Premiere is crashing as soon as I tell it to Export Media - Desperately needing help!

[John Hewat]

Hi all,

It's 2:30am.

I have mere hours to be up presenting the edit that should have exported hours ago.

It is unquestionably the most important deadline of my soon-to-be-short career.

And Premiere is refusing to even show me the Export Settings window. As soon as I click File, Export Media, the screen goes that horrible translucent white and Premiere crashes saying that a problem caused the program to stop working correctly.

This happens every single time I try to export.

I'm on the latest version of CS6, Win7 x64.

I've tried creating new sequences, sequences with different settings, everything I know how to do. And I'm running out of time.

The footage is all Cineform AVIs made from Blackmagic Cinema Camera DNGs and Sony FS700 footage, but only the Cineform footage is in my sequence, and for that matter, the project.

Should I go through the motions of uninstalling Premiere, uninstalling Cineform, re-installing both and hoping that fixes my problem?

I just don't have time to do it. To compound the problem, I've just surpassed my download limit for the month and my Internet speeds have been reduced to dial-up. So to download the 1GB+ installation file for Premiere from the Creative Cloud will take me longer than I'm able to wait.

I'm afraid I'm at a complete loss as to how to solve this. And it could cost me an awful lot of future work. I'm genuinely as terrified as I've ever been about work.

[Chris Hurd]

I wish I had sufficient knowledge to help you John but the purpose of this reply is to move your thread back to the top of the forum index page. Good luck and hopefully somebody can step in with something useful.

[Noa Put]

It probably won't help but it's worth a try, do you have any antivirus and other not editing related software running in the background? Might want to close these, or even uninstall them temporarily. I have seen weird behavior being caused by that. Good luck in finding a solution though, hope it works out for you.

[John Hewat]

Thanks Chris - I appreciate it.

Noa, there's nothing running that doesn't have to be.

I am in the process of trying two solutions at once:

1: I've plugged my PC into my iPhone and am using cellular data (which is literally going to cost me hundreds of dollars in excess data fees!) in order to download the Premiere installation file so I can reinstall Premiere.

2: I'm slowly transferring the 4TB of assets and project data to a USB3 drive so I can try to open and hopefully export the sequence from my MacBookPro.

I'm not sure which will be finished first.

Sun will be up in three hours...

UPDATE:

The installation file download completed so I uninstalled Cineform and Premiere. Reinstalled both. No change. Export still fails before the Export Settings window even appears. So that was an extremely expensive mistake.

I've tried copying the sequence and pasting it into a fresh sequence in a fresh project. No luck. Just gotta wait on my second option, hoping that the sequence can export on my MacBookPro.

This has really got me beat.

[John Hewat]

Update again:

The transfer to the external drive is done. I'm now on my theirs export attempt on the MacBookPro after getting the stupid sheep sound a part way into the export.

At least on this machine the export window opens.

So I removed a bunch of footage based on where the encoding got to when it failed and hopefully this will be third time lucky.

UPDATE:

Believe it or not, though this export seems to be working, my battery power has been drained down to 5% despite being plugged in to the wall. I can't understand that but it happens before my eyes: the laptop conks out from a flat battery despite being plugged in.

I may never get this done...

[Trevor Dennis]

John, I really feel for you, and wish I could help. Not entirely sure what your hardware you are using, but it sounds like it is struggling. The Export is one of the most system intensive parts of a project for me, and the only time I see sustained heavy use, and hear my system box fans get louder. Anything you could do to minimise that?

Render the timeline first, and if you can get the Export panel to open, choose 'use rendered video' or what ever it says? Wiz over to the Premiere Hardware forum and try and find one of Harm's system optimise FAQs. This is probably all daft advice, but without any history, or knowing anything about your system...

I sure hope you get it fixed though.

[Dan Herrmann]

Try using Adobe Media Encoder to export your Sequence.
If that does not work mane sure you have all the updates and of course make sure you are not using the trial software.
Re-install media encoder as a last resort.
Have you rendered the timeline?

[John Hewat]

Not a dud idea at all Trevor, in fact when I was building the machine I practically lived on those sites and in fact the machine was built on Harm's advice. And likewise I try to optimise my system based on those suggestions.

