Ive been doing still portraits since I was a kid (read Kodak Brownie camera, complete with flasholder and giant flash bulbs), and I've been creating slideshows with PSE4 since it became available a number of years ago, but only now, with the release of the PSE7/PRE7 bundle, have I been using the two programs, extensively, together. And I thought I should share, with those of you are just starting with all this, a few more of the very helpful features that I have learned recently and that are not, to the best of my knowledge, already covered by Steve and Chuck's books and tutorials.
1) If you are accustomed to creating what PSE4 called a Collection and what PSE7 calls an Album for the purpose of arranging the Sort Order of the slides in your slideshow (the sequence in which they will play), here is a simple way to maintain that Sort Order in your PRE7 Project: Select all your slides in the PSE Album, right-click any one of them, then Send to Premiere Elements. If you then go to the Icon View of your project's slides in PRE 7, you will observe that they are in the same Sort Order as they were in your album. Cool!
2) Note, however, that when you send your slides to PRE7 this way instead of sending a slideshow that you have comlpeted in PSE7--including the slide and transition durations--the slide and transition durations that will appear on your PRE7 Timeline will be whatever you have preset under PRE7's Edit>Preferences dropdown--so be sure to open PRE7 and set those preferences before sending your slides.
3) While on the subject of PRE7 Edit>Preferences, I recommend that you leave Default Scale to Frame Size de-selected, and here is why: If you are using, say , 2288xz1520-pixel slides, like I am, and you intend to use the Keyframe featiure of PRE7 to pan and zoom your slides after they are on the Timeline, then you want as many pixels in your slides as possible.* If you subsequently decide that you do not want to P&Z some of your slides--but some of them are outside the borders of your Project Preset (in my case, NTSC-HD 1080i 1920 x1080)--simply right-click that particular slide, select Scale to Frame Size and--Voila!--your slide in instantly fitted by this extraordinary program into the available space. VERY cool!**
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*But keep in mind that larger files demand more of your system's resources. In his book, Steve recommends 1000x750 pixels for SD and 1600x1200 for HD projects. If you find that your system is running very slowly and you need to make a file smaller in PSE, use the File>Export New Files command in the Organizer.
**And, yes, if you decide that, on second thought, you would like ALL the slides on the PRE7 Timeline to be fitted to frame size, you can loop-select them all and then select Scale to Frame Size