Crashes and Memory Problems with Aspect HD and Premiere Pro 2.0

[Steven L. gotz]

If I were you, I would probably bring the 24p footage into a new project, and then export it to the same format you are using in your main project.

[Tim Kolb]

Can you tell us more about what else is running on this system?

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[David Cherniack]

Though they don’t say so in the promo literature the bottom line here is that PPro was not designed to handle large projects with ease. It’s heavy in the use of system resources. Adding plugins like those from Cineform or Matrox Axio add to the use of those resources and the program quickly runs out of room. You’re not the first to experience this, believe me. Finishing up my last project was living hell.

The problem is that the underlying design of PPro is at fault. What’s Adobe’s attitude to fixing this? They’ve never publicly acknowledged that the problem exists said but it would appear that they’re looking to the 64 bit addressing space of Vista to solve the problem….ie the user will have to throw gobs of ram at the system.

What to do till then – (probably next year sometime?) If you can, break up your project into smaller projects. Render each one out into a master project every time you want to look at the whole. If you can’t do this switch to another NLE and save yourself the misery.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Marisu Fronc]

David-

FWIW I have found some tricks that are working to minimize my frustration with large projects. First (I did this last, don’t make yourself miserable) add a gig of RAM – 3 GB did help (in fact, it made one particular timeline play back for the first time in weeks!!). Keep task manager open and when your page file usage gets too high (ie: you know that the lockup or crash is coming) touch task manager and switch focus away from Premiere, then toggle back and immediately render and save (this one is great for the out of memory render errors and the couldn’t render but don’t know why errors). Always save before playing back a complex timeline – that seems to ease some of the RAM usage and lets you play through without a hitch. There are others, but these three have managed to save me from continual frustration and now I only have a once or twice a day reboot on the big projects.

I can’t imagine how anyone would get any work done with other things running on the same box (even stuff like anti-virus), I try not to even open After Effects and Premiere at the same time (so much for integration).

slainte,
marisu

[Blast1]

[Pmont243] “a brand new Dell XPS 600”

How is your XPS configured? Hard drives, scratch disks, etc.

[Tim Kolb]

[marisu fronc] “add a gig of RAM – 3 GB did help (in fact, it made one particular timeline play back for the first time in weeks!!). Keep task manager open and when your page file usage gets too high (ie: you know that the lockup or crash is coming) touch task manager and switch focus away from Premiere, then toggle back and immediately render and save (this one is great for the out of memory render errors and the couldn’t render but don’t know why errors)”

I agree with Marisu on this…and it seems to have more to do with the number of assets than the length of the timeline in my case.

This sort of issue is not manifesting itself in any standard way across any group of users I know. I know that I run AJA Xena retail drivers for uncompressed SD/HD and I use Prospect for HD and those two plugins don’t co-exist well since they both apparently compete for control of the card…so I move them in and out of the plugin folder depending on what work I’m doing.

On RAM, I also agree, but I have 4 Gigs of RAM…and you can hit the bottom of that eventually too.

Adobe is aware of the issue apparently. Frankly, until recently I assumed that some of my issues of this type were the result of simply too many plugins/display cards/video I/O cards all running at once and running PPro/AE/Photoshop open frequently.

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[David Cherniack]

Hi Marisu,

Thanks for the tips. I’ll start to watch page file useage but Axio systems manage PPro memory somewhat differently than software PPro. They also have a little system tray utility to let you know when things are going to get flakey. It still doesn’t help a situation that probably never should have occured in the first place and could have been addressed two years ago by Adobe had the company had the will to commit the resources. There are rumours that the company has sent out teams of developers to learn from whatever up-market users PPro has, what’s lacking in the product that causes people to shy away from it. While it’s true that the feature set is not as mature as the industry leaders, it is a very strong editor with an unsurpassed integration across all Adobe apps. But no one likes to have to restart multiple times a day – especially in front of clients – because of lack of memory resources.

If they were smart they’d have PPro 3 ready to roll out the door the day that 64 bit Vista ships. Of course there are probably a myriad of hardware driver issues (and a whole lot of lame other excuses) that will prevent that happy day from happening but no matter how you cut the cake the bottom line is:

Premiere Pro runing under XP is not well suited to handle large projects.

Now don’t get me started on its useability issues…..

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Pmont243]

Hi there,

Thank you all for your great and FAST responses. I wanted to address some of the questions people have had about the setup before this thread gets too cold. My XPS system is set up as follows:

Dell XPS600
Pentium D 3.0GHz
2GB of RAM
Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi
1 system drive (250GB)
1 RAID array for media (onboard RAID 0: 1TB)
1 secondary drive for media (500GB)
All drives are Seagate

As per your suggestions, I’m off to buy another 2GB of RAM tomorrow. Also, I just re-installed Premiere Pro 2.0 and the latest version of Aspect HD. It’s probably just a shot in the dark, but I’ll try to get some editing done tonight and let you know how I made out.

Thanks again, long live the cow!
Phil

[Mark Kalbskopf]

Phil,

Have you had any success curing your crashes?
I have 2GB of mem on my Dell with P.Pro 2, Cineform Prospect 2K.
I’m trying to edit a mixture of HD 25p files and 2K 24p files
It hangs all the time. It’s incredibly frustrating.
I’ve tried the re-install thing, but it’s obviously nothing to do with that.
I’m only on a PC system because of Cineform and it’s confirmed all my worst fears.

Mark.

[Pmont243]

Hey Mark –

Funny you should ask… the problem had become such a problem recently, that I reached out to some more posts and I finally found something just last night that worked. However it involves increasing RAM to 3 or 4 gigs on your system, then going into windows and changing the boot.ini file. I suggest going to the other post I put up at:

https://supportcenteronline.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=614

Check out this thread and you’ll see my initial post which was similar to what I posted on creative cow, but further down the thread you’ll see more details of what the problem may actually pertain to and how to solve it. Make sure to check out the post near the bottom which talks more about the RAM issues that is causing these headaches Hope this helps.

Phil