I Hate Premiere!! Crash Crash Crash

[Craig Lieberman]

I'm so effin sick of Premiere I want to hang myself.

I have a 3.25GHZ machine with 4GB RAM and Premiere crashes randomly about 15 times a day.

I have 39 process running on my PC and have turned off everything I can. I run Premiere alone, with no other programs running.

I have Boris Continuum installed and gave up on Sapphire Genarts as the effects would cause random crashes, too and would rarely stay in place after exported. I've already deleted toonIt and three other plugins programs (for which I paid big bucks, mind you)

I'm at a loss. Everytime I make ONE simple change to a clip, the entire timeline disappears then has to reload. I have uninstalled and reinstalled...twice.

I've scanned my computer with TWO antivirus programs, nothing. I can't find an 800 number to get a LIVE person at the RIGHT Adobe department to save my life.

Any suggestions?

I'm 10 minutes away from buying a MAC and sending dog turds in envelopes to Adobe.

[Eric Addison]

The 4GB of Ram is good, but when you say 3.25GHZ, what type of processor is that - P4, Dual Core, Quad Core, etc? Also, what type of media are you editing? And what type and how many hard drives do you have setup?

Trust me, I edit with PPro every day and it works great.

[Craig Lieberman]

It's a dual core processor.

I'm editing HDV 1080i 60fps.

I have two. A C drive with 250 GB on it (60GB free) and the E drive, with 500GB, 290GB available.

Cache for Premiere is on the C drive. Files are captured on the E drive, both audio and video.

Final export is at 29.97 fps.

My total project size is 6 minutes, tops. I've given up on elaborate effects, I'm using basic cross dissolves, OCCASIONALLY some Film Damage by Boris.

My work can be found at www.bikinidrivingschool.com

My challenge is this: I film on a Saturday...I have six hours to shoot...that's it. Episodes MUST be live by Wednesday...that gives me four days to capture 13 hours of footage, edit, render and export. It's gotten SO bad, I'm closing Premiere every 30 minutes and am restarting just to ENSURE that my changes are saved...hitting "SAVE" does NOTHING. If it crashes, that "SAVE" is GONE.

[Eric Addison]

I would have reponded quicker, but I've watching the clips on your site...

That is odd. I know that HDV is processor intensive, so that could be the problem. But it does sound, to me at least, like something else is going on. Just going over the basics, which I'm sure you've done - all your video card drivers are updated...and what kind of video card do you have? Are your hard drives 7200rpm? For HDV, again, you've got to have some fast drives...

Does it react that way even with DV footage?

Also, you're editing with antivirus turned off I assume?

1-800-642-3623 is the Adobe tech support number - give them call tomorrow. Hope you can get it working...if I think of anything I'll post back.

[Craig Lieberman]

Thank you, Eric, for your help thus far.

Yes, my hard drives are 7200rpm eSata drives. There is occasionally DV footage mixed with my HDV footage, so I guess yes, it does it with DV footage too.

Yes, antivirus is disabled.

My video card is a brand new Nvidia 8800GTX specifically chosen for it's HDV capabilities.

Interestingly, I tried using Cineform before...it caused so many crashes, I deleted it.


As for the clips on my site, Episode 7 and Episode 10 are what I consider to be the best of that lot...granted, I've been editing for four months total, so I know it's not perfect. A big part of the problem is that what I render and view does NOT always export out that way.

I'm using accelerated GPU effects now and so it seems that after a render inside Premiere, once I export, it seems as if the footage matches, in that there are no surprises.

In the past two months, I've deleted ToonIt, Digital Anarchy, Cineform, Sapphire, and Walker FX suspecting those plugins were giving me fits.

I will indeed try Adobe tomorrow.

[Eric Addison]

It sounds to me like a hardware issue - I'm just not sure what it is. Cineform is used by a great many people who love it, and it makes editing HDV on less powerful systems possible so it causing PPro to crash to tells me something else is going on.

One thing I didn't ask - what version of PPro are you running? CS3? If so, are you running with the latest update - 3.2? Are you on WinXP or Vista?

[Aaron Winters]

Wow, I'm running Premiere with a system really just half of what your's is. A 2.2 Ghz AMD dualcore, 2gig ram, 7800GT video card.

Not trying to rub it in, just doesn't make sense why it isn't running correctly for you.

You sound like a smart person, check the very basics? Motherboard drivers up to date? As well as any other drivers. Which version of Windows are you running? Which version of Premiere?

[Yossi Margolin]

Originally Posted by Craig Lieberman

I'm so effin sick of Premiere I want to hang myself.

I have a 3.25GHZ machine with 4GB RAM and Premiere crashes randomly about 15 times a day.

I have 39 process running on my PC and have turned off everything I can. I run Premiere alone, with no other programs running.

