You’ll often find a longer project much easier to work with if you work on it in shorter pieces. Doing this can minimize system lugging and maximize program responsiveness as well as reduce the likelihood that you’ll run into problems when you try to output your finished movie.
Once each segment is finished and output, open a new project and combine the segments into a final mix.
In order to do with this minimal loss of quality and maximum performance, you’ll want to output each segment in its ideal video format – a format that the program is designed to work with natively and won’t have to re-render. Instructions for outputting each of these ideal video formats are found below.
The ideal source video format for a standard definition video project is the DV-AVI, although DV-MOVs will also work.
The ideal source video format for a high definition video project is either the 1920x1080 HDV MPEG or the 1920x1080 MTS AVCHD file.
For standard video
If you’d like to export your video project – or even a portion of your project – so that you can import it into a standard definition Premiere Elements video project on a Windows computer, use Publish & Share/Computer/AVI with the DV preset option. The file you output will have an .avi suffix
The Macintosh equivalent to the DV-AVI file is the DV-MOV. To output a DV-MOV file from your project, use Publish & Share/Computer/MOV with the DV preset. The file you output will have a .mov suffix.
For high-definition video
If you’d like to export your video project – or a portion of your project – from an HDV (tape-based high-definition) project for use in another HDV project, use Publish & Share/Computer/MPEG with the MPEG2 1920x1080i 30 preset (or 1920x1080i 25 for PAL).
If you’re working on an Full AVCHD project, output your video by clicking Publish & Share/Computer/AVCHD and using the M2T 1920x1080i preset (with the appropriate frame rate). For more information on outputting AVCHD video.
Both forms of high-definition video will output with the .m2t suffix.
(From The Muvipix.com Guide to Adobe Premiere Elements)
