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Activity Forums Adobe Premiere Pro Project freezing after adding special effects_Now almost unusable_Primere pro CS5

  • Project freezing after adding special effects_Now almost unusable_Primere pro CS5

    Posted by Jake Hunter on February 16, 2012 at 4:20 am

    Problem: My premiere pro project takes 30 minutes to open and 30 minutes to save. The spinning wheel of doom spins, program freezes. I can open file and can basically work in it (slow) but autosave takes 30 min… in other words all is not lost yet, but I am sweating about finding the best way to repair this problem and and not loose work. I have over 100 hours of work in this project and am desperate for good advice.

    Help?!: Can you help me know how to fix the problem with my file or tell me how to transfer the actual content of my project to a few new projects or share how you solved a similar problem?

    Background: The problem began when I recently added some special effects to project consisting of 15 seconds of keyframes guiding an object through a motion path frame by frame. The project became slow and now freezes. I frequently have to force quit while working on project when freezing. The project file size was around 250 MB before I added the effect and file grew to 1.7 GB after adding the effects (and Crashed). I recovered a previous auto save (My default settings only kept the past 5 autosaves) but it still had a substantial amount of the effect in the file (750MB file). I deleted the effects from the timeline but project still does not run faster.

    I have around 15 sequences in the project ranging from 3 to 12 minutes with minimal transitions, slow and fast motion, etc… ( my computer handled everything in the project extremely fast before adding the effect). It is a rough cut of a full length documentary and a lot of work still needs to be done to the sequences. This is my first full length project and after experiencing this problem I would make the project out of many smaller individual projects in order to not risk loosing everything by messing up one file.

    Help? Please!

    Premiere Pro CS5 Mac
    Raid Array
    Raid 4 TB (1.5 Available)
    Clone 2 TB (1.42 Available)
    Awesome Video Card
    Awesome Processors
    My hardware is not the issue, it can run other hefty projects with ease

    Kris Merkel replied 14 years, 6 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Jon Barrie

    February 16, 2012 at 6:53 am

    Hi Jake.

    Do you have renders in this project?

    Are you running the latest updates for 5?

    There was a bug whereby the render files became part of the project file and it would bloat the load times etc.

    It’s not meant to do that. 250-1000+MB project file just doesn’t sound right at all…. That’s whats making me think it could be this issue.

    – JB

    Jon Barrie
    Adobe Video Solutions Consultant ANZ
    Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
    follow Jon with twitter

  • Petros Kolyvas

    February 16, 2012 at 1:00 pm

    If it was me, I’d try importing each sequence into a new project. You could even try to do it all sequences at once by importing the entire project, but I like to start slowly so I’d recommend just starting with a single sequence.

    On the occasions we’ve seen project files start to behave poorly, we’ve successfully moved sequences to new, “clean”, project files to continue working.

    This may not be the solution, but it could be worth a shot.


    There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

  • Petros Kolyvas

    February 16, 2012 at 1:01 pm

    Oops – double post.

  • Kris Merkel

    February 17, 2012 at 5:01 pm

    Are you using DL with AE, or are the effects added directly in PPro?

    “Think of everything in terms of building capacity.”

    Kris Merkel
    twitter @kris_merkel
    Product Specialist, Flanders Scientific Inc.
    http://www.shopfsi.com
    Co-Founder, Atlanta Cutters Post Production User Group
    http://www.atlantacutters.com

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