How to get Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 to do what I want?

November 15, 2006 8:47 AM

Video files (.avi) don't play properly with Adobe Premiere 3.0. Picture jumps back and forth in rapid jumps. Why?

I want to edit video clips that I recorded with my digital pocket camera. It's a Canon PowerShot SD400 / Ixus 50 and it records .avi files of 640x480 px with 30 fps and sound.
So I bought myself Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 to edit them. When I load one of my video clips from my Computer into the program and try to play it, the video playback is all warped: It seems like it has a severe hiccup or stutter, always jumping back and forth a couple of beats (a behaviour similar to that of 80s virtual TV host Max Headroom). The sound runs smoothly, though.
Any video experts in here / out there that know why and how to fix it?
Could it be that my Computer is too lame (2 yr. old notebook with 1.5 Ghz Intel Centrino, 1256 MB memory and enough discspace to handle the low res clips that I am dealing with)?
Thanks!

posted by ollsen to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Sounds to me as though the camera's using an MPEG (I assume MPEG-4) codec that is almost, but not quite, correctly supported by the codecs you have installed on the computer. If the camera came with any drivers and you didn't install them, try that. Otherwise try installing some additional MPEG-4 codecs, such as Divx/Xvid/3ivx and see if they deal with it any better.
posted by kindall at 9:06 AM on November 15, 2006

Nope. Don't think that it's a codec problem. My film clips (and any other video files, no matter what format or size) play smoothly in Windows Media Player and other players.
posted by ollsen at 10:30 AM on November 15, 2006

That kind of performance is usually attributable to disk spin rate. 7200 RPM is recommended, as well has having two disks (not partitions): one for system\applications and one for video files.
posted by trinity8-director at 1:10 PM on November 15, 2006