Premiere Elements 8.0 Crashing When it Loads?

Question

Hello - I'm completely new to video editing, so it's very possible I'm just doing something wrong, but hoping for some help.  I downloaded the trial version of Premiere Elements 8.0 today on two separate computers and I'm encountering the same problem with both.  I can only seem to open the Organizer, but can't access Premiere Elements from either the "New Project" button on the home screen or through "Edit with Premiere Elements" command under the edit dropdown in organizer.  I first loaded it on my wife's laptop which is a bit underpowered (Pentium 2 2.4GHz or something, 2 MB RAM) and then tried it on mine (Dual Core 2 Duo, 2.6GHz, 4 MB RAM) with the exact same issue.  Does it sound like a problem with the trial version, a resource issue, or just something I'm doing wrong?  I'm happy provide more info, but I don't know enough to know what else would be relevant to add.  Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

If I partition the first drive and put the OS in it's own partition, would I achieve the same benefit as having the OS on its own independent drive?
Please do not even think of a partition. That will actually slow things down. What happens is the OS sees the two partitions as separate physical HDD's. It will request reads/writes from both, but the partitions are only one physical HDD, and cannot comply. This becomes a big bottleneck.
The only reason that I can think of for partitions would be for multi-boot systems. In those cases, nothing but the OS would be on any one partition, so the others would be idle. There used to be a reason for doing this, back in about PS 7, but as of PS CS, the program can see discs of infinite size.
With two physical HDD's, you might want to think about getting a fast, FW-800, or eSATA, external, and using that for your Projects and your Scratch Disks. Note that you will likely have to add a card (PCI, PCIe or ExpressCard) to allow for this connection. If that is the case, go with eSATA, as it will be as fast as you'll get.
As I shuttle my Projects between my laptop (3x 200GB SATA II's) and my workstation (6x 1TB SATA II's + 2x 1.5TB ATA-100's), I use a bank of Maxtor 2TB FW-800's. In these cases, I have everything on the external. This is not the ideal, as having the media files on an internal would be better, but I can shuttle the Projects and have everything work fine, regardless of which machine I am editing on. FW-800 was the slowest connection that I could stand to edit to/from.
Please do not even think about a partition.
Good luck,
Hunt