Premiere Elements 8 Initial Impressions

Question

Premiere Elements 8 First Look: Part 1.
Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8 are now installed on my Windows XP SP3 with about available 1 GB RAM and 70 GB free hard drive space and the virtual memory controlled by the operating system…not great for a heavy duty project, but adequate to overview the programs.
1. Download & Installation. Both programs took about 3 ½ hours to download, using high speed DSL. Premiere Elements 8 downloaded and installed without problems. Installation went much quicker. But, Photoshop Elements 8 download did present challenges, first, it kept downloading Premiere Elements 8 instead of Photoshop Elements 8. Finally in the early hours of the morning, the download from the Adobe site was named Photoshop Elements 8. Great, except, once downloaded it would not launch. The launcher did not know what to do with the .7z  file. Download and use of WinZip took care of that. My default browser Mozilla Firefox was worthless for the download of either Photoshop Elements 8 or Premiere Elements 8, but no problems with my Internet Explorer 6. I had this same problem with the Photoshop Elements 7/Premiere Elements 7 downloads last year.
2. Premiere Elements 8
a. Organizer. I would take exception to Steve Grisetti’s picture of the Organizer in “What’s new in Premiere Elements 8?”, but maybe I was overly optimistic by “The most visible change to version 8 is that the Organizer is no longer a sub-program of Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. It now lives as its own, separate, pretty much independent program – behaving more than ever like its professional big brother, Adobe Bridge.” He went on to say “In version 8, both programs have equal access to a single, full-featured Organizer.”
Here is my dilemma for some who want a separate video and photo catalog. If you had Photoshop Elements 7/Premiere Elements 7, you could create additional catalogs in Photoshop Elements 7. Premiere Elements 7 could use one of these catalogs, but could not create new catalogs. So then, you could have a photo catalog displaying in the Photoshop Elements 7 Organizer and a video catalog displaying when you opened Premiere Elements 7. You cannot do that anymore, and File Menu/Catalog is gone in Premiere Elements 8. You still cannot create catalogs in Premiere Elements 8, so, if you just have Premiere Elements 8, you have ONE catalog. If you have Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8, you can create additional catalogs in Photoshop Elements 8 that can be used in Premiere Elements 8, but these programs will display the same ONE catalog.
b. Project Presets. The “New Preset” button is gone. The categories of the presets for NTSC and PAL remain the same: AVCHD, DV, “Hard Disk, Flash Memory Camcorder”, HDV. However, two choices have been added to the “Hard Disk, Flash Memory Camcorder” categories. Now we have HD 1080i30, HD 1080i30 (60i), Standard, and Widescreen. Here I have a problem reconciling the names and the descriptions. It was my understanding, in Premiere Elements 7 for standard and widescreen in this category, this preset category reverses the Fields: from Upper Field First to Lower Field First in Premiere Elements edits. So, now with these new choices described as follows:
HD 1080i30: 1920 x 1080i; pixel aspect ratio = square pixels (1.0); camcorders like JVC GZ-HD7; 16:9 interlaced HD video at 29:97 frames per second.
HD 1080i30 (60i): HD video from 1440 x 1080i camcorders; 16:9 interlaced HD video at 29:97 frames per second HDV 1080i Anamorphic.
When thinking HD 1080i30 preset….the JVC camcorder captures to a progressive sensor, assumed at 30 frames per second, and can record to it’s built in hard drive as 1920 x 1080i with 30 frames per second each frame with 2 fields. So, what prevents us from calling this preset HD 1080i30 (30p) Square Pixel?
When thinking HD 1080i30 (60i))…the camcorder involved captures to an interlaced sensor at 60 fields per second, and can record to it media as 1440 x 1080 with 30 frames per second, using a HD Anamorphic. So, what prevents us from calling this preset HD 1080i30 (60i) Anamorphic?
When I start comparing preset choices, the only reason for using these “Hard Disk, Flash Memory Camcorder” new choices appears to be, like for standard and widescreen, to have the Fields reversed. Do you agree? Any comments on the nomenclature for these new preset choices?
3. Adobe Folder, folders and files
If you go to the default location of the Adobe Folder (My Documents\Premiere Elements\8.0), there are some differences there:
For Premiere Elements 7 and earlier versions there were:
Adobe Premiere Elements Previews Folder
Encoded Files Folder
Media Cache Folder that piled up with conformed audio files (.cfa and .pek)
Project Prel file
Styles Folder
And sometimes 2 .log files
Now in Premiere Elements 8, the Media Cache Folder is gone and we have the arrangement:
Adobe Premiere Elements Previews Folder
CA Object Track Results
Encoded Files
Layouts
Styles Folder
(You no longer see the endless conforming of DVD Menus (not even used) at the beginning of the project. But, I am still trying to figure out what they did with the conformed audio files (.cfa and .pek). More on that next time, along with Premiere Elements 8 Exports as well as Photoshop Elements 8/Premiere Elements 8 intergration.
ATR

