Trying Adobe Premier Elements

I'm trying out Adobe Premier Elements. I downloaded the trial and I'm just get started with it. I just shot a some camera box opening video with the EOS 5D Mk II and now I'm going to see how it does with converting and editing the 5D files.

I'll let you know how it works out...

The good news is, Adobe Premier Elements recognizes and plays the Canon EOS 5D Mk II .mov files. The bad news is, it puts a line of text through the middle that says the clip was created with the Adobe Premier Elements 7 Trial. That means I have to pony up before I actually make my video. I wasn't gonna rip off Adobe. But I did want to actually make a full video to evaluate the quality.

I am also finding that my desktop is too slow. It can't keep up with the full-size video. I guess I'm gonna need more than 1 GB of RAM. Or is it the video card? Or the processor? I don't really know. It's a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB RAM and a Radeon 9200 AGP video card with 128 MB of memory. What do I need to upgrade to be able to playback the HD .mov files?

I was kind of surprised by that too.

Premier is pretty str8 forward for the most part. There are a couple of work-flow tricks that you learn by getting to know the tools.

When it comes time to export LMK. I have a blog post ready to go on that. It's something I've been struggling with. Basically you have to export as uncompressed and re compress with Quicktime Pro. A pain, but the result looks great!

-M

Premier leverages the gpu to gain performance, but this isn't turned on by default, so have a poke around and switch it on. This will speed up rendering but doesn't really boost playback. 4gb of ram is a good starting point (premier recomends at least 2gb for hd). I know that unless you are running a 64bit OS you can't use all of the 4gb but you need to give premier as much ram as possible when working with HD. Increasing the size of the virtual memory paging file will help. The other common practice is to have a seperate data drive on a different disk (not a different logical disk) than the applications and os. This has a dual benefit, it means that you can allocate more space to your paging file and free up hard drive space and it means that you can use a multicore processor to greater effect accessing both the application and the data at the same time. I guess that answers the question about your cpu. It is probably fine, but again adobe recomends at least 3.4ghz for hd.

Have a look at this link from adobe about optimizing your system <a href="http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405744.html">http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405744.html</a> it is for premier pro but applies just as well to elements.

Incidentally my computer struggles a bit with hd playback from the timeline in premier, but I have found that reducing the viewining window size a bit improves this, and the exported finished product plays just fine.

My pc's specs are : 2.6ghz quad core, 4gb ram, gforce 9600gt and 500gb os drive and 2 1tb data drives. I would really really like something like a matrox render card but I just can't justify the $$.

The new versions of premier include native support for almost all of the various avchd and hd formats that are available at the moment including red and the simplicity of file handling this gives you is one of its great benefits. It means that no matter what your cameras format and file structure, you can drop the files into the project bin and premier will treat them as standard video files automatically recognizing the folder structure and treating the video as 1 file.

Native file handling of AVCHD!!!!!!!! SWEET!!!!

-M

Thanks for the replies guys. The original clips are all stored on an external hard drive that runs through a USB hub. That can't be the most efficient way to handle video. So I am moving them to a second internal hard drive to see if that works better. I am also taking a look at all the program preferences to see if I can tune things up there. But there's no way around it, I need more RAM. Guess I'll go buy some today. At least that's a reasonably cheap and easy upgrade.