PrEl 8 slow and clips will not play in monitor window.

Question

This is very dissapointing. I have been using PrEl 3 up till now and have been really happy with it. I decided to give V8 a whirl. First off, I am not happy with the way the whole interface has been dumbed down from 4.0 onwards. 3 seems to have more manual controls easily accessible and seems more professional. Still, it is what it is. I am bothered by the fact that this is unusable on my machine. I have tried full size avi clips from an SD camera and I have tried little bits of wmv's and phone clips. Nothing will run. It loads into the media bin, drags onto the timeline, creates the peak file as usual but when I hit spacebar to play the clip the asudio works but the video does not. It juts shows a static image of wherever the plaay head was when I hit start. If I then stop the playback and click on the timeline it goes to that spot. Now, I can grab the play head and scrub back and forth on the timeline but it just willnot play in the monitor.
I have tried running 3 and 8 side by side on each screen with the same clip in each. 3 is perfect - 8 will not work.
specs:
XP Pro 32 bit SP3
Dual Xeon 3.2 533
4gb ram
2 x 1tb Samsung hard drives.
Matrox P650 graphics
Now, later this year I will be building a new i7 rig, and it may well ne that this will run the program with no problems. But it SHOULD run on what I have right? Its old certainly but still none too shabby.

Answer 1

Thanks for looking in. I have tried using clips direct from my camera which is a Canon MVX3i and the same thing happens. I know that Elements is made specifically for editing videos made on camcorders but I must say that in version 3 I have been able to drag just about any kind of video file onto the timeline and edit and output it with no problem
So yes, we are talking about standard SD DV-AVI files here.
Project preset is PAL SD 4:3 as it should be.
My video card is rumming latst drivers and BIOS although its an old card.
Quicktime - yes, have latest version.
I have version 3.02 installed still and it runs perfectly.
"Have you right clicked the Monitor and selected Playback Settings to see what setting are checked there?"
External device: DV 25 720 x 576i
Aspect ratio conversion - hardware
Export device: DV 25 720 x 576i
both boxes ticked - this is the default setting and should work.
Okay - update on this: if I select External device: none then it works.
Also if I select External device: Monitor 2 60 1600 x 1200 it also works, and plays back on my secondary monitor which is very cool. But if I select DV 25 720 x 576i then it does not, although this is the setting I have on my 3.02 version as default.