Playbck window is green and footage won't play

Question

Hi,
I'm using an ACER Aspire 5920, and the Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit Operating System. Last month I did some filming on a Panasonic HDC-SD60 camcorder then imported the footage into Premiere Pro CS4 and did all the editing bits and pieces I needed to do. A very smooth process.
However I've tried to do the same this month and although I've used the same camcorder and not changed any of my Premiere Pro settings I'm having trouble editing.
When I click the play button to show the footage in the playback screen, the screen is green and I cannot see any footage at all, but I can hear the audio. When I click on the playback window, the audio playback stops but the first image from the footage appears. When I click play again, the footage image disappears, I can hear audio but only see green screen.
Image here show's the problem:
Any idea what's going on? Thanks in advance for any help anyone may be able to give!

Answer 1

Liv,
The embedded Intel graphics chips are good for general computing, but fall very short for either image editing, or especially video editing. It's not so much the chips themselves (though they are limited too), but the lack of driver support. With a desktop, the "fix" is to bypass the embedded chip (by DIP switches, jumpers or through the BIOS), and replacing their function with an nVidia, or ATI card. Unfortunately, with a laptop, this is not normally possible (would say is totally impossible, but there might be some exceptions).
The problem is that an NLE program, like PrPro, has to interface much more closely with the video driver, than almost any other program on one's computer. Photoshop is similar, though not to the level that PrPro is. Video drivers are very, very important with video-editing.
Glad that you have a new machine on order. Go with nVidia, or ATI for the graphics, and be wary of any mfgr., that does a proprietary driver. I ran afoul of such with an older Toshiba. Though it had nVidia chips, it would ONLY work with the Toshiba re-written drivers, and Toshiba never issued any. I had to "roll my own," and that was a bit of work. Both Dell and HP seem to do some video driver tweaking, but are much more regular with their releases. Not sure how Toshiba does nowadays.
Good luck,
Hunt