What OS are you running? If you're using XP, I think there may still be a few to many things running in the background - when I start my system I have something like 27 processes running.

You also might want to make sure you don't have a faulty RAM chip. Try other RAM or take out one module at a time and see what happens. I think Microsoft makes some kind of RAM testing utility.

[Mitchell Skurnik]

Run a disc check and a ram check. You probably have a bad stick of ram.

[Martin Catt]

Is this machine used exclusively for video, or do you have "other" software installed? Like disk duplicating software, word processing stuff, games, etc? Premiere CS3 was giving me fits until I uninstalled some backup software that was apparently remapping some resources. It was trial and error, kicking stuff out until the problems went away.

I keep one machine for video work only, with only a few items of related software installed (Cinescore, Photoshop, and some sound editing software). It's easily the hottest machine I own, and has very few problems with crashing and locking up, even when I have projects in the 2-3 hour range in the works. I've explained it to my puzzled computer-geek friends that it is a specialist tool, intended to do just one thing, and only that one thing VERY well.

Martin

[Oren Arieli]

I'm going to have to side with Yossi, 39 processes is about 10 too many. Sounds like there is quite a bit going on in the background.

[Julian Frost]

It may well be a CPU overheating issue, or even a power supply issue. All kinds of strange things can go wrong when the CPU gets too hot or the power supply stops giving consistent output. When you're rendering, you're giving the CPU a good workout, and it only needs one "bit" to not go where it should...

[Chris Soucy]

I think you need to ascertain whether this is a hardware problem or a software problem.

If you Google "Sisoftware Sandra" and download the shareware "free" version of Sisoft, then install it ................


(this may throw up a few "Microsoft Update not applied.....module will not be loaded" messages, which, if you're so minded, will lead you into the bowels of MS whereupon you will trip over the XP SP 3 update, which in turn will necessitate backing up your entire C drive to external, which etc etc - I started investigating this nearly three hours ago!!)

...........and fire up "Burn IN Computer", you set it to hammer your entire system continuously till it either breaks or doesn't.

If it can run for a period substantially greater than that between your Adobe crashes, it's probably not a hardware issue, no guarantee however as I'm not sure at this point whether SiSoft will hammer both hard drives at the same time.

Anyway, if SiSoft (or similar, must be shed loads of these programs out there) can't break your machine, it's probably software, either system or application.

I would visit the Adobe web site and go to the Premier support section and download the relevant "Setting up your PC to work with Premier" download (think there's a few of these).

Like this one:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...2172&sliceId=1

It (they) run through just about all and any issues that can cause stability problems/ throughput issues and contain a myriad of tweaks.

They also run through how to stop programs in your Services and Startup list getting fired up, thus keeping those processes under control.

If all of that doesn't stop the shenanigans then it's time for some more head scratching.


CS


PS: XP SP3 seem to be working just f
i
n
e
................

PPS: The Cnet download site....

http://www.download.com/SiSoftware-S...dlPid=10834499

[Craig Lieberman]

Originally Posted by Martin Catt

Is this machine used exclusively for video, or do you have "other" software installed? Like disk duplicating software, word processing stuff, games, etc? Premiere CS3 was giving me fits until I uninstalled some backup software that was apparently remapping some resources. It was trial and error, kicking stuff out until the problems went away.

I keep one machine for video work only, with only a few items of related software installed (Cinescore, Photoshop, and some sound editing software). It's easily the hottest machine I own, and has very few problems with crashing and locking up, even when I have projects in the 2-3 hour range in the works. I've explained it to my puzzled computer-geek friends that it is a specialist tool, intended to do just one thing, and only that one thing VERY well.

Martin

Yes, there's other stuff here.

I work in CS3 and have Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Flash (all CS3 versions) plus one video game installed. All my Office programs, including Powerpoint, Word and Excel are here, too, as well as ITunes.

I've optimized my system for running Premiere now, and I've defragmented both my discs.

RAM Check and disc check both provided no errors and no new clues.

All drivers are updated, I just basically "rebuilt" this machine two months ago...new CPU, new power source, new video card, new hard drives, basically everything but the motherboard was changed.

I've also turned off some programs running on startup and have 32 processes running now.

I do indeed have 3.2 running and yes, I agree that Cineform would be awesome to run. I'm going to TRY this new configuration for a day or so. Once I get 30GB's of footage loaded to this file and start compiling clips with edits, dissolves and effects, if the fits start again, I'm pulling an Office Space destruction routine on this sucker and am buying a MAC.

[Roger Averdahl]

Originally Posted by Craig Lieberman

I have a 3.25GHZ machine with 4GB RAM and Premiere crashes randomly about 15 times a day.

3.25GHz?

I assume that you have overklocked the processor which is i great way to chrash applications. IE, dont overklock. :)