I've downloaded Premiere Elements 4, only to find that it (and v3 too) require a processor with the SSE2 extensions.
The "state of the art" PC I built up 2-3 years ago doesn't have this processor and an upgrade would need a new motherboard. The current MB, a Gigabyte GA-7N400L, has a SATA/RAID controller and if I change the MB I will need to find one with the same SATA controller, otherwise Windoze won't boot anymore. I don't want to lose the windoze installation because it has a pile of software I need and would take days to reinstall.
I seem to have a few options:
1) Try to find out why Pinnacle stopped working. I think that they changed their video card requirements somewhere just after patch 10.5... I am going to buy another video card and see if that fixes it
2) Find a motherboard which can take the AMD 64 processor (with SSE2) and which has the same SATA HD controller
3) Find some other video editor program which doesn't need SSE2. All the Adobe stuff seems to need this.
4) The XP SP2 Moviemaker does not recognise my (very common) Sony HD camera, via 1394. There appears to be no config anywhere. Otherwise, it would probably do the job.
5) Build a whole new PC just for this occassional function.
A lot of people use Avid. I tried Liquid7 a year or so ago, and after a few days' messing the best I could do was a movie with sound but no video. It is possible that the AMD non-SSE2 processor was the problem since L7 lists Pentium 4 (which is an SSE2 processor) as the minimum requirement. No AMD processors are listed as usable. Clearly it did not check during installation and simply made a black video... stupid.
One thing I would like to be able to do, one day, is a movie taken from an aircraft which contains, say near the bottom, air data computer output parameters such as IAS, HDG, GS, TK, FOB, etc. These would be taken from a text file which contains the date/time on each line. If the line also contained lat/long data, one could generate a separate image sequence showing the aircraft position over a map, and then bring this sub-movie into a corner of the main one. Can L7 do this?