Importing one project into another on PE 11

As you add effects to your movie, the program creates renders on your movie "on the fly" whenever you play your timeline. These can appear greatly degraded. Rendering your timeline (by pressing Enter so that this line turns green) creates a "hard render", a temp render of your timeline so that you can see the timeline in much higher quality.

As I've said, you'll get the best quality experience if you start with your project set up to match your video specs so that, until you add effects, you don't need to render at all.

These are MOVs. You said they were MP4s.

MOVs will likely require you to manually set up your project settings.

I show you how in the last part of Part 1 of my free 8 Part Basic Training tutorials.

*** Premiere Elements Basic Training***

Is that 1080p footage the first clip on your timeline, on the Video 1 track? The program should have matched its settings to your footage. When the program matches your settings do your footage, you do NOT see a yellow-orange "render" line above the top of the timeline, above the footage. When you add that footage to a new project, do you see that render line?

I'm not sure why the program wouldn't match your footage. You do have Quicktime installed, per the program's system requirements, right?

It should not degrade the quality of the clip of a) your project settings match your original video specs and b) your output is the same format as the input. At least not that you or anyone else would be able to see.

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

What are your project settings, as listed under Project Settings/General under the Edit menu?

With that information, we can advise you the best output format selection.