Giving up on PE8...

[Paul LS]

Well I have been putting up with the terrible AVCHD editing experience with PE8 for long enough. I am going back to PE7.

The playback of AVCHD clips is like chalk and cheese between PE8 and PE7. In PE7 I can play back AVCHD clips without rendering and they play back "cleanly". With PE8 if you play back with out rendering the clips "break up"... is the best way I can put it. Also the playback is very jerky. Adobe have definately broken AVCHD playback in PE8. I have discussed this with other AVCHD users and they are seeing the same thing... and rolling back to PE7. Very dissapointing... especially as this issue was pointed out to them at an early stage.

[Chuck Engels]

Sorry to hear that Paul, good thing you have a backup plan

[George Tyndall]

Well I have been putting up with the terrible AVCHD editing experience with PE8 for long enough. I am going back to PE7.

Can you get your money back, Paul?

I discovered my dislike for the 8 bundle (my preference for 7) at the trial version stage so there isn't much I can do to express to Adobe my displeasure, but if enough people who actually paid for 8 ask for their money back, that might cause Adobe to get a message that would be helpful for consumers in terms of future releases.

[RJ Johnston]

I had trouble playing back just DV-AVI footage until I turned off one of the options in Project settings. And I have to manually turn it off for each new project because it's not a sticky item. Once I turn it off, playback resumes to normal.

Edit > Project Settings > General > Playback Settings button > Realtime Playback External Device: NONE.

I also found that turning on Timeline Page Scroll instead of Smooth Scroll also made a big difference.

GPU Acceleration is better for me if it's turned off. Having it on makes for choppy playback.

[Paul LS]

Yes I tried all those options from your previous posts but made no difference. It is not so much the choppiness as that for AVCHD the picture breaks up when it plays back... unless it is rendered. In PE7 I can quite happily playback the unrendered AVCHD with perfect quality.

[RJ Johnston]

It's interesting that I can add an AVCHD 1080i file to the timeline of a standard definition project, clear the checkmark for "scale to frame size," and there is no distortion. Same thing if I add AVCHD 1080i to a 720p project and clear the checkmark for "scale to frame size."

By the way, don't edit the project presets with WordPad. Premiere Elements won't recognize the edited preset. Notepad might work, but I used VEdit.