Export ideas for premiere crash

[Deniz Ahmet]

OK, so I have a 70min 1920res profile project in ProspectHD.

My PC has 4GB ram and XP64.

The project has used a lot of magic bullet and colour corrections.

I'm trying to export movie at PAL DVD resolution.

Premiere just closes down or unknown error between 50-95% of the project.

ANY SOLUTIONS! Is this simply a ram problem?

If I export in 2 chunks for Encore, will it playback seemless?


Thank you!

[Ian Lewis]

What I did with my 90 minute movie (also with lots of magic bullet and so on) was to export the whole thing as a Cineform 1080p HD avi file, and then make all other versions from that. It takes all night, but then at least you have a single 100GB (ish) file with no previews/rendering to worry about.
Ian

[Deniz Ahmet]

Originally Posted by Ian Lewis

What I did with my 90 minute movie (also with lots of magic bullet and so on) was to export the whole thing as a Cineform 1080p HD avi file, and then make all other versions from that. It takes all night, but then at least you have a single 100GB (ish) file with no previews/rendering to worry about.
Ian

Is the conversion less RAM intensive, if I'm not scaling down to SD?

[Ian Lewis]

Originally Posted by Deniz Ahmet

Is the conversion less RAM intensive, if I'm not scaling down to SD?

I would guess so, but I can't answer with any certainty. I, too, had problems with running out of memory. I guess the only way is to try and see how it works for you.

Personally, I tend always to export a complete single file (of whatever length the project is) and then do MPEG conversions in Procoder. That way I'm not doing several stages at once, and can see where any problems are occurring (if they do).

Since Cineform bang on about how many generations you can go before it shows, you could export in two chunks in Cineform, then put them together on a new timeline, and export that as PAL or whatever.

[Robert Young]

I agree with Ian completely.
In my experience, PPro CS3/Win XP 32 is so flakey re memory management that I always try to ask it to do only one thing at a time.
I always render out finished timelines to CFHD.avi movie, then transcode the the rendered movie to whatever.
If I am doing a long form project, I do it in "reels"- seperate projects of 10-15 min in length, then render each to a CFHD.avi movie, then assemble the "reels" in a seperate "final assembly" project, then convert to BR, DVD, Flash, etc from that timeline.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

I agree with Ian completely.
In my experience, PPro CS3/Win XP 32 is so flakey re memory management that I always try to ask it to do only one thing at a time.
I always render out finished timelines to CFHD.avi movie, then transcode the the rendered movie to whatever.
If I am doing a long form project, I do it in "reels"- seperate projects of 10-15 min in length, then render each to a CFHD.avi movie, then assemble the "reels" in a seperate "final assembly" project, then convert to BR, DVD, Flash, etc from that timeline.

Ditto on Robert's post. Even the 25-30min 1920x1080p productions we do, are broken up into a minimum of 3 segments, output at full res CFHD AVI's, then brought back into PP3 for final VFX tweaks, and final audio touches (after mixing in Audition. It's still light years better than the audio cludgeware in CS3). Try and do it any other way is only inviting disaster and normally it renders out beautifully if we keep the segments ("reels" in last century speak... :) small and render out to compile as final AVI's.

One more thing, if you have lots of changes to render for previewing, we've found with the 32bit XP, that it's better to only render smaller portions at a time, otherwise it crashes out due to memory probs. If it hasn't completely zapped PP3, we save the file again, then close PP3 and reopen before rendering to free memory. Works every time.

BTW, if you're worried about generational losses, you can forget any real loss until after 8-10 generations, then it gets soft. CF works, just look at our website videos and you'll see.

[Robert Young]

I didn't see Stephen's post till just now, but he brings up a great point about the soundtrack workflow.
In the final assembly project containing all of the rendered CF avi segments, I always import the audio tracks seperately: voiceover, music, ambient sound track, etc.
For some reason, there always seem to be last minute tweaks to the sound track, including rewriting snippets of voiceover script. If you have your final movie avi with all the individual audio tracks, it's a no brainer to make changes without having to rerender the entire movie. Once everyone is satisfied, you can mix the final audio, drop it on the timeline, mute the other tracks, and code it all out to delivery formats.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

I didn't see Stephen's post till just now, but he brings up a great point about the soundtrack workflow.
In the final assembly project containing all of the rendered CF avi segments, I always import the audio tracks seperately: voiceover, music, ambient sound track, etc.
For some reason, there always seem to be last minute tweaks to the sound track, including rewriting snippets of voiceover script. If you have your final movie avi with all the individual audio tracks, it's a no brainer to make changes without having to rerender the entire movie. Once everyone is satisfied, you can mix the final audio, drop it on the timeline, mute the other tracks, and code it all out to delivery formats.

Hi Robert. Bet your weather there is almost as good as our's here :) .

Yes, since we work with multi-languages (both dubbed and sub-titled), the easy multi-track flow is exactly as you described. Usually, in these particular productions, we narrow it down to just three basic tracks for the final output: voice, music and AFX. That keeps things simple, while allowing us to modify as needed and immediately output.

In this current series, we also keep some video tracks separate, as there are titling and lower third text issues to contend with as other languages are added. Some of those we can deal with by using "patches" over the original video (to save time), but usually it's as easy to re-output.

All our complete projects are saved on HDD's, with everything included, making later changes possible and fairly easy. As you observed, CF's great intermediate HD codec gives us the flexibility to output and scale final 1920x1080 video x 32-bit audio masters (saved from Audition) in various different formats as needed. Good stuff, and all done on PC quad workstations's, with Adobe Prod. Premium, Win 32-bit/64-bit OS's!

Hard to believe, but true...especially for some of us old-timers. Adobe has actually managed to scale Premiere into something truly useful. Now if they'd just cooperate more with industry innovators like CF, we'd all benefit!

[Douglas Turner]

Tips for successful exports:

1) Switch off auto-save
2) Split projects into 15 minute chunks, e.g. for 0 - 15 minute chunk, delete 15 - 90 minutes, then Remove Unused
3) Export your final CF HD avi (Filmscan) in small parts (I do it by scene, makes it easier to re-assemble)
4) Create a new project, and stitch your film back together.

You should then be able to re-export your whole film out in one chunk (either CFHD avi or DVD etc).

[Adam Gold]

Just make sure you have a duplicate project before you do #2.