Answer 1

I have not gotten to Part 3 yet. This is an add on to the last add on.
I tried to find the Premiere Elements 8 Read Me file since those Read Me files usually contain "Known Bug Messages". I could not find that Adobe had put it online, but I did dig it out of the try out download folder. Here is the excerpt on Premiere Elements 8 known bugs/issues:
Adobe Premiere Elements 8.0 Known Issues
Importing Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 and 4.0 Projects
• Effect keyframes in Premiere elements 3.0 projects may not import correctly
Capturing and Importing Video
DV Device control will be disabled and capture will not proceed normally if sound card is not present or offline.
·         If capture is interrupted by a system event such as switching users, locking the system, or the screensaver, the duration of the captured file will be much shorter than expected. It is recommended to disable the screensaver before starting capture, and to avoid any actions that may interfere with the capture.
·         For live capture from DV camcorders, you must first disable scene detect.
·         When importing some Flash files a “Macromedia Flash Player security" message reading “Flash player has stopped potentially unsafe operation" may appear. Click “OK”, and the file will import normally.
·         When capturing form HDV camcorders you may see interlace lines in the preview window, The interlace lines do not appear in the captured video
·         Divx files may not be imported properly and sometimes import only audio or video part of it
·         After completing time-lapse capture, it may take some time for the organizer to update and display the thumbnails for the captured files. Still images captured using Stop Motion are not added to the organizer.
·         Importing media from some devices requires that the drivers provided with devices are installed
·         Stop Motion capture is not supported for HDV camcorders.
Organizer
•       When reconnecting missing media, each grouped scene must be reconnected individually
Edit
·         If issues are seen with color in preview, switch to CPU playback mode by un-checking “Enable GPU Playback” checkbox in Edit>preferences>General and restart application after saving your project.
·         Generation of thumbnails for DVD scene menus may take longer than expected when using HDV content.
·         Organizer may exhibit performance issues with large catalogs (5000-10,000 files )
·         With some GPU cards enabling “Accelerated GPU Effects” may cause the preview to be zoomed in.
·         Voice over narration may not be recorded using a mono USB microphone
·         When previewing audio mixes, pops may be heard as the CTI passes form one clip to the next. These pops will not appear in your exported movie
Audio mixer sliders may become “sticky” when mixing clips that have been time stretched
·         [Japanese  & Chinese Simplified SPECIFIC] When application is installed to path that contains double byte characters path, GPU effects/transition will not function.
·         [Japanese SPECIFIC] Inputting ¥ symbol in Menu templates produces a backslash ( \ )
Photoshop Elements Integration
• In Photoshop Elements, choosing “Edit in Adobe Premiere Elements” may not bring the Adobe Premiere Elements window to the foreground.
• If a Photoshop Elements slideshow is sent to Adobe Premiere Elements, further edits in Photoshop Elements will not be reflected in Adobe Premiere Elements.
• Images saved in Photoshop Elements in BMP mode using the Advanced Settings cannot be imported into Adobe Premiere Elements. This includes images created using Adobe Premiere Elements Freeze Frame function and sent to Photoshop Elements for editing. If the image is saved using Photoshop Elements Advanced Settings, it cannot be returned to Adobe Premiere Elements, and as result, the original, unedited Freeze Frame image will be used.
• Send to Premiere Elements 8.0 will not work from older versions of Photoshop Elements
Exporting Movies
• Export of movies to the root directory of any drive (e.g. D:\) may fail.
• When exporting movies over one hour to MPEG2 format, the render dialog may continue to be displayed for a period of time after the render progress bar appears to have completed. Rendering is still occurring until the render dialog boxes closes. Clicking Cancel before the render dialog box closes will interrupt this process, and your export file will not be created
• For play back on a PSP, movies must include both audio and video. Movies exported with video only or audio only will not play back on the PSP.
• Archival of projects with Type 1 DV-AVI files is not supported.
• If standard definition menu templates are used when burning to Bluray, menu images s will appear of low quality
• When attempting to burn a Bluray disc to a previously burned disc, you will see an error message indicating that the disc is incompatible, instead of an error message indicating the disc is full.
• Movies exported in H.264 format may have a few white frames added to the end
• Movies exported in MPEG2 format may be a few frames shorter than the original movie
This seems to answer my question about Photoshop Elements 8/Premiere Element 8 integration regarding slideshows, but may be of more widespread interest to others for the other "known bugs" cited by Adobe.
ATR