Pre 7 Trial does not recognize my canon HD vixia HG21

Question

I have spent 11 days with my Pre 7 trial trying to get it to recognize my camera. It is AVCHD. it cannot detect my camera. I was hoping to bypass the cheap software that came with the camera and just use Adobe to retrieve my videos, edit them, and then burn them to DVD. Reading the forums it looks like I am going to have a lot of problems. I don't know because I can't get past step one.
I took care of the warning at start up stating that content was missing.
So far i am not liking this program.
This is my first time ever editing video. I am worried, looking at all these posts, what other problems I am going to have.
Can someone help me get past step one anyway?

Answer 1

Jill,
I think that it is time for us to look at your computer resources to determine if those are involved in the problems that you described for your computer as well as Premiere Elements 7. Questions/Considerations.....
Operating System and 32 or 64 bit
Installed RAM and Available RAM
Total Capacity of C: (Local) Drive and free hard drive space there
Do you have an external hard drive and is it formatted NTFS, not FAT32
Does your computer operating system control the Virtual Memory or have you used your own settings?
Do you defragment the computer routinely and frequently?
When you are running Premiere Elements 7 are you multitasking, maybe using other programs at the same time?
We need to get the drive locations under control and understood. Confusion on what letter represents which drive can create problems if you do not know to which drive you are assigning videos or whatever. In the good old days, you started with (A:) drive which was for those 3 1/2 floppy discs. That drive was usually designed as "3 1/2 Floppy (A:)". The (C:) your local drive was designed "Local Disk (C:)" that is where your Premiere Elements program files should be   I am told that there was a (B:) drive at one time which was for 5 1/2 floppy discs. After that the drives and the letters assigned by the operating system could be from:
(a) installation of DVD/CD burner(s). Typically you might see them designed: "DVD-RW Drive" with a letter next to it as well as "DVD-RAM Drive" with a letter after it. How drive names and letters are determined is a whole other story.
(b) insertion of a Flash Drive (aka Jump Drive) into one of the USB ports of the computer...your would probably see that represented as "Removal Drive or the brand name of the Flash Drive" with a letter next to it.
(c) installation of an external hard drive which you might see as "FreeAgent Drive" with a letter next to it....it is important to know what letter the external hard drive has been assigned by the system.
In my system it is very important that before I unplug any external hard drives or flash drives that I use the Safely Remove Hardware Icon in the Task panel to avoid problems. Also, Premiere Elements thumbnails are just thumbnails that reference back to the source media that you have saved on the local or external hard drive. Once you have imported source media into Premiere Elements, save and close the project, you will get into serious reconnect media problems if you start moving the source media from the location that Premiere Elements initially recognized.
This next part I will just address quickly and save for the next time. When you use the program that came with the camcorder in order to get the video to the computer hard drive, make sure you watch the export file format that you use.
I hope that these focus points will help to get your look at Premiere Elements 7 moving along, If any additional questions, do not hesitate to ask.
ATR