In the end I couldn't solve it. So I had a brainwave: I downloaded some cheap screen capture software and placed the frame over the preview monitor and pressed play and voila! A super crappy, low res, highly compressed excuse for an output.

But it meant I got to keep my job because they could see the edit was done.

Now my day is going to be spent trying to problem solve.

Today I'll test things that I didn't think of last night:

1. Some of the footage is 2.5K in a 1080 timeline. Sometimes in past projects if I didn't have "scale to frame size" selected I had export errors. But I can't afford for that to be the case here, I have reframed almost all the 2.5K media because of the smaller sequence size.

2. Deleting the cache again prior to the next export.

3. Trevor's suggestion of rendering before export. I have a CUDA card so the footage doesn't require rendering with CUDA hardware acceleration enabled. I disabled it out if desperation last night to see if it would have any effect but it didn't help me, but of course it does mean I can then render the timeline in advance. So I'll try that.

4. And if worst comes to worst, I'll try MpepStreamclipping all the Cineform AVIs to regular old tiny bit rate MP4s. That might fix the trouble. But will take a day to do all 4TB.

[Trevor Dennis]

I'd till be inclined to render the timeline and click on Use Previews in the Export Panel. That 2.5K footage is something to think about as well. But if you can scrub the timeline without any stutter, surely the hardware is keeping up?

I once had a similar problem using pan and scan with huge stills mixed with 1080 in the timeline, which is what makes me wonder about the 2.5k footage. You could send them over to AE and render them back as 1080 perhaps? I am pretty new with AE, so that might be another daft suggestion, but it feels right to me.

[Paul Mailath]

I feel for you - as I'm sure most of us do.. I've been in a very similar position with Premiere crashing all the time and a deadline already past - it's a bad place to be. I seem to remember one of my faults being a corrupt clip and premiere crashed every time it rendered or exported. I've moved to Edius - not that I think Premiere was at fault, I'm sure it was a hardware configuration problem but I gave up looking.

The best explaination I ever heard was that every computer is fitted with an anxiety chip, the more frustrated and anxious you become, the more random software & hardware failures the chip produces.

Absolute nonsense of course but boy that's the way it seems.

hopefully you've found the problem and had an ale or two to mitigate the stress.

[Gabe Strong]

Sorry to be a day late and a dollar short here. This happened to me and I was able to finally
get it to export by closing premiere and opening media encoder. Then directing media encoder
to the premiere project and sequence in question and exporting from within media encoder.
This was on a Mac however so not sure if it would work the same way.

[Rob Morse]

Originally Posted by John Hewat

Update again:
Believe it or not, though this export seems to be working, my battery power has been drained down to 5% despite being plugged in to the wall. I can't understand that but it happens before my eyes: the laptop conks out from a flat battery despite being plugged in.
I may never get this done...

CS6 seems to run much harder than previous versions and I've seen my CPU go up to 100% and I'm on a fairly hefty machine. I could imagine a laptop wouldn't charge while that was going on. I've had render issues but not like you've described. What did you finally do to restore the program and start rendering?

[Eric Stemen]

I'm too late to help you, but for anyone who takes a look at this in the future.

I've had premiere crash on export many times when it get's to still images that are above a certain resolution. Now I batch resize photos in Bridge to make the largest side of the photo about 2500 pixels.

[Trevor Dennis]

Eric, I worked my way down to 2200 pixels on the long side after doing pan & scan on a bunch of stills in different projects. If you are going to start of stop the clip at actual pixel size in the timeline (works out at 87.5 scale with 2200 pixels) then that is the most movement I felt happy with over a five second period.

I had problems dissolving between such clips initially, because the overlap would suddenly stop moving and look disjointed. I got round that by putting the stills on alternate tracks, and overlapping them by the length of the dissolve, and putting a dissolve on the end of one track and the beginning of the next.

The only time I ran into trouble on export, was with full res stills that I'd forgotten to resize before bringing into Premiere. Dynamic link to Photoshop and a resize fixed that.

[Rob Morse]

Trevor, If I'm understanding correctly what you're saying, if you're doing your moves and then adding your dissolves, you need to go back to the effects panel and move the key frames to the very beginning and very end. If you put the dissolves on the still before you change the movements, it will eliminate having to do it afterward. A little annoying.