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  • My video footage keeps freezing up.

    Posted by Reynolds Strother on February 19, 2008 at 7:42 pm

    I hate to repost but the subject title of my first post was not descriptive. The problem is my Photo JPG video footage will randomly freeze frame into a still image from within its timeline. It happens to only a few of my videos at a time, not all. It happens to different videos at different times and I never know what videos will be frozen each time I open the comp.

    I’ve got plenty of ram, 6gigs. A 2x dualcore2.66 MacPro. So can’t imagine it is a ram capacity issue but it will temporarily fix if I clear the caches. By temporarily I mean for about 5 min of editing before it happens again. It’s almost like what the ram caches screws up what AE sees the actual video file as. Like it interprets what’s in the cache as the actual footage file. I’ve noticed when I play the footage file from the project panel, the video will open and play just fine in the standard little media player/previewer that AE has. But when I double click it to open it in the comp panel to view it as a footage element. It is frozen just as it is in the comp timeline.

    So the actual file in the project seems to be fine but when the comp interprets the footage it seems to care less about what the actual video file is.

    Needless to say this is driving me nuts and it has been going on longer than I ever thought for this project. My deadline is fast approaching and I hope someone can help me out here.

    If you want to read a few more specifics about my setup check out my first post on this issue.
    Freezeframe Footage?

    Sally Sherwood replied 15 years, 8 months ago 5 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Steve Roberts

    February 19, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    I’m sorry you’re having this trouble, as it sounds pretty frustrating. I also don’t know how to solve it right now, but if we get a discussion going, maybe something will come up.

    1. It may be RAM, as this sort of random thing sometimes happens when RAM usage reaches a certain point and a certain RAM chip is accessed. Can you open OSX’s Activity Monitor and monitor RAM usage to the freeze point?

    2. Stab in the dark. Can you disable OpenGL?

    3. Has this machine always behaved in this manner? If not, what changed before the trouble started?

  • Reynolds Strother

    February 19, 2008 at 9:36 pm

    Here are some specs on the setup.

    -It was happening with QT 7.3
    -This started when I upgraded to CS3 and my new MacPro
    -I’ve tried reinstalling
    -Started with 2 gigs of ram, so I upgraded to 6gigs thinking this would fix it.
    -My RAM usage is set to default 120% (3 gigs)
    -My RAM cache is set to default 60% (1.8 gigs)
    -OpenGL is OFF
    -Multiprocessing is ON
    -All the original videos (12) have been rendered into PhotoJPG less than 50mb in size.(This was just to ensure RAM was not being maxed out from the videos)
    -The comp design is just alternating through each video with 8 sec on screen and a 1 sec black fade in between each video. There is an audio track for the length of the comp and simple text animation for each video transition.

    Simple setup, few effects applied only to text and sound, the videos have no effects applied. My best guess is that AE is screwy on how the video is caching. My runner up suspicion is that the video itself is screwing with how AE can interpret it. But my assumptions still leave me stuck in the mud. I hope somebody can snuff this problem for me.

  • Reynolds Strother

    February 19, 2008 at 11:48 pm

    I just finished testing out different pref settings with ram, cache and multiprocessing. No luck.

    I haven’t seen these little red and blue things on my quicktime icons in the project panel before now. Some icons have them and some do not. What are these thing, can’t find anything about what they mean. link

  • Alan Morse

    February 20, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    I’m having the same issue and it’s annoying as hell. I’m running a dual core 3ghz machine with 4gb of memory. Quicktime is 7.2.

    I’m using Adobe CS 3 Professional, but it’s on a work computer and I’m not sure of it’s sketchy origins. Possibly this has something to do with the malfunction? ? ?

    I wanted to let you know your not the only one hit by this issue. If you find a fix, let us know! I have project deadline fast approaching and it’s tough to show a file with bad freeze frames.

  • Jon Draper

    October 22, 2008 at 11:17 am

    Same problem here.
    On a Mac Pro 8 core.
    6Gb Ram
    Using CS3 – full legit copy…thanks to my Boss’s.

    Turned on Multi Processing – gonna turn it off now as my computer is acting worse than before….

    Tried QT Animation, H264, JPEG, all froze after time. H264 froze straight away.

    Now trying AVI’s instead..

    USE ‘MPEG STREAMCLIP’ free to download can convert to tonnes of formats.

    Will post here if I ever fix it.

  • Sally Sherwood

    September 11, 2010 at 12:45 am

    did you ever figure this out?? I am having the same problem. eeekkkk!!! no time for problems.

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