First time poster.
Just downloaded the trial of Elements 11, wanting to use it with videos taken by a Canon DSLR. The videos are MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression in a .mov container.
First of all, I'm getting the common laggy playback problem when playing a clip in the timeline. I know that the common fix for this is pre-rendering the preview file so it will play smoothly during editing, but I'm strangely not getting any option for this. Basically above the clips there is no red, green, or yellow line at all. I tried pressing enter to render, and all it does it play the clip. I tried clicking the render button, and trying from the menu, and all of these just play the clip but don't actually render it.
I tried grabbing a random .wmv file from elsewhere and put it in the project, and there's a yellow line above the clip in the timeline showing that I need to render. I rendered that clip, and it played fine.
1. Why won't it even give me the option to render the MPEG-4 files?
2. How can I lower the playback quality to hopefully smooth out the preview video? When I right click the preview box it only gives me options of automatic or highest quality, no draft or anything.
3. Also, what specifically in my hardware is the likely culprit of laggy playback? In other words, what aspect of your hardware specs is most important to improve for smoother editing?
Thanks!