Troubles with PE8

Question

I have used PE in various versions for years. Most of this year I've used PE7 which works perfectly on my PC, the only reason I upgraded to PE8 was to use the Effects Mask facility. This is the only reason, and now I have to say I so exasperated I'm contemplating some way of requesting a refund.
Initially I had a lot of crashes which seem to be plaguing a few people on here. What amazes me is that there appears to be very little difference between the two product versions and yet there is clearly a world of difference. There have been lots of comments about cleaning up your hard disks making space available and minimising the number of processes running while you run system hungry PE8, I have done all this and I have to admit the crashes have been reduced. In fact I thought eliminated until 5 mins ago.
My PC and SW spec is at the bottom of this message.
Ok .. so here it is. I can manage with the crashes .. which are infrequent now. But here are the issues I have
1. THE REASON I bought the software, animating the "Effects Mask", causes the Save of a video clip to fail with the error "Error Compiling Movie Unknown Error" I thought initially it was to do with moving the mask outside the video area, but I tried a control test by just moving the mask a small amount inside the video .. same result. I know its the mask because the clip will export fine without it, and with the effect I used inside the mask (Gaussian Blur), but not with the mask with or without the effect. Incidentally an error is STILL produced even if the mask is stationary. This mask is applied to the clip by "Clip - Effects Mask - Apply"
2. I have many video clips on my PC in various formats and ALL can be imported into PRE7 and used fine, not so with PRE8. Lets be clear about this, a short 5 min clip captured from my SD camcorder is imported into PRE7 edited and Exported/Saved fine, but in PRE8 not so. In PRE8 the same clip has only the Audio element, there is no Video. I used the drag and drop technique and the "Get Media" option. So I tried to re-capture the video straight from the camcorder at which point the import and program crashed after about 1 min.
3. Other clips I have dragged across are simply not viewable .. appear as red blocks in My Project area. Clearly PRE8 is not understanding the video format. I simply can't understand why the very same file is fine in PRE7. It makes no sense.
I'm a busy guy, I have lots of work to get done, and the last thing I need is to waste a couple of days on what should be a minor program upgrade. I've never had any issues like this before when upgrading PRE. I've used versions 2 4 and 7 and now 8.
I'm so annoyed about this I'm considerinf dumping the product and switching to Pinnacle or an alternative.
Any help would be appreciated.
Robin
Quad Core HP
4Gb Ram
4.5 Terabytes Hard disk (5 drives) with at least 10Gb on each drive free
ATI Graphics card with twin monitors
Twin moniWindows Vista 32 Home Premium

Answer 1

I normally export all my videos in wmv file format, with about 2000BPS either PAL res or NTSC res depending on my source video. I have recently started doing this with my PAL HD and NTSC HD formats. The Pal is from a Sony HDR-FX1000, the NTSC HD is from a Canon 5d Mark 2 so is true 1920x1080 res, which PRE 7 cannot handle. Im not sure if PR8 can.
Yes, I am running both versions on the same PC, to get the existing video into PRE8 I usually just drag and drop. I must stress every single clip I have (and I have hundreds) in many different formats and different codecs, ALL can be imported into PRE 7 and work fine. I can even mix formats. So I can create a PAL HD project in PRE 7 and import Ntsc SD and HD and Pal SD and HD, and AVCHD .. and they all work fine, on the same timeline.
OK, Im doing a test right now. I have created a clean new PAL HD Project editing mode HDV 720p 25fps timecode. I will now capture directly into this project from a wedding video I have .. I'll just capture 20 secs. I'll then add an Effects Mask. There is no need to move this mask .. I'm certain it will fail. Exporting using Windows Media Preset HD 720p 25 Windows Media Video 9 codec. Ok .. That worked ok.
So now I have toggled on animation for the effects mask and have moved it from one point to another across the video over a 5 sec period.
Sheesh !! That worked as well.
Ok this is looking like a codec or export settings problem. Because I tend to tweak the export parameters.
I shall aghve a bit of a play with these settings and get back to you. While I'm doing that, can you guyys consider this. I was importing this wedding earlier and the PC blue screened. That hasn't happened since I bought thiws PC with Vista preloaded about 18 months ago. Naturally I was VERY concerned when that happened. I must add I was importing into PRE8 but I was also using lightroom and photoshop elements to do some editing...
Cheers
Robin