When I add media from my dLink surveillance camera, the avi files always land in audio instead of the video area. Why, and how can I get them to land as visual?

Question

I am trying to edit some of the surveillance videos taken from our dLink camera of the dogs playing when we are not home, but when I import the .avi files, it always just goes to the audio portion (of Premiere Elements 11) and nothing shows up as video. What am I doing wrong? Please know, I am completely new at this program, since I bought it for the purpose of playing with my dLink home camera videos and haven't been able to do a single thing with them as of yet due to how they are importing. I did "get media" from my Bloggie camera to see if that worked, and it did come across as a video and not just audio, so I am not sure why the other isn't working.

Answer 1

ATR, just to make sure you understand me, all my video clips in my folders appear as the first frame of the video clip when I view my folders as (small, medium, large)icons instead of lists, when saved as .avi files but when saved as .mp4 files, those icons display as a graphic icon of filmstrip with a musical note on it. I do have various other methods to open with (quick time, windows media, winamp or real player) but prefer real player because I like it's quick and easy trimmer that comes along with it, since so many of my videos are just pet antics where you need to clip off the boring beginning and ends of the video.
I did go on a few of the icons and right clicked, Open With, and tried quick time and also Windows Media and it did nothing as far as how the file was saved for display, and they opened the same no matter which player I used...the actual video opens and plays right at it's first frame... but it's the way it is visually displayed in STORAGE that bugs me because it isn't immediately apparent to me what it is a video of (weddings, outside the house, pet antics)... it makes me have to actually title things and read titles where before I let it just be dates because I had the visual of that first frame as a reference. Obviously, this is a problem for unedited videos only, as anything I actually work with, I do give a title along with the date of the video.
I also just realized this seems to be the way ALL videos that are wrapped in .mp4 are displayed, as my bloggie camera's videos appear the same way. Now I know why! My other videos display as .avi's so I see the frame. Puzzle solved. Guess I'll just have to learn to live with it, as it seems to be how things display with the various formats.
Now I need to watch some tutorials to learn how this Premiere program works! It's all new to me, since this is the first time I've been able load any of my videos onto it. I haven't even been able to figure out how to trim on it yet!