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Has Premiere Pro ruined my feature film?
I wrote several lines down about a problem I had with placing a PSD letterbox image over my feature film in Premiere Pro. I’m writing a new post because I believe this problem has caused severe damage to my film.
What has happened is after placing the PSD letterbox image over the film on its own layer, a black frame was added to the first frame of every cut in the last half of my film. I know this is an odd problem, which is why I am baffled.
I deleted the PSD letterbox image, but the black frames remained. So when I play the film, it looks like the film is blinking every time a cut occurs.
I would gladly go to a previous save, but unfortunately I saved the film and a copy after I placed the letterbox image, not expecting anything this unusual and irreversible to occur.
I have tried outputting the film to a single AVI file, without the PSD image anywhere in the timeline, and it still renders the black frames.
I have replaced the footage for particular cuts, which then deletes the GenArts Sapphire color effects I had placed on the footage. So I place the original footage in, which seems to fix the black frame, but when I replace the GenArts plugin settings, the black frame reappears!
So it seems that the PSD image somehow corrupted the Genarts Sapphire color treatment plugin so it places a black frame at the beginning of every cut.
The settings for the plugin vary as often as the cuts. Every shot is different, so going back and adding the plugin over all the cuts isn’t an option. It would take me too long to go over the entire film again and retreat it shot by shot. I have film festival deadlines to meet in two weeks!
Does anyone have any ideas on this? Any way to unrender and rerender a section of footage? Any suggestions are appreciated.
And thank you for R. Evans and Aanarav Sareen for your suggestions from the previous post.
Thank You
Nathan
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9 Replies
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Could you try deleting the rendered files from the project and re-rendering?
Also, it might be worth uninstalling and re-installing the Sapphire plug-ins set. I’ve seen a few incidencies where the plug-ins would stop working and had to be re-installed so it might be worth giving it a shot.
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I don’t know if I’m understanding the entire problem correctly, but if it is just a matter of an overlayed black box causing the problem, are you applying the box to a final sequence, or as an additional layer on top of your edited footage?
Is it possible to render out the footage with fx and then apply the box?
Neither of these things would solve any footage that is lost, I understand. This addresses only 1 of your stated issues.
Thoughts for whatever they are worth.
Justin.
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Thank you Justin and Chris for your suggestions. Yes, I have deleted all previously rendered files, which seemed to work for a few minutes, then after rendering a few scenes the problem popped up again.
I also uninstalled and reinstalled both premiere and the Sapphire plugins, which again seemed to work temporarily.
Justin, initially I applied the letterbox PSD file above my entire edit. This is what caused the glitch. At this point, I’m just trying to recover my edit without the letterbox so I can take the clean file and apply letterboxing to it.
I just spoke with Adobe Tech support and they feel the project file itself was corrupted, so have suggested nesting that file in a new Premiere sequence to see if it will uncorrupt itself. If not, I have to erase all of my coloring effects (2 hours of individual cuts) and redo them. Ugh.
If anyone has any better ideas, they are most welcome. Thank you for your suggestions and help. I’ll leave the final solution on this thread when it is complete.
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Nathan-
[Nathan King Miller] “If not, I have to erase all of my coloring effects (2 hours of individual cuts) and redo them. Ugh.”
You MIGHT save yourself some time (or, at least, save yourself from rethinking everything you’ve already done) if you copied and pasted the effects properties from the bad sequence into a fresh sequence with no colour effects applied (yes, it WILL still be a pain, but not as much as starting from scratch). Just toggle back and forth and copy/paste (assuming you can’t get rid of the glitch, of course).
slainte,
marisu -
It seems that you have the same/similar problem I have…
I posted a couple of days ago about the green/black screen render/preview bug in 1.5
which arose from large amounts of stills and cuts in timelines. I recreated the entire
project after upgrading to 2.0. Did clean install of XP, etc. Everything was fine up
to a point. Then I started having black (only, no green) renders and previews come up
again in 2.0 but usually it will go away after fiddling with some controls in the motion
tab and forcing PPro to re-render. But sometimes not. A restart of the app will solve
this most of the time too, but it seems to me that the 1.5 bug isn’t QUITE fixed. This
doesn’t really help you, Nathan, but I understand your struggles…A couple of folks from Adobe were here yesterday and I demonstrated this issue and some
others to them. They seemed genuinely suprised at this one and that it seems very similar
to the 1.5 issue they thought was fixed. Eliminated GFX card, RAM, HD and other hardware
related issues, it SEEMS to be down to PPro. At least at this stage of my project,
I am able to work around it.Good luck with your project!!! And thanks to all that helped in my previous posts!
Just for the curious, my project is now up to 5500-plus still images as sources, and
I know I’m really pushing PPro to it’s limit (other systems would buckle too, I suspect)
and in general, I’m very impressed with 2.0’s handling of the size/complexity of this
edit. Just a couple of nagging things I guess…-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA -
Thanks Troy and everyone for your encouragement and suggestions. Ultimately, I did find a solution that worked, though it really shouldn’t be necessary to do it this way.
I deleted ALL of my renders and opened the final edit, which somehow corrected the black frames issue. Whenever I tried to rerender a section, however, the black frames would reappear in various parts of the film. So I deleted all renders once again, held my breath, and exported a full AVI without rendering.
Somehow, this worked. I then placed the AVI in another Premiere Pro timeline, added my letterbox, and rendered again. I hate to render twice, but the compression wasn’t really noticeable and it allowed me to escape with my film intact.
Phew.
It’s good to hear Premiere is aware of this issue as it greatly persuaded me to look at other editing software if these bugs persist. I love Adobe’s entire suite of software, which is why I use it. But editing is difficult enough without the software constantly working against you in unpredictable ways. I’d prefer they work out these bugs before adding any new bells and whistles to the next version.
Thank you again, and hope to see some of you at the festivals.
Best,
Nathan
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I’m not sure that what Troy’s describing is the same problem as what you’re experiencing. Can you confirm that the black flash is specifically the first frame of every cut where a clip has a Sapphire filter applied?
The bug Troy describes is a general failure that occurred mostly in 1.5 when a system would run out of memory – however, the difference would be that the green/black frame could potentially pop up anywhere in a rendered section, NOT consistently at the first frame of a new rendered timeline segment…
I personally suspect the filter – have you seen the same problem anywhere where the filter isn’t present?
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I agree with Wil…in Nathan’s case it certainly sounds like the Sapphire plug is creating the issue, not PPro, or the PSD file.
If the problem can be recreated by simply replacing the Sapphire effect…that’s about as solid a diagnostic as you can do…
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Hi, Nathan — if you think a Sapphire Plug-in is causing this problem, please contact us at support@genarts.com and we’ll be happy to help.
— Gary
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