Premier Elements driving me mad

Question

Hi
For info I have a Sony Viao desktop.
Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2
Processor Intel Core (TM)2 Duo CPU
RAM 2.00 GB
32 bit system.
I bought Elements 9 so I could edit videos.
I have transferred some video from my camcorder to the PC using ION EZ Converter.  This stores the video as .mpg.
When I open Elements (which seems to take absolutely ages and hugely slows my computer down whilst it opens), I go into "organise" and see the thumbnaill of the video.  However, I can't do anything with it.  The first time I went in, I managed to drag it across to the left pains and I got a timeline but when I pressed play the timeline moved and I got sound but no picture.  Every subsequent time I try to do the same thing the right hand pane simply flicks into video effects with a load of hang-gliders and I can't get back to the video clip.
So far I must have spent 3 hours going round in circles getting more and more frustrated.
Oh, at someone's suggestion I tried downloading SHARK007 Codec pack but this didn't seem to help.
Graham WT

Answer 1

Graham, you confess to being a newbie, so I hope I can offer some useful thoughts.
You have a camera which records on digital tape.  That means that it's recorded in digital form.  If you are capturing from the composite or S-Video output of the camera, you are converting that video into analogue form and digitising that.  A digital camera should have a Firewire port, and possibly a USB port.  These allow you to transfer the video in digital form, and Premiere Elements (PE) should be able to capture it directly as long as you connect the digital port to your computer, which may need a card added (to a desktop) or a Firewire/USB plug-in if you don't have a Firewire port on the computer.  These are not terribly expensive.
When you import your footage to PE, the first thing it usually does is index the video, and this can take considerable time, especially if it's a large file.  You should see a progress bar at the bottom right of the PE window, in the status bar.  Once the video is index, the audio is "conformed", which is a faster process.  Until the indexing is finished you can't see the pictures, and until the conforming is finished you can't hear the sound.  While indexing is in progress, you should see a fixed image in lieu of the clip images.
The purists recommend using DV-AVI, which is uncompressed and therefore suffers no quality loss and should process faster since it doesn't need to be decompressed for display.  If you have lots of disk space, this is the best option.  If you don't have the luxury of lots of space, compressed formats such as MPEG variants do work well, but the more sophisticated the compression algorithm, the more CPU grunt it takes to do it well.  I've used a number of in-built cards and USB devices over the years, and they have all worked well and none was terribly expensive.  The reason I've had to replace the devices was not that they failed, but that Windows updates destroyed the drivers, which was rather annoying.  Rather than wait for a later update to correct what was fouled up, I've been impatient and bought a new device.  Also, upgrading the machine generally means upgrading the operating system, and support for "legacy" devices tends to be, shall we say, unsatisfactory (Windows 7 64-bit is why I had to replace scanner, printer and video capture device!), and much software besides!  Virtual machines solved some of the issues, but PE doesn't play nicely with sound drivers in virtual machines.
A final point: if your project specifies one video format and your video footage is something else, you will get poor performance, as I have discovered.  Check that match (PE9 offers to correct it with the first clip you add, which is nice), and use the render option if there's a mismatch, and especially if you see red line segments on the top of the timeline bar.  Define the region you want to render with the sliders at the top, press enter, and she's off.
I wish you happy editing - PE is a far better editor than the others I've seen, mostly because it allows many layers of video rather than just the main one and picture-in-picture, and indefinite numbers of effects.  Ask for help here if you run into trouble, and my experience is that one gets excellent advice.