Videos distorted and wavy after dropping playback quality to medium and low

Please help. First time this has happened to me. I changed the settings on my go pro to 2.7k and 60fps. Now when I load the clips into premiere elements they can only play in high quality playback. Which slows down my computer. When I try to turn down the quality it becomes extremely distorted and wavy and can't see anything. When I pause it goes back to normal. Or back to high quality. But I can't do much in high quality because of my laptop.  Thanks.