Footage unable to playback footage in Premiere

[Robert Ober]

Are you having this issue in more than one project? Tried copying to a new timeline or project?

Windows or Mac?

Robert:-)

[Al Bergstein]

Updating this post. I just encountered this very issue today.
Using Adobe CS 6.0.3
Windows 64 Bit 8 GBs RAM
Happens in new projects and old.
New timelines also affected, it appears.
Was not happening as recently as yesterday.
No changes made to the computer.
Only changes is that I have combined timeines (Imported) from one project to another.
Video shows yellow or Green.
I have rerendered the footage to show all green on timeline.
Only way around it is to reboot the computer, it comes back after a while. The problematic timelines work fine for a while, then this starts happening.

Anyone have a clue?

Al

[Tom Daigon]

Find out where your Media cache files arestored on your computer Close Premiere. Delete the files in the Media Cache folder. Then start up Premiere.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPrG3WUyz8
(Best viewed at 1080P and full screen)
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid

[Al Bergstein]

Tom, the media cache files say that the location is C:UsersAlAppDataRoamingAdobeCommon.

Under it the Media Cache Database is located at F:adobe media cache

Should I delete both? I assume only the cache files on C:

Al

[Tom Daigon]

Be sure you are deleting only the contents of the Media Cache Database folder. Mine is usually in the same place, but there are reasons why you might have it in two places. Just confirm the title of the folder is correct before deleting the contents.And be sure PrP is closed.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPrG3WUyz8
(Best viewed at 1080P and full screen)
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid

[Al Bergstein]

Didn’t seem to change anything. I just got the error again. Things seem to be curiously messed up. I tried to render a sequence out to MXF. The headless crashed each time, (not totally unusual, but it couldn’t complete even once). I also got an error message when I bypassed the Media Encoder and just went strait to rendering it out within Pro. It managed to continue to render it to MXF but when I got done and imported it into Pro, it didn’t play the clip when I clicked on it.

The interesting thing to me is that to totally clear Adobe from RAM, I have to go into Task Manager and kill the process after exiting the program. So it’s not closing properly, it appears. Once I kill the process and reopen the app, I can then play the sequence, for a while. It’s very curious. Task manager also shows lots of RAM open, no memory leaks at work, nothing unusual. It appears, to be just choking on footage, sort of like it can’t quite process the audio (like when you bring in new footage and it has to process that audio). What’s happening is like it sees the audio at first when I bring it in at startup of the app, then loses it. If I exit without killing the Premiere process (or shutting down the machine), then it still exhibets the behavior on startup again.

So this project is large, for me. It is showing as 34 MBs. I have a wide variety of clips at play here, but only MXF and MOV. The MXF are the default sequence(s) unless I shot nothing but MOV.
I have tried rendering the visualization, all green lines on top but that doesn’t seem to fully help.

There are no special effects, yet.

Is it worth re-installing Premiere? This has cost me the better part of a day screwing around with this.

Let me detail this again:
Premiere is installed on C There hundreds of GBs of storage avaialble there.

All project files are on F which is a RAID 1 array. It appears to be functioning normally. 800 GBs free space on 2TBs.

All Renders are taking out to an external drive like I always do. Lot s of space available there too.

I’d really like to not reinstall as I have Boris installed and it would take me hours.

Thoughts?

Al

[Tom Daigon]

Deleted. Problems with cow not saving message.

[Tom Daigon]

Deleted. Same issue as above.

[Al Bergstein]

By the way, my original MXF footage is Canon xf305. It’s worked fine until now. The whole thing has worked fine until now. If I could get by deleting all the files Adobe has created (essentially if I could reset the program without reinstalling), I’d love to try that. I’m not that deep into this project that I couldn’t recreate all the rendered views. The odd thing is that when I render the footage so that the timeline is green all the way through (or black, meaning that the footage matches, right?) then it works, at least until I add some new footage to it. That’s how I’m ‘limping” along, as well as killing the Adobe process and restarting the app.

