Why does Premier elements keep stopping working?

Question

Premier elements keeps shutting down with a message saying that it has stopped working and will find asolution to the problem on line but it never connects with anything nor does it provide any answers.

Answer 1

Garth,
What has happened is that recently, some camera mfgrs. have broken from long-established "standards," regarding their video output. We see more of this with less-expensive stills cameras, that also shoot video.
For decades, the standards for SD (Standard Definition) Video has been:
NTSC:
720 x 480 Standard 4:3 with a PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) of 0.9 (pixels are taller, than wide).
720 x 480 Widescreen 16:9 with a PAR of 1.2 (pixels are wider, than tall).
PAL:
720 x 576 Standard 4:3 with a PAR of 1.06 (pixels are wider, than tall, but not by much).
720 x 576 Widescreen 16:9 with a PAR of 1.422 (pixels are wider, than tall).
768 x 576 Square Pixel w/ a PAR of 1.00
With Stills, which usually use Square Pixels, the size of 640 x 480 works fine, but with Video, the cameras used non-square pixles, in the appropriate PAR. Camera mfgrs. got lazy, and just decided on their own, that they would not bother creating Video with rectangular pixels, like the video standards, and just use the 640 x 480 w/ PAR of 1.0.
Now, PrE 10 was coded, before this became so popular. It is also built around video standards, with output, such as DVD-Video the main focus.
If enough camera mfgrs. have begun producing cameras, that create video at the 640 x 480 w/ PAR = 1.0, then I feel that Adobe will include that Project Preset, and maybe as soon as PrE 11, due out in a few months.
PrPro handles such things differently, in that it offers a Custom Project/Sequence Preset, which allows the user to match the Project/Sequence to odd footage in most attributes. However, PrE does not offer such, and only addresses more standard formats. I have filed Feature Requests for that Custom Preset for about 5 years now, but so far, no-go. As PrPro costs about 6x what PrE does, there WILL be some differences between the two programs, and so far, this is one of them.
We will just have to wait and see what is introduced in the future - though by then, camera mfgrs. might go off on another tangent, and decide to use some other format and PAR for their cameras. Who knows?
Some users have had success at hacking PrE's Presets, to accommodate other formats (several such hacked Presets are listed in the Tips & Tricks sub-forum, with links to that work), but I have not seen one for 640 x 480 PAR = 1.0.
If one does mind either a bit of Scaling, and cropping of the Video Frame, or a little bit of distortion, they can use that footage in a Standard Preset, and just adjust it a little.
Good luck, and I hope that this explains why Adobe has not caught up to this deviation from the standards.
Hunt