[Tim Kurkoski]

You’re using a Canon video camera. Premiere 6.x has this problem with some Canon cameras because Canon does some funny things when it reports the frame rate information off the tape. It’s a pretty well known problem, and Adobe has a workaround available:
https://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/322232.html

You will need to recapture all of your video that’s at 29.96.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Go to the Edit menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts. You can view and customize all of the shortcuts from there.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere Pro 1.5.1 supports HDV. That means:
a) You need to have Premiere Pro 1.5 (not 1.0).
b) You need to download the 1.5.1 update from the Adobe web site.

[Tim Kurkoski]

What kind of video/audio files are you using? Does it happen in a new project? Can you play the files in Windows Media Player?

[Tim Kurkoski]

Doug- What kind of video files are you using. I suspect you’re using MPEG files, which are not ideal for editing. Premiere Elements 1.0 was notorious for not handling MPEG files well. (The actual cause of the problem is incompatible MPEG decoders set as the default on your system.) Premiere Elements 2.0 is much better at it, I’d recommend you upgrade if you have the opportunity.

Another solution people have found is to install the K-Lite codec package, and during the install set the MainConcept MPEG decoder as the default option.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Well, that flicker will vary depending on DVD player you use, so you should test it to see how bad it is. On most DVD players it should hardly be noticeable. But in Encore’s preview it’s pretty pronounced. You can’t truly get rid of it because it’s inherent to the DVD format- when it’s switching streams from the menu to the timeline, it has to pause a little to load the data.

[Tim Kurkoski]

It probably is because the Swedish keyboard layout is different. On international keyboards, sometimes when symbols are relocated to different keys, the keyboard shortcuts remain with the the physical key, not the symbol. (I think it has to do with the fact that the signal AE looks for has less to do with the symbol being pressed and more with the actual key being pressed.)

Here’s an interactive picture of the US keyboard layout:
https://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/kbdusx.htm

And the Swedish for comparison:
https://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/kbdsw.htm

I can see that the keys where the bracket symbols are in the US layout are used for something else in Swedish. What you need to do is use the same keys on the keyboard, even though they’re labeled differently. (I don’t know what those symbols are called in Swedish. If only my grandmother were still alive.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

You’re RAM previewing (0 on keypad) or audio previewing (period on keypad) ?

[Tim Kurkoski]

I get the sense that when you say “cropped”, you really mean “squished”. That is to say that none of the image is missing, it’s all just squeezed into a space smaller than you expected.

This would likely be a pixel aspect ratio problem, but before continuing we’ll just confirm that it’s what you’re getting and not something else.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Just for kicks, I tried block dissolve with a dozen images or so sitting around in my “My Images” folder. (JPG, BMP, GIF, TIF, etc. Afraid I didn’t have any dead chickens handy.) None of them have the problem, so I’m just as stumped as you.

The images that are having the problem- do they have anything in common? I’m thinking that there might be something in them visually that may be killing the effect.

Other things to try- create a new project, trash AE prefs, reinstall AE. The basics. Oh, and I hate to mention it because I assume you’re already doing this, but you’re changing the settings on the effect (from the default of zero) to check its effectiveness, right?