You can customize the look and behavior of Premiere Elements, from determining the default length of transitions to setting the brightness of the user interface. Most of these preferences remain in effect until you change them. The preferences you set for scratch disks, however, are saved with your projects. Whenever you open a project, it automatically defaults to the scratch disks you selected for it when you set up that project.

• To open the Preferences dialog box, choose Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Premiere Elements > Preferences (Mac OS), and select the category of preferences you want to change.
• To restore default preference settings, hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) while the application is starting. You can release the Alt key or Option key when the splash screen appears.
• To restore default preference settings and plug-in cache at the same time, hold down Shift-Alt (Windows) or Shift-Option (Mac OS) while the application is starting. Release the Shift-Alt keys or Shift-Option key when the splash screen appears.

Preferences are stored in the following location:

• For Windows: <drive>\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements

• For Mac OS: <drive>/Users/<username>Library/Preferences/com.adobe.AdobePremiereElements.plist

General preferences

In the General pane of the Preferences dialog box, you can customize settings for several things from transition duration to tool tips, like the following:

Specify the default duration for audio and video transitions

Specify the default duration to display still images. 

When a sequence is longer than the visible Timeline, you can select from different options to auto-scroll the Timeline during playback.

• Page Scroll moves the Timeline automatically to a new view after the playhead moves offscreen. Selecting this option ensures that playback is continuous and doesn't stop.
• Selecting Smooth Scroll keeps the playhead in the middle of the screen, while the clips and time ruler move by.
  

Select this preference to automatically scale imported assets to the project’s default frame size. 

You can set an option to automatically scroll the Expert view timeline from right to left, when a sequence is larger than the visible timeline. This way you don’t have to zoom out to see the entire sequence.

• No Scroll: Doesn’t scroll the Expert view timeline.
• Page Scroll: Scrolls the visible section of the Expert view timeline one page at a time.
• Smooth Scroll: Scrolls the Expert view timeline while the current‑time indicator stays in the center of the visible timeline.
  

Hardware acceleration You can enable hardware acceleration for rendering, playback, and export on computers that have Intel HD Graphics 2000 and newer.

If required, you can choose to disable hardware acceleration:

1. Click Edit > Preferences > General.
2. Clear the Use HardwareAcceleration (Intel HD Graphics 2000 and newer) for rendering, playback and export checkbox.

Audio preferences

Enables audio scrubbing. You can create a keyboard shortcut called “Toggle Audio During Scrubbing” to toggle audio scrubbing on or off while scrubbing. Using a keyboard shortcut is preferable to returning to the Preferences dialog box each time you want to turn audio scrubbing on or off.

Creates keyframes only at intervals larger than the value you specify. Enter a value from 1 through 2000 milliseconds.

Audio Hardware preferences

In the Audio Hardware pane of the Preferences dialog box, you specify the computer audio device and settings, including the ASIO settings (Windows only), or buffer size setting (Mac OS only) that Premiere Elements uses for recording audio.

You can specify the target speaker in your computer sound system for each supported audio channel.

Auto Save preferences

By default, Premiere Elements automatically saves your project every 15 minutes and retains the last five versions of the project file on the hard disk.

You can revert to a previously saved version at any time. Archiving many iterations of a project consumes relatively little disk space because project files are much smaller than source video files. It’s best to save project files to the same drive as your application. Archived files are saved in the Premiere Pro Auto-Save folder.

Automatically save Projects, and type the number of minutes you would like between saves.

Enter the number of versions of a project file you want to save. For example, if you type 10, Premiere Elements saves the ten most recent versions.

Capture preferences

Controls how Premiere Elements transfers video and audio directly from a deck or camera. (None of the other project settings options affect capturing.) The contents of this panel depend on the editing mode. If you’re capturing DV footage, use the default DV capture settings. When DV/IEEE 1394 Capture is the selected capture format, no options are available because the options are automatically set to the IEEE 1394 standard. Additional capture formats and options appear if you install other software, such as software included with a capture card certified to be compatible with Premiere Elements.

Device Control preferences

In the Device Control pane of the Preferences dialog box, you specify the settings Premiere Elements uses to control a playback/recording device, such as a VTR or camcorder.

Media preferences

Clear Media Cache

Premiere Elements creates lot of intermediate files which are used in projects. These are called Media Cache.

You can set the media cache size to keep cleaning your hard drive. Slide to increase or decrease the Media Cache Size using the Cache Size slider.

Click Clean Now to clear the cache. Enable Automatically Clean Once in a Month to peridically clean the files.

Titler preferences

In the Titler pane of the Preferences dialog box, you can change the letters Premiere Elements shows in the Titler Style Swatches panel and in the font browser.