Random Lockups (Workaround) and a couple of questions

[Charbucks]

I got a Panasonic SDR-H18 camcorder for Christmas, and I just finally got around to installing windows so I can edit some video. Since Adobe Premiere Elements is one of the few programs I found that could natively support Panasonic's .MOD (mpeg2) format, I thought I'd give it a shot. So far, it seems alright, except for a few things...

1) The program locked up on me for no apparent reason every few minutes (requiring me to end the program process and lose whatever I was working on). I looked at the task manager, and it was using approximately 15% CPU and around 200 MB ram. My system is a P4 2.8 (with hyperthreading) with 1 Gb ram, so that's not much of my system resources. However, I managed to "stop" the lockups by setting the processor affinity to just one CPU (rather than having it take advantage of the hyperthreading). Is there a way I can disable multiple processor support in the program settings (aside from changing it in the BIOS) so that I can avoid having to do this every time?

2) When I dragged a bunch of clips onto the timeline at once, they showed up in reverse chronological order. No matter how I selected them in the media pane or organized them, I couldn't get them to go into chronological order. Is there a trick to this? I can't imagine why anyone would want reverse chronological order, so it seems like a silly default.

Thanks in advance, and hello to everyone here!

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Char, welcome to Muvipix

I don't know if natively supporting .MOD files is an accurate statement, but there will be some people with experience dropping by to give you a hand shortly I'm sure.

[Charbucks]

Thanks for the welcome, Chuck!

Perhaps "seamlessly" is a better word than "natively"? In any case, PE4 is the first program that I've found that doesn't require either the installation of additional codecs or conversion of the files to AVI. Do you think my issues are related to the use of the .MOD files? I suppose it's possible.

As to my "workaround", I think I might have been fooling myself. I just opened up a short project and exported it to Youtube, and it didn't freeze at all - and I completely forgot to set the processor affinity. I suppose that's a good thing, but it does mean that I have no idea where my first freezes came from. Maybe it was generating the media cache and just didn't give me enough feedback to realize that something was going on?

[Chuck Engels]

For starters try this suggestion from one of my friends

Try this:
Close PRE
Go to: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0\Plug-ins\en_US
Drag the the ImporterFastMPEG.prm file to the desktop

Does peformance with your MPEG/MOD files get better as a result?

You can also just rename the file to ImporterFastMPEG_OLD.prm
That will work also. Should clear up most of your problems.
If you would like to convert the files to DV-AVI, which will work much better in Premiere Elements, you can download and install the free utility mpegstreamclip
http://www.squared5.com/

[RJ Johnston]

I just found out what the ImporterFastMpeg file is used for. To index Mpeg files -- you know, when you add an Mpeg file to the media bin you see the status bar going Indexing.... followed by conforming.

My suggestion would be to put that back if you are going to import MPEGs other than MODs. I've had problems with MPEGs when they weren't indexed.

[RJ Johnston]

If you put the ImporterFastMpeg file back, then the next time you open a project that has MPEG clips, those will be indexed automatically, and you're back where you started. Best to convert the MODs to DV-AVI before you put that ImporterFastMPEG file back.

Punt...

[Charbucks]

Hmm... I guess MPEG really just isn't meant to be edited, eh? I wanted to avoid converting to DV-AVI because one of the things I liked about this camcorder is the relatively small file size, so I was excited to see that Premiere Elements didn't appear to require a conversion. I can tell that it's doing something, because my 6 gigs of video now occupy 8 gigs of space (with all the cache, project files, etc), but that's still better than the 1 gig per 5 minutes of DV.

Right now, I can't get PE4 to freeze up on me again to test what the problem might be, but next time it does, I'll try renaming that plugin. Thanks for all your help!