Crash Crash Crash

[Brad Tyrrell]

Ok, I figured I have a low end machine (3 gig hyperthreading + 3 gig Ram) so I'll bite the bullet and make PP2 work easier and buy Aspect HD.

Funny thing, never had a problem editing native HDV. Now pp2 crashes constantly. I save before every transition I render because every 3rd or 4th time it crashes PP2, not the machine, just PP2.

Adjusting color correction (which is why I actually bought A HD) crashes PP2 too. Grab those handles and pushem around a bit and reboot.

Also interesting, - preview with native is fine, preview with HD takes a bit to find. HD seems to slow the machine to a crawl. Click on a window and count to 5, sometimes 10 and the window becomes active. Doesn't happen in native.

Any fixes or known bottlenecks that I should be aware of?

[David Newman]

That is not the typical experience. File a trouble ticket with support so that can see what up with your PC.

[Brad Tyrrell]

Originally Posted by David Newman

That is not the typical experience. File a trouble ticket with support so that can see what up with your PC.

Ok, I did, waiting to hear.

[Brad Tyrrell]

Hmmm...

Not a really happy camper.

Jake from Cineform tells me it takes more sytem power to run Aspect HD, not less. I got the oppposite impression from posts and reviews. My fault I guess.

I bought HD, among other things, to make it easier on a marginal machine, - wrong.

So I guess PP2 is just going to lock up on me with Cineform unless I buy a faster machine. Double Rats!

[David Newman]

????

It take less power to use Aspect HD then native HDV edit (much so.) Your PC isn't fast by today's standards, but it is faster than the PC I develop on, which runs Aspect HD fine.

[Brad Tyrrell]

Well that's sorta what I thought. So why's my machine slowing to a crawl then freezing? It'll edit m2t without slowing.

I apply AHD color correction to a clip. Animate. Put in a couple of keys start to grab handles and PP2 freezes. Actually, it doesn't exactly crash. If I wait 4 or 5 minutes without clicking on anything it'll come back up and I can scrub. Adjust anything and it freezes again.

Jake at Cineform told me to reinstall, - I did. He told me to register the ".ax" files manually, - I did. Then he said it takes more system power to run Cineform, agreed that I had a "low-end" machine, and gave me the link to "long form projects" where there's a link to "Video-Guys" tweaks. I haven't tried those yet, I'm reading.

The "long form" page also advised I add a startup command to get PP2 to recognize 3 gig. Ouch - big mistake. Had to restart in safe mode to re-edit the command line. Thought I'd lost my external hard drive and files for a bit but I was able to re-initialize it without problem. Whew.

So something else is wrong. Got any ideas?

[David Newman]

No idea. We are doing a new release very soon, so you could try that, otherwise there must be something that is just too out of data on your PC.

[Douglas Turner]

I had hassles with my long form project (95 minute movie with 40+ hrs of footage) - slow as treacle and crashing all the time.

Jake from Cineforme tried to help out. But basically I was left with the feeling that at least one of Windows XP, Cineform or PP2 isn't happy with large projects (DEFINITE memory leakage/problems happening).

I did all the 'tweaks' and use the /3GB & PA switches (I have 4GB installed) - AND I use FreeRAM XP PRO too (which does seem to help).

It seemed to crash less, but was just pretty slow still. Timeline unresponsive, rendering segments >20 min in length not working etc.

Sorry to say I had to let the problem ticket drop, as I was too busy editing the film to support the support!

So I've split my movie into 6 x 15 min projects, removed unreferenced footage and I'm happy to say that I can edit without crashing (most of the time!).

But there will come a time when I'll have to combine all the sections again into one big movie file to do the final 5.1 mix (albeit with unused footage removed) - fingers crossed it works.

[Frank Pitsikalis]

Ya...I think something is up with the current release (AHD 4.3.1 Build 76).

Jake from Cineform support has tried the standard troubleshooting steps (uninstall/re-install and re-registering all .ax files manually to no avail) but I haven't heard back from him so I suspect there is an unfixable issue with the current release.

Has anyone had skipping issues on their timeline?

Running PPro 1.5.1 on a Windows XP x64 workstation.

