Some difficulty with exporting from Prospect 2K

[David H. Wilson]

David,

I've been having a tough time exporting from a PPro/Prospect 2K timeline. All MPEG2 exports (BluRay and otherwise) crash PPro after exporting between 3 and 7 minutes of a 15 minute selection of a one hour timeline. The exports crash at different places every time. It will crash regardless of what section of the timeline I choose to export. Renders will often return an error message as well.

I have reimported the timeline into a fresh Prospect 2K file with the same results. I have completely uninstalled and reinstalled both CS3 and Prospect and done deep cleans of both (CS3-clean and working with Jake to clean all residual Prospect files and settings.) I have tried the trial of Prospect 4K with the same result. The project is 720 29.97P.

I attempted to export a CF AVI of the same section and the application crashed immediately. However, if I import the timeline into a new DVCPRO HD file, I am able to export an AVI from the same section of the timeline. I am then able to make a MPEG2 from that AVI. Even though I am able to export an AVI from the DVCPRO HD project (with the CineForm files imported) I am not able to export an MPEG2 from that DVCPRO HD file.

If I make a DVCPRO HD file and import mxf's of the same shots, I AM able to export MPEG2s of any flavor without trouble.

My computer is a quite new Boxx quad core w/ 4 gigs of ram.

I have been though two weeks of Adobe support and my fellow on level 2 support finally today decided it was not an Adobe problem. I have worked through a trouble ticket with Jake and he is stumped for the moment as well.

On the other side of the coin I have been experimenting with CineForm 4K test shots using the much maligned application with a name reminiscent of a beloved droid and have been astonished with the ease of use and splendid image quality. Oh, Brave New World!

Many thanks for your thoughts on this stumper.

[David Newman]

No idea. Work with Jake as much as you can, as this doesn't sound like a general fault, something is happen in that project or on your computer, or with a particular file. When export in a CineForm preset or a DVCPRO-HD present the same one component is used, the CineForm AVI importer. If it was causing this fault generally we would have heard many screams, yet we've heard nothing. You can even remove it and use the default importer (remove all instances of im-CFHD_File_Import.prm from PRogram Files/Adobe directories.) 720p29.97 is particularly easy, been do that for years, so I doubt it is a memory issue (have you told Jake all the filters you are using?) Get info to Jake on whether the failure is occurring in other projects. Also what is you immediate goal, get the export out or solve the particular issue? There are many ways to get the export done, but getting to the bottom of this mystry will take longer.

Random idea : export to your system drive -- funny how many time a bad media drive or RAID can cause random crashing.

[David H. Wilson]

David,

Many many thanks for getting back to me. This strange behavior is not limited to the one project only; the instabilities occur in many CF projects. I know the problem is somehow in my system alone and not a general problem. Could I have conflicting drivers or somesuch? I routinely get "critically low memory errors" sometimes only a moment after opening PPro. So it's not just the exporting problem I'm experiencing but a quite sever general instability that occurs more in my large project but does occur in other CF project as well. Non CF projects do not seem to have problems.

I'm sure I can find a work-around to get this project finished; it is really plumbing the depths of this mystery that is high on my list.

I am exporting to a Raid0. I'll try exporting tonight to my C drive.

The good people at Boxx (who I have also dragged into this) have sent me a new drive with the OS. I'm thinking of installing that and loading CS3 and Prospect only. Does this seem like a good idea?

Thanks again for your thoughts on all of this.