How stable is PPro on your system when editing large projects?

[Dave Friend]

Jack,

I have stopped trying to do large project with Premiere Pro. Put simply, it cannot handle them. Beyond a certain size and/or complexity it becomes unstable to the point of being unusable. I find that breaking jobs up into multiple projects is required. This is a pain but not as painful as the constant crashing and other failures to perform that appear once a project reaches the breaking point.

I had hoped that cs3 would address these long-standing issues. Apparently it is beyond Adobe’s technical prowess.

Dave

Dave Friend
Co-Host Discrete Edit*ors COW

[Phil Radelat]

Premiere has been Adobe’s “premiere” bug box (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Truth is all Adobe products are this way, some just more than others. It’s a luxury they have in being the Microsoft of AV. They could care less.

Worse offenders for me have been Premiere (since about v3) and recently, Audition. It’s amazing how Adobe can destroy great code.

Audition used to be known as Syntrillium Cool Edit. In that incarnation it was one of the most stable audio editors I’ve ever worked with (and as a matter of fact, still work with). Once it got sold to Adobe and they made it Audition, POOF! Instant crash box.

So the short answer to your question is no, you’ll never have a stable version of Premiere. Considering it’s legacy, I don’t mind making that statement without a shadow of a doubt.

[Vince Becquiot]

Absolutely no isssues here on our 2 dual quad systems, on Raid 5 media, and Raid 1 OS. 8 Gigs of DDR3 1333. Right now, I’m working on a mix of DVCPro HD 1080P and uncompressed HD keyed footage, as well as 1080 targa sequences from C4D. I have about 120 clips loaded in right now and counting. Been working on this for a week, not a crash, steadily fast.

This is on Vista Ultimate 64. Installed on machine: CS3 suite, Cinema 4D 10, Sonic Fire Pro, P2 loader and absolutely nothing else.

Cheers,

Vince

[Bret Williams]

[Phil Radelat] “ruth is all Adobe products are this way, some just more than others. It’s a luxury they have in being the Microsoft of AV. They could care less. “

Premiere, probably yes. The early versions were pointless and seems like the newer versions are to some extent a prettier interface built upon a dated concept.

But Photoshop? Illustrator? After Effects? Their record of bugs is stellar. Photoshop of all of them is nearly invincible. Even if youi don’t have enough RAM it still doesn’t crash. Just chugs away using the disk as ram. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen “Photoshop has unexpectedly quit…” And what bugs does Illustrator have? None that I’ve heard of. And AE too. Adobe has a pretty amazing track record. And if you now look at their newly acquired Macromedia line, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc. you’ll find they’re extemely stable and always have been. Been using that stuff since day one and have never seen any odd quirks.

[Eric Addison]

I edit with PPro CS3 almost everyday, and it’s never let me down. It very rarely crashes, and I’ve found that the whole Production suite is pretty stable.

I’ve cut short projects as well as long projects with it (both SD and HDV), and I never noticed any stability issues in relation to the project size.

I’ve worked on FCP systems that are rock solid, and others that crashed all the time…

—Eric

[Phil Radelat]

>>Photoshop of all of them is nearly invincible.<< If you happen to be on PShop on a Mac, tap the period quickly on the numpad twice and then hit enter on the numpad. [G] I tend to fly around hotkeys a lot in PShop (my stock in trade) and too many times I've accidentally hit something that blows it up. That's the only one I remember. Most of the time I don't even know what I hit (because it wasn't what I was intending to do). The worst part about PShop is that, here we are, almost literally twenty years down the road, and we STILL don't have any form of crash recovery in PShop. Twenty years. When you're the Microsoft of AV, you don't have to care...

[Tim Kolb]

[Vincent Becquiot] “I have about 120 clips loaded in right now and counting. Been working on this for a week, not a crash, steadily fast.”

You will want to watch two things…the size of the saved project file and the size of the pagefile while you’re running (many of us now simply run with the performance tab in the task manager open all the time). Vista might be different as it may handle memory differently, and memory usage seems to be the key to most stability issues with PPro. Lately I’ve had some elaborate AE projects also refuse to render (or take an unbelievable period of time) unless I save the project, close the app and restart the computer, then open the project and do the render…so PPro isn’t alone.

I’m honestly at a loss as to what the problem is with memory handling. I’ve certainly been an advocate of extending the benefit of the doubt to Adobe, but time is money.

…interestingly, PPro CS3 ran pretty impressively on a Mac in beta. I wonder if it ends up ultimately being something in Windows?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

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

[Tim Kolb]

I have had less issue with large clip counts than with elaborate projects that drive the project size up, though I will say that I’ve been doing a semi-regular project where I need to edit hours (in the neighborhood of 20-30 hours) of finished two camera stuff (40-60 hours of source footage) along with another 20-30 hours of Camtasia screen grab footage, all inside a 1024×768 graphic that is the final frame size so it has to be a “bezel” over all the footage, with graphics, etc… And I don’t have much of an issue editing it quite honestly.

Unfortunately, I HAVE had issues with Adobe’s Media Encoder not being able to export such a file from a 1-2 hour timeline.

I end up having to “export movie” to some sort of intermediate master file and use ProCoder to encode.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

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

[Bret Williams]

Something like an autosave feature? Sure that would be nice. But your drive could fill up mighty fast. I guess just keeping one or two autosaves would be ok.

I tried your hot keys. Couldn’t get anything to happen more less a crash. What does the period do? I’ve been using PS for twelve years, since version 3, and I haven’t used that. Everyone’s different. But bummer that your workflow makes PS crash all the time. For whatever reason, my doesn’t I guess. I’ve never even thought twice about the need for crash protection.

[Bill Buchanan]

“…120 clips…” I don’t believe that constitutes a “large project” as described by Jack Kelly. When project files get into the 30 to 100 or more meg range, with thousands of clips, lots of video and audio effects, etc., things tend to go haywire in a hurry with PPro. I’m still on PPro 2, because apparently the well-documented memory issues with PPro were not entirely addressed in CS3, though some have stated they were. I’ve found editing large projects on the XP 64 side of my dual-boot box a bit easier, though not without problems. There seems to be a concensus among pro users that PPro is not the way to go for long-form work involving thousands of clips, etc.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co