PE14 Monitor Panel - Negative/Inverted Images

Report · May 03, 2017

I have PE14 running on Win10-64bit and ATI Radeon 3000 (AMD Athlon II x4 640 with 8Gb RAM). Every now and then the display in the preview area goes grayscale and inverted (upside down), and sometimes it remains right-side-up, but dims out with negative colors (somewhat like looking at a negative for an old color photograph). This doesn't otherwise effect the operation of the program and videos export okay, but it is a nuisance.

I haven't discovered any pattern to this failure, it sometimes happening after rendering, sometimes upon importing a new image to the timeline, and some days it never happens at all. The only way I've found to correct it is to close the project, and then reopen it.

I've read other posts about problems with the preview panel. None of them seem to describe this same quirky behavior, but most of them seem to point to the video card or its drivers. I'd be willing to upgrade to a video card (e.g., Sapphire Radeon HD 6570 - not on Adobe's list of "Supported Devices"), or the latest version of Premiere Elements, were I confident that it would eliminate this nuisance.

If anyone has any experience to share along these lines, it would be appreciated.

Report · May 03, 2017

First try going to AMD's web site and downloading the newest driver for your card.

BTW, what operating system are you using?

Report · May 05, 2017

Thank's for the reply, Steve. Windows 10/64bit. ATI Radeon 3000 is on-board video (built into the ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 motherboard.) ATI's position is that the product reached peak performance optimization on October, 2013, so no additional driver releases were planned. The system is therefore apparently using a generic Microsoft Windows 10 driver.

Report · May 05, 2017

You're right. It appears on the site that AMD doesn't even make drivers for Windows 10! Which, unfortunately, may be contributing to your problem. It might be worth upgrading to a newer card -- but don't worry too much about getting a big, powerful card. Premiere Elements doesn't benefit much from a powerful card.

Meantime, go to Edit/Preferences and, on the General page, uncheck Use Hardware Acceleration. See if that makes a difference. Also, right-click on the Monitor panel and set the Playback Quality to Highest.

Meantime, what model of camcorder is your video coming from and what is the format and resolution of this video? Do you have Quicktime 7 installed, per the program's system requirements?

QuickTime 7.6 for Windows

Report · May 06, 2017

Thanks Steve ~

Changed the Hdwr Acceleration and Playback Quality, and DL'd and installed QuickTime 7. We'll see, I guess.

Unfortunately, the problem is intermittent. Some days it's a real nuisance, screwing up like that so consistently that I just have to ignore it and work with the dimmed out, off-color, usually upside down preview. Otherwise I'd have to be shutting down the program and restarting it over and over again. Other days it never happens at all. I've experimented with closing down everything but Premiere Elements on those troublesome days, but it never makes any difference. Then during sessions when it decides to work properly, it doesn't seem to make any difference what else is running. As for the content that I'm working on, it's different chapters of instructional material, but the video, image and audio sources are all more or less the same ... same size, same formats, same PE title screens, etc.

Maybe some service or something running in the background?

FWIW: About QuickTime 7.6 ... the QuickTime business seems to be a little messy. Once installed, it up-sells to QuickTime 7 Pro, and clicking on that link takes one to a support page instead, that seems to say that QuickTime 7 Pro no longer exists, redirecting to Mac-only QuickTime 10. Then looking for the latest version for Windows, it's apparently QuickTime 7.7.9, and that download page says to forget it, since QuickTime 7 is no longer supported by Apple, and no longer needed for Windows. Crazy!?!

I have your book, by the way ... 9781517365523 ... That's been helpful in a pinch now and then, so thanks for that too.

Report · May 07, 2017

There's no reason to upgrade to Quicktime Pro -- especially since Quicktime Pro doesn't exist anymore. But you will need Quicktime's components to edit some video formats.

Report · May 08, 2017

Noted ... thank you. 🙂