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Activity Forums Adobe Premiere Pro PrPro Source Monitor, Program Monitor will not play back footage

  • PrPro Source Monitor, Program Monitor will not play back footage

    Posted by Will Stewart on March 30, 2015 at 7:58 pm

    Hey guys, posted this in the Adobe forum, but I figured I’d maximize my exposure and post here too. Really desperate for a fix, client meeting is at 10 tomorrow.

    Hi all, just this morning I’ve encountered a problem that I’ve never seen before, and I can’t find any threads on it anywhere. I’m using Premiere CS6 to edit a feature documentary, and the footage totals around 715 gigs, which I’m storing on a 3 TB RAIDed drive. I’ve been working on the project for the last week or so with no issues, but today, every time I try to open up interview clips in the source monitor, I get the yellow “Media Pending” screen. The timecode runs regardless, sometimes audio plays back, sometimes it just runs in silence. Sometimes the footage starts playing, sometimes the source monitor just becomes green and sits there while the timecode runs. I opened up another project to see if the issue was system wide, and playback worked fine there. THEN, when I came back into the doc project, opening clips in the source monitor opened the wrong clips, and then it started opening clips from the other project I had just tested. I’m supposed to have a meeting with the client tomorrow, and I’m at a complete loss. I’ve tried cleaning the media cache, I’ve reloaded the program, I’ve restarted the computer, nothing has helped. Sometimes the video clips start playing and work for about 30 seconds, and then I move the bulkhead and it all freezes again. Also, the entire program stops responding at the slightest provocation, just right-clicking on a clip to get its properties caused the program to stop responding.

    I’m running Premiere Pro CS6, windows 7 x64
    16 gb RAM
    RAIDED Hard drive with 655gb free from 1.81 TB
    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Graphics Card

    The footage varies. It’s all 1920×1080 @ 23.976fps, some is mpeg .mp4 videos with an aspect ration of 1.0, and the rest is DSLR mpeg .mov files with an aspect ratio of 1.0.

    If I’m not providing certain information, please let me know, and any help is greatly appreciated!
    Will

    UPDATE: Now all playback is halting or slow. I tried dragging the clips into the timeline to just extract the bits I need there, and my program monitor just turned black while the audio ran underneath

    Ht Davis replied 11 years, 2 months ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Jason Agnew

    March 31, 2015 at 7:12 am

    Have you checked the playback settings in Preferences?

    In your sequence settings, have you changed the preview codec and re rendered your timeline?

    I also have a folder on my desktop to save my preview files.

    Doing those things have typically helped when I’ve had similar issues.

    -jason

  • Will Stewart

    March 31, 2015 at 5:07 pm

    Hey Jason, thanks for responding. I haven’t changed my sequence settings because I can’t even get the videos to play in the source monitor. Rendering the timeline seems to enable playback, the problem is this is a feature length doc with hundreds of hours of interviews, I don’t have the time to render every interview just to pull the 30 seconds I need from it. I’m not sure what you mean about a folder on your desktop for the preview files, how does having them on a separate filepath help? I’ll definitely try that next though, because this is super frustrating.

    I’m wondering if it’s not just a RAM issue because this is easily the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, and two other projects I have going right now work just fine.

    As a final reference, this is what my monitor looks like half the time

  • Jason Agnew

    March 31, 2015 at 5:27 pm

    In your project settings, where you create create your folder path for captured video/audio, project auto saves…you can also save the path for video/ audio previews. I found that (and I have no real explanation why i tried it or why it worked) that when I have a folder on my system drive (in my case, the desktop) and save preview files there, instead of the folder/drive where the source footage resides, that things became more stable.

    Do you see a little yellow “caution” triangle or red “stop sign” on the very bottom of your screen? sometimes thats an unnoticeable indicator of errors.

    -jason

    -jason

  • Will Stewart

    March 31, 2015 at 7:10 pm

    Actually, that totally makes sense, in theory, pulling it from a different filepath could reduce the amount of strain on one hard drive system and distribute it evenly over both systems that I have. I’m checking my RAID for disk errors, but I’ll try that as soon as that’s done. As for the warnings, I try to keep an eye down there, because that has gotten me before, and I don’t recall seeing any, but I’ll check that again too.

    I’ll let you know if changing the path resolves it, if not we’ll just wait for my extra RAM to show up tomorrow…

  • Kevin Monahan

    April 2, 2015 at 9:46 pm

    Hi Will,
    [Will Stewart] “Hey guys, posted this in the Adobe forum”

    Do you have a link to that discussion?

    Thanks,
    Kevin

    Kevin Monahan
    Support Product Manager—DVA
    Adobe After Effects
    Adobe Premiere Pro
    Adobe
    Follow Me on Twitter!

  • Ht Davis

    April 6, 2015 at 5:38 am

    “If you place your source and preview files on the same drive, you may have playback issues.”

    For me this falls into the NO SHINOLA category. Here’s why:

    You are trying to playback a mix of separate video files from the same drive. Basically, you are loading your original video in the source monitor, so it’s being called up and is being added to a read operation for the drive. But you are also trying to read another video file from the drive (your previews). The playback on the preview is probably 10mbps, the full, another 10-50, and the hard drive can only multi-read at about 10-20. You are overtaxing the drive.

    Also, run error checking on the drive…
    Place your cache internal to your system, (leave it at the default)
    Capture is for live capture or iLink system captures, always keep audio and video together for previews. It just works better.

    My setup:
    Originals are placed in a disk image (look it up) on a roughly 2tb esata RAID (4 drives 750each) on my mobile (2008 mbp) and my proxies (I transcode a full fomat and a proxy) go onto that as well. All original video is on the RAID. I remove the transcodes if I don’t think i’ll need them. I rar split and burn the disk image to a set of discs for a backup.
    Previews go on another esata raid with my project and all the files related (still images, other project files etc, of a smaller nature). Both are read separately, and at speeds of 300mbps easy. Since I use proxies, the read is easier for “Original” video and since I don’t drop res on my previews, I see great quality playback. I also get great backups, and can continue a project or “throwback” a project fairly easily. My clients like that.

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