Hey, I recently bought an ADS Pyro A/V capture card and it came free with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0. I know the problem isn't with my capture card because I've seen other videos done with the same capture card at much higher quality.

It seems the longer I record a video, the worse the quality and the higher the file size. A friend told me that Adobe Premiere Elements "auto-edits" itself when it's recording and that I should use Quicktime Pro to record "raw footage"

Does anyone know how I can record without the quality getting worse as the video goes on? Thanks

I am not familiar with the Pyro Capture Card, Premiere Elements doesn't capture from Capture Cards only firewire devices.

I am familiar with the Pyro Link Digital Converter, I have one and use it for all of my analog captures of VHS tapes.
It works flawlessly and the quality is excellent through an entire 1 hour tape, not problems.

Premiere Elements captures DV-AVI over Firewire in excellent quality, the same as Premiere Pro. It does not auto edit (whatever that is) itself, Quicktime Pro would be a good option if you want to capture .MOV format but then you might as well get a MAC and use Final Cut Express.

Premiere Elements captures excellent video, there must be something wrong with your setup. The length of the capture has nothing to do with the quality.

I see. Well when I bought this capture card it came with Premiere Elements, so I'm sure they are compatable with one another.

Could you tell me, in Premiere, how do you change the format it records in? When I press record it automaticly selects .avi as it's file type when I didn't even ask it to use that - I want it to record in the highest possible quality, regardless of file size.

This is what I do to sort out the capture settings...

I start a new project...

Get Media> DV Camcorder,HDV Camcorder, Webcam

I then click the little camera icon and click "Capture Settings"

From there I click on general, and options such as Editing Mode, Frame Size and others are greyed out so I cant change them.

Do you know how to change the capture settings so I don't have to record in .avi?

Thanks for your help

That is simply not true, the card is not really compatible with the program to a great degree. They may sell them together, ADS has an agreement with Adobe, doesn't mean it really works.

The software captures best over Firewire to a DV-AVI format, there is no changing what format it captures in. There are no other options, Premiere Elements is a DV-AVI editor, that is the only option.

Okay, so I can't record in any other format than .avi, that's fine.

So once I have my .avi file recorded, how would I export that file as an mpeg4? I ask because I understand an mpeg4 file is best for YouTube but I can't find any options that allow me to choose mpeg4 as my export file type.

You can export to H.264
Check under the SHARE tab.

FLV will work fine with YouTube also and there is also a YouTube preset that you can use.