I recently received a gift from a friend of mine. He knows how much I like to make AMVs and so he got me Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 (which "I" will refer to as APE3 for easy typing).
So here's the lowdown. I figure out how to use it, its user friendly like WMM (which is what I'd like to stop using) but its easier to use than AP6. I just finished remaking my "Cloud of Sadness" AMV but the problem is that the AVI file APE3 produces is too big (944MB) for me to share online (via my website or here at a-m-v.org). What's great about this, though, is that its the best video and audio quality I've ever seen and heard for any of my AMVs, and I couldn't have gotten the timing any better in WMM.
I've seen plenty of AMVs here at The Org and elsewhere that are no more than about 80MB but have excellent video quality. I've tried using a couple different codecs for the rendering of my AMVs through APE3 and the final results are about the same: crappy! Does anyone have any suggestions or solutions to my problem? I'd like to keep the video at 720x480 (or close to) and retain as much video quality as possible. My only other option is to export the timeline without audio into an uncompressed AVI file and then import that into WMM, add the audio, and then save as a WMV file. But I've tried that twice with varying aspects and received nearly the same results each time: WMM's low-qual video. I expected that, but still, I'd rather use APE3 since it allowed me to add scenes and overlapping scenes (through multiple clips) with its multiple timelines. Something WMM, of course, doesn't have.
I've asked for help from my roommate who is a web programmer/developer who knows quite about about computer stuff, including videos. I also contacted my friend who gave me APE3, since he knows a great deal more about AMVs and video editing than I do, but he couldn't help. I'm a little frustrated with all this, only because I wish to share such a nice amv with everyone else (since its a great improvement on all my videos in the last two years). If anyone can help me at all that would be awesome. So that's why I made this post, and I've also contacted a couple other editors directly who have shared their AMVs at The Org.