To be clear, I’ve been using Pr for about a year, having come from both Vegas Pro and a couple of years of FCP 7, and this is my first major problem with it. I’ve loved that it’s been rock solid until now. Wish it had more of the automation tools that FCP had though.

I’ll limp through today, in case anyone has a better idea, and will go post over on the Adobe forums.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Well, as I wait for all my media to conform yet again, I just got off the phone with Adobe tech support. The person was quite knowledgeable and also got to what appears to be the root cause of the problem. As you mentioned Tom, the media database and it’s cache is the cause, some kind of corruption that was not present a few weeks ago. Why did this start happening after months of rock solid work is unknown to them or me, but something caused the corruption with this timeline/footage.

Adobe took control of my machine, and deleted the same media cache and database that I deleted the other day. This is also after I created a new Admin based user profile, and moved to it. So the new profile helped only in as much as the old one was apparently corrupted (again why, I have no idea).

So it’s now conforming all the same footage as I conformed just Friday, and conformed for hours in months gone by.

A couple of things that I’ve learned from Adobe Tech support. I won’t hold all of Adobe to this, but these are worth noting.

-My project has many timelines. I am working on multiple chapters of a film, and will hopefully assemble them at the end, but now, I’m not so sure.
– AVCHD: I have a bit of AVCHD footage I use on some of the timelines, just a few of the project shoots used it as a b camera. Adobe said that I should *never* strip out the AVCHD MTS files from the original folder structure. Never. I have been under the impression, for some time now, that this is ok to do. They do play just fine. This is bad news because it’s much harder to rename files that are inside the folder and give the whole thing a unique name. It also seems to create the likelihood of duplicate clip numbers, yes?
The tech said that corruption is more likely to happen to AVCHD files that have been stripped. He said to simply work off the files in the folder, in it’s totality. But to be clear, my playback issues are on timelines that may contain *no* AVCHD.
– He said that it’s ok to use stripped MXF files from Canon, as long as I use the Canon utility, which apparently properly copies them. So that’s good news.
– The most destressing thing he said was that I told him this whole thing has been a new event, after months of rock solid work on Premiere. I said that I would be having to do a lot of work if my project was going to need conforming again every few days. I mentioned that I do have a high end MacBook Pro with 6.0 on it, that I could switch to in order to get to the end of the project. His answer was along the lines of “we do not see this media database corruption issue on the Mac as we see it on Windows, so you are more likely to not have to put up with this problem if you can and do switch”. Hmmmm. So whatever corrupts media caches are more something wrong with Adobe’s interaction at a low level with Windows, and it doesn’t have the same issue on the Mac. Well, all I have to do is move my 4 TB of footage to a Mac formatted drive I guess (G, sigh).

A couple of additional tips, given my experience:
– I likely will never mix formats in a single timeline if I can help it again. Despite Adobe’s insistance that their product can handle anything thrown at it. It seems that this is not a good idea, given my personal experience. (though MOV files seem to not be a worry to Adobe, they said they don’t see corruption from them, likely because there is no real folder structure to mess with. I’ll also have to see if using the full AVCHD folder structure actually improves this problem.
– I will likely try out moving my next project to the Mac, and see if media cache corruption shows up there too, and what issues the Mac platform has that Windows doesn’t.
– I will not create massive 1 hour projects on Premiere until this all gets resolved. If I have to worry about this kind of corruption, I’ll continue to break my larger projects into chapters and hope I can assemble them in the end without corruption (maybe render out the final chapters to MXF and assemble the timelines that way.
– This is all very aggravating as my Windows machine has been rock solid for months, Adobe has been rock solid for months, and if I thought that restoring to a month ago would be worth it, I’d do it. But I don’t think it would. It is not a comforting situation to run into after spending so much effort with Premiere. But maybe this problem will resolve itself.

To be clear, Adobe phone tech support was superb, and I appreciated their help.

Al