I just bought Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 and I love it! Or at least I assume I would if it worked the way it’s designed to work. But instead of working, I’m having two major problems:
1. While capturing video from my DV camera, I get frequent errors that say “Unknown Recorder Error” at which point the capturing pauses. If I click “ok” on the error and then restart the capture it picks up where it left off and seems to work fine. The problem is that sometimes it will go a half hour without an error, and sometimes it will go five seconds. In other words, I have to sit at the computer the entire time so that I can click “ok” on the error and restart the capture. Great, now it just gave me the error again but also told me some frames were dropped.
The only support I’ve found on Adobe’s site is this KB article. I do happen to have a dual-core processor in my computer, so I tried the fix they recommend but it didn’t work. I’ve actually had the error pop up about five times just while writing the last sentence.
2. Actually, when I followed the fix Adobe recommended, it did seem to work for a while, but instead of giving me the unknown recorder error, Premiere Elements would simply freeze up and stop responding. This is even worse because then I have to stop the program, restart, my clips are all out of order, and meanwhile the camera has kept on running so I have to go and figure out exactly when the capture stopped, get the tape to the right place, and start over. Right now I have it on one CPU but it’s still giving me the unknown recorder error.
Theoretically, I should be able to start the capture, walk away, and then come back in an hour to find it complete. In other words, my total time investment to capture an hour of video is only a minute or two as I get things started. Then I can work on something else. But as it stands, it’s taking me about two hours to capture one hour of video.
Yes, I can capture the video just fine with Windows Movie Maker and then edit it in Premiere, but I’d rather see if there’s a way to make Premiere work the way it’s supposed to.
And in case you’re curious, I’m on Windows XP with all the updates and patches, 2.0 GHz dual-core Pentium processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 256mb graphics card. I’d love to have a faster computer but it’s not as though mine is all that slow.
If you’ve got the same problem please let me know if you’ve found a way to fix it. I haven’t been able to find any solutions other than the one on the Adobe site, which didn’t work.
Update: I’ve just gone through these tips on correcting errors in Premiere Elements and so far I’m about 11 minutes into capturing a tape with no errors. I’m crossing my fingers that this is it.
Update Update: Unfortunately I got another few errors just now. It went about 20 minutes before an error though, which is a record.
