I love Adobe’s Elements suite of software, but there are a couple gothcas with the older versions.

 

Adobe is heavy on temp files and these tend to be stored in the local user profile in Application Data.  I haven’t used the 4.0 version in a few years so I can’t remember exactly how to move the temp files, but that might be the issue.  Try to point the whole thing to a single area and put that on the flash drive.  Also, be sure all the media is contained in the same folder, I know this can lead to duplicate files… but, in my experience this tends to solve a lot of flakey issues and bad mojo.

 

The new version is 8.0 and you can get this as part of the Digital School Collection for $80.  What’s nice with this is that you get Premier & Photoshop Elements, Contribute, SoundBooth AND Acrobat Pro (Digital Portfolios made easy… wicked easy).  You can also purchase a maintenance agreement with this so you will get the latest versions (they update every year).   Something like this sounds like a no-brainer for a media lab, but it gets pricey when we talk about 100s of seats.  I did have a chat with an Adobe rep on this specific suite of software and we could get the cost down to almost $30/seat with maintenance if we all got together and bought as a collective (that’s based on buying a few thousand seats).

 

Food for thought and I’m happy to work with Adobe to on this for us if enough people are interested.

 

Mike

 

	Michael Vining, SB IT Support South Burlington School District South Burlington, Vermont 05403
	Direct: (802) 652-7298 IT Help Desk: (802) 652-7050

 

 

 

I inherited many copies of Premiere Elements 4.0 for Windows and overall I really like it.  The interface is clean and simple, and I'm really impressed with the software's ability to quickly burn a project to DVD (unlike iMovie).  But there's a significant problem I can't figure out and need some help.  The students save their work to the local machine and also copy it to a flash drive.   When their project contains .jpegs or clips from other media, the project is fine for several days but then parts of the project simply disappear.  The time line shows the name and length of individual segments, but no data.  On these clips we get a message which says some media is missing, and the program attempts to find the files.  Nada.  This often happens when a student imports an image and saves it to their documents and then inserts in into Premiere Elements.  The frustrating thing is the fact the students can go back into the project many times and continue editing, and then one day it's all messed up.  It seems like the link to the file is broken, but I also can't find the file anywhere in the system.  Is there some way we're supposed to be archiving, or something else we're supposed to do to save this work and continue editing later?  This is not an issue with content imported from a DV tape or other student created video media, but still images/.jpegs or clips ripped from DVDs simply disappear after a week or so.