I’m rather tech savvy.
I’m rather tolerant and tend to try to make things work.
I’ve tried to make Adobe Elements 8.0 work for a solid month, and I’m done.
Note: all the Apple juice drinkers realize that I desire a windows solution, I do not desire to move to a Mac to solve this issue.
Background
I recently purchased a Kodak Sport Play video camera. It is excellent – Great video, easy to use…and water proof.
To edit all the short takes one makes with a video camera like this, I felt I’d get a solid piece piece of software, and having used an earlier version of Elements, I thought the latest version was the right move.
My machine: HP with 4 core Intel, 6 gb ram (remember this for later), loads of storage space. Vista home premium 64-bit (yea, I know, but it has been fine.)
So, on to using AE 8.0.
For some reason, and this seems to go for most Adobe programs, the start process is painfully slow.
Nicely, Adobe shows you all the millions of processes that are starting…so you at least think something is actually happening.
Once started, I worked on my first video for…maybe…5 minutes before crash number 1.
An hour later AE 8.0 had crash half a dozen times.
Frustrated I called a friend who’d been using AE 8.0 for a few months already. He too was frustrated with all the crashing.
Going against my manly intentions, I called Adobe support.
Yes, I got a someone from a foreign land, with a thick accent tough to understand, but we powered through that.
Overall I spent about an hour on the phone.
The result was 2 items:
- Per “core” you need at least 2 gb ram, as I have a 4 core processor I should have 8 gb ram, but I only have 6 gb.
- Set the priority for adobe elements.exe to HIGH
OK, now what?
Both of these items are attacked within the task manager.
But this didn’t solve it all, including the fact that there is some “residue” left constantly by Elements.
For example: adobe elements 8.0.exe seems to not like closing. I also noticed yesterday that Elements Manager.exe (or something similar) had been eating processor cycles, even though Elements hadn’t been run in about a week…nice…not!
Back to the “fixes”.
To fix item 1 do the following:
Task Manager/Processes
Right click adobe elements.exe
Select Affinity
De-Select the number of processors necessary to get to that 2 gb of ram per core. No, it does not matter which processor(s) you de-select
To fix item #2 stay in the Task Manager/Processes
Right click adobe elements.exe again
This time select Priority / High
NOTE: this needs to be done each time Adobe Elements is started…….
Wow, you are done and Adobe Elements 8.0 should now run perfectly.
Unfortunately it doesn’t.
I still get crashes, though not as many.
I did discover that the Affinity “fix” (item 1 above), really did nothing.
Setting the priority to High does makea a difference.
Elements still crashes way too often, even when nothing else is happening on the PC except saving the video to a different format.
My conclusion: Adobe Elements 8.0 stinks, and I’m now searching for a good alternative…any thoughts?
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