services I can.
I have noticed for example, that once things have settled down, if I do so much as access task manager and then click back on PE4, the hourglass spins around for about a minute before the program resumes. Task manager shows 1.GB commit charge which seems a lot, but should be OK as I have 2GB RAM. CPU usage around 30-40%.
Any clues please before I bin the software

I take it you are trying to import mpeg files off a dvd into Premiere Elements 4? Has the dvd disc been finalised in the dvd recorder? Even if it is finalised, Canon may have its own mpeg codec and Premiere Elements may not recognise it and therefore be unable to open any files.

__________________
Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...

Hi, yes the DVD was finalised. The import does work in the sense that eventually the scenes are all available in the organiser and I can play them but it...is...so.....slow. To be honest last night when I posted, I had been moving files around and importing, so I am a bit confused about my data sources right now. I am a real newbie as in I only got my copy of PE4 yesterday!!

But I have spotted something that may be part of the speed problem. Prior to purchasing PE4, I tried several other trial products, and for a time I had no editing software at all so I was copying files directly to my HDD for somewhere to keep them. So I have my files all over the place in at least 3 formats - mpeg4, .VRO and .VOB . I notice that the .VOB files are massive, containing all the scenes from a 30minute DVD in one file, whereas I have squillions of MPEG4 files. The program speed seems to depend on the type of file as well as the number of them in the project. I thought it was the VOB file that really slowed it down, but now I'm wondering if it is lots of MPEGs that are the problem. I'm going to keep experimenting.

I'm really confused about the different file formats. My Canon seems to produce .IFO &. VRO files and can operate in DVD-RAM, or normal video mode. What format do people normally expect to see after importing to PE4?
So I think the speed issue is related to the type of file I am using, maybe some are more 'native' to PE4 than others. But if people agree that my hardware spec is OK, then this problem should be solvable!!!

I use Premiere Pro and switched to AVI very quickly after discovering that it didn't handle MPEG input very efficiently. Premiere Elements probably isn't that great with MPEG input either.

If you want to use Premiere Elements (it is a good editor), your best bet is to convert your MPEG files to AVI using the information at the following link:

Adobe Forums - What is MPEGStreamclip?

Zam
my blog: Digital Video and Film

Thankyou, zamiotana! I have followed your suggestion and downloaded MPEGStreamClip; also the Quick Time alternative that it seems to require. As my Canon produces VOB files, I can now convert these to AVI.

I found that MStreamClip presented me with so many options when exporting VOB to AVI that I'm really not sure which would be the best ones, can you offer any advice? Presumably the conversion should be lossless - and If I choose wrong options I will lose information before it even gets as far as PE4. On ething I have observed is that the resulting AVI file is much larger than the original VOB file - 6 or 7 times bigger in fact.

Which is the preferred format for PE4 - is AVI 'better' than VOB?

Hello,

PE4 works better with AVI than MPEG/VOB.

You basically want to export as either DV-NTSC or DV-PAL AVI (depending on the broadcast standard in your country of origin). In North America it is NTSC. The other default settings in the tool should be fine.

The resulting AVI files will be about four times bigger than your camera's VOB files.

Zam

Digital Video and Film

well ive been having the complete opposite problems, my adobe premiere 4 doesnt like AVI at all, it keeps talking about not supporting the audio bit rate-it has no problems with MPEG but i think AVI has way better quality, it doesnt read my dvds either, it keeps saying how the device isnt connected properly and to reconnect and try again (wtf??)

my advice-bin it. I'm sorry i wasted my money on this software-tech support is awful but most of the time it's non existent.

Convert the AVI in Windows Movie maker to DV-AVI, yours is obviously a different codec.
The new file will work in Premiere Elements just fine.

If Movie Maker will not read the file then use Virtualdub to do the conversion to DV-AVI
(also known as Microsoft AVI)

Okay cool. i'll def check it out, thank you!