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Possible Limit to the Number of Assets Premiere Pro Can Have Loaded… 12,000!?
I am posting the following info in the hope of helping anyone else who might encounter this issue and the solution I found that helped.
Computer specs:
iMac 3.4GHz Intel Core i7
OS 10.8.5
32GB RAM
Adobe Creative Cloud CC (Premiere 7.2.2)
AJA Kona 3G in Sonnet Thunderbolt chassis
Fiber Channel to shared XSAN environmentSituation:
Editing a one hour doc program for broadcastThis is my first time cutting long form in Premiere Pro and I am acting as the test project for the production company I’m doing work for. They are in the process of switching over from FCP 7 to either Premiere or AVID. They are currently leaning heavily towards Premiere, however the following situation might change their mind.
For the past several days I’ve had a serious error occur shortly after Premiere opens my project and starts checking in the media. I would get the following window:
I have over 500GB of free space on my system drive, so I knew something else was going on. I then had to force quit Premiere. I did some research and saw that other people had run into this issue, but with other applications. I then opened Premiere again with Activity Monitor running to see what was happening. I won’t go into all the details, but basically the OS wasn’t releasing InActive memory back to the system and Premiere was sucking up Virtual Memory and then the program would crash. We tried reinstalling the software and opening on another machine, all of which still led to the same issue.
My last thought was perhaps the project had too many assets because the media check in would start to hang with about 3000 assets left to check. All told my project had at least 12,000 assets possibly a little more. I decided to create a new project and import only what I needed since I had already delivered my rough cut.
1. I opened the bad project and while it was still checking in media, I exported each of my main organizational bins (i.e. media, seqs, grfx, music etc.) as individual Premiere project files. Just select the bin in the project manager window and then under File>Export select Save Selection as Premiere Project. I did this for all my organized bins.
2. I then opened my new empty project and started with my Media bin which had all the camera original material organized based on location. Before I imported anything else, I went through and deleted the bins that had camera original assets, but kept the bins that had the converted assets (ProRes). I was able to do this because I cut with the converted assets and not the original assets. (I only had the original assets imported because I started with a project file that an assistant editor had used to import the media and he had brought in both the original and converted assets. Going forward, in the future I will make sure the originals are removed before I start cutting). I then imported the other Premiere projects leaving my Sequences project and my Music project for last.
3. I decided not to import the Music project since I wasn’t going to need access to all those tracks, just the ones used in the rough cut. I then imported only my final rough cut sequence and two other sequences that had material I might need. (Nice thing about importing the Premiere project is that it keeps the bin structure of the assets used which is particularly helpful when importing Sequences.)
4. Once everything was loaded, I saved and then rendered. The whole time I did this process I had the Activity Monitor open so I could see what was going on with the memory. Everything appeared to be running as it should.
I now only have about 6500 assets loaded in my current project and things seem to be running as they should.
Concluding comments and questions:
1. There appears to be a limit be to the number of assets a Premiere project can have loaded. Based on my experience, it looks to be around 12,000. Question for Adobe: Is there a limit and if so, is this the correct number?
2. In both FCP and AVID I would normally have individual project files or Bins for organizing things like media, stock, music, graphics and sequences and then open and close them as I needed them. Premiere does not allow this, and I may have pushed Premiere to its limits with regards to number of assets loaded at any one time. Comment to Adobe: Long form docs are inherently going to have a lot of assets so please address this issue and allow us to have multiple projects open or closed without affecting the editing.
Cheers,
Jamie -
2 Replies
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Hi Jamie,
I will forward this to a few folks and see if I can get them to jump in. As far as physical limits to the number of assets, that is generally tied to RAM. You will hear more details about long form features like Gone Girl in the coming months but suffice it to say, there are a lot of assets…
Each clip has a bit of memory used to point to the location of the file on the storage (that’s my understanding anyway.) Eventually, you can gobble up a lot of your RAM if you have lots of assets.
If it is possible for you to try to put in 64GB of RAM, see if that addresses your problem.
This also might be related to your issue: Memory Preferences
Like I said, I will email this thread to a few folks to see if I can get some help.
Cheers,
Dennis – Adobe guy -
hi…
I’d suggest too….for a lot of your library things that you just want to have quick access to that might be scattered far and wide…on your network.
take a look at integrating Adobe Bridge into your workflow.
Collections in Bridge can act a lot like Bins do with the PPro application.
Materials from any location locally or on your LAN can be organized into collections how you see fit WITHOUT moving them from their original locations on your file system. thus…much like a BIN.You can then browse collections and then from Bridge bring only the things you need into Ppro, there by keeping your projects slimmer.
you can also open/close Bridge as necessary without disrupting your PPro project.
just a thought for consideration.
hth…
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
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