PE7 - Really Choppy Preview

[tentmaker]

I am editing HD footage (.mts files) on PE7. Once I burn to disk, they are fine and smoothe. But during the editing process, in the preview screen, it is always really slow and choppy (audio and video). It takes forever for the filmstrip to load the little thumbnails and so on. Is there a way I can make this work faster (like maybe decreasing the quality of the preview playback so it can load faster or something???). i am running windows vista, with plenty of ram I think.

[Chuck Engels]

It takes a lot of horsepower to edit HDV, some formats more than others but always uses a lot of resources. A Quad Core CPU and 4GB of RAM are recommended for HDV editing, can you please list all of your computer specs so we can help you find out if there are any shortcomings in your system with regard to HDV editing?

[ATR]

tentmaker

Please do not hesitate to post details of your issues. We welcome them.

For now I am assuming that your computer has a Vista 32 bit operating system. Please indicate if that is correct and
a. installed RAM as well as available RAM
b. total and free hard drive space

What brand and model camcorder are these HD footages coming from? How are you getting them into the Premiere Elements 7 Timeline?

From what you wrote, you are OK with getting them into the Timeline and the quality of the end product. To get a decent preview of the Timeline content in the Edit Mode, you need to Render the Timeline in the Edit Mode of the program by pressing the Enter Key of the computer main keyboard. This gets you a better preview so that will forewarn you to bad end product. It does not impact quality. It can be very timing consuming, but does open a window of opportunity to what the end product will look like. It is especially essential when working with non DV AVI content, titles, transitions, effects. But, as you found out, you can get a good end product with or without this type of Rendering. But, if you had Rendered the Timeline in this manner and still got a poor preview, that would alert you to a problem that needed correction before moving forward.

Since what brings you here appears to be a search for ways to speed up the process on your computer, Rendering in that sense is not the answer. Editing AVCHD and HDV requires that you evaluate your system for the resource demands involved in editing types of video. So, enter the need to know what you are trying to operate with.

All that being said, bottom line for now:

Please check out the following links to see if either help:

“How can I “proxy edit” a high-definition project?”
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/390600?tstart=0

“How can I optimize Vista for best performance?"
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/415316?tstart=0



I will be watching for your progress.

ATR