adobe premiere 4 elements

Your camcorder shoots in AVCHD -- a format that was not supported by version 4 and was not well supported by Premiere Elements until version 10. (It is now the standard for consumer camcorders and is fully supported by current versions of the program.)

I can't advise you on working with that video on that version of the program. It's simply not going to work well.

In fact, I'd recommend you download the free trial of version 15 and give it a test drive. I think you'll see that, when the video format is fully supported, editing is much easier.

You're using a relatively ancient (11 years!) version of the program with very limited capabilities. Version 4 can pretty much edit tape-based video from miniDV and HDV camcorders only, so if you've got video from any other source, you're going to find the program challenged.

Meantime, what operating system are you using? What processor do you have with how much RAM? How much free, clean, freshly defragmented space is on your hard drive?

What model of camcorder is your video coming from and what format and resolution is the video?

Which Share output are you trying to use to output your finished movie?