Any issues upgrading from AHD 3.x to 4.x?

Upgrade was fine on my notebook (Windows XP SP2).

[Brad Tyrrell]

Fingers crossed, checking for new release.

[David Taylor]

Premiere Pro has known memory problems with long projects. It's not so much the length of the project as the complexity of the project file. We find that as the project file gets towards 50MB that random crashing increases. So the best strategy is to manage your project files to less than this.

Because CineForm projects can have so many different transitions, effects, titles, etc in them (because of our RT engine) the project files grow more rapidly than projects in which you spend a lot of time rendering. So management of the size of project files becomes more important.

We have heard rumors that this has been improved in PP within CS3, but we haven't tested it yet.

It's frustrating for everyone....

We have a tech note published about this: http://www.cineform.com/products/Tec...rmProjects.htm.

[Brad Tyrrell]

Aha! I think I see something that could be my problem.

Re-reading (more carefully this time) the PC requirements I see "NO integrated video". Ooops.

I've got a hyperthreaded Pentium4 with integrated video. Works fine with m2t in PP2 but I guess maybe not with Cineform.

Unfortunately, my lil ol Goldfish3 motherboard only has PCI slots, - no AGP, no PCI Express.

Not really quite ready for a new machine (I have 7 of those door-stops already.) Thinking about new mobo using same PCU & RAM but with a PCI express slot. Unfortunately, I'll probably have to upgrade power supply too. Doesn't seem too expensive, but I do fear the "blue screen of death".

Anybody been there?

Anybody got any suggestions? Inexpensive video card that'll help me limp along?

Come to think of it, is this likely to even fix my "freezing"" problem?

[Douglas Turner]

I have a 7900GS PCIe card and I still have issues.

It looks like the application is at fault (PPro rather than Aspect I'm thinking) - so even if you had a good spec PC, you'd still be frustrated.

Maybe worth waiting for PPro CS3 and see if that fixes anything before you go spending a fortune on a new PC.

I'm so deep into my current project, that there's no turning back - all footage captured as CFHD files, weeks of editing already done in PPro 2.

Before my next big project I'll re-evaluate the software and workflows, I think it's worth checking out EDIUS and AVID certainly.

[Brad Tyrrell]

Double Rats !!

[Peter Ferling]

I've traced skipping issues to large or oversized tiff files (those not exactly conforming to the project aspect ratio and size). Replacing with lower rez, less memory size jpeg would do the trick.

I've had a particularly nasty five second section that would be skipped in the render, replacing with a jpeg, moving about the timeline, and even creating a seperate project for just that sequence with project manager, and moving the files to another location did not help.

I know it's a PPro memory issue, because I could render the HD timeline to a cineform SD rez file and all the issues were gone!

What I did was recreate a new sequence and copied the files over to that sequence. I then closed the project, deleted all the media encoded and conformed files. Reopened, and then immediately rendered that timeline/sequence. PPro was forced to pre-encode the media files for that timeline first, before moving on to the items in the bin. Success!

Doing some more testing, an alternative fix was to simply render the offending section itself as a clip, and then replacing that part of the sequence with the clip. Success again.

If you watch PPro in the processes tab of the resource monitor you can litterally see the level or memory usage climb, and the higher it goes, down goes the performance.

One interesting thing I did notice in a PPro CS3 test, although I was not able to create an HD project, I did create a desktop preset for SD, and was able to capture a few minutes of CFHD. I then noticed my PC was nearly slowed to a crawl. (I have a quad-processor BOXX 7400 -it never did that before), and looking at the performance tab, I realized that PPro was using all four cores to 100%! This was not evident in PPro2 before, which only used two full cores or 50/50.

CS3 crashed when I tried to edit. But there is something going on memory wise. I tried some other stuff in CS3, but it's HD/HDV features are disabled. I would have to make a purchase (groan) and buy in order to try.

I forgot to mention, some of you may find better success in simply rendering a microsoft avi using the cineform codec (wrapper). When I couldn't render a "cineform HD", the wrapped avi would work. I assume it's of lower quality slightly, and so less resource intensive.