Premiere CS6 makes my computer freeze in Normal Mode

[Travis Brown]

Anyone… any ideas? I’ll post here if I find a solution. This is a bizarre problem. Has anyone run into it before? CS5 and CS6 Premiere both do the same thing…

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Blue screens are major issues, either RAM, processor, or driver related in most instances. I would google how to look at blue screen crash errors (they are logged) to gain some info on where to start.

My usual guess is bad RAM for blue screen errors, but safe mode shouldn’t affect that. It makes me think it’s a high level video driver, maybe something CUDA related.

You could try see if turning off hardware mode for the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere’s preferences stabilizes the program.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Travis Brown]

Thanks for the reply. But as mentioned in my post I am not getting any bluescreen errors at all.
I decided to reinstall Windows, drivers and updates and not install any other software. I’m going to try to reinstall CS6 tonight, see if it works, then one-by-one install all my other software… we’ll see.

What did you mean by, “You could try see if turning off hardware mode for the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere’s preferences stabilizes the program.” How do I do that?

Thanks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I apologize, I must have misread that particular sentence. If it just freezes then my guess would be a high level video driver. Memory, CPU, and power issues usually give a proper error.

Regardless, still try disabling MPE by going to Project > Project settings > General under the “Video rendering and Playback” tab, set Mercury playback to software mode if it’s in hardware mode.

Alternately, try disabling any antivirus or automatic disk defragmenting programs (Perfect Disk, Diskeeper) if installed. These types of programs dig deep system-wise and can sometimes be the source of freezes as well.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Travis Brown]

No problem.
I changed the video card and didn’t have any problems for about 45 minutes… but then it froze.
I think maybe it’s somehow the audio? If I can find a sound card, I’ll try that. This is an extremely frustrating problem. I also ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic test which didn’t turn out any errors. So, all my hardware seems to check out OK thus far, all drivers are up to date, and I just reinstalled Windows and CS6… what the hell.
I looked in Premiere and the option under “Renderer” is greyed out, so I can’t make the suggested change. It does say that it’s set to software mode, but I can’t change it anyways….
One thing I find odd is that the HDD light on the front of the computer is always solid. I’ll try a new HDD and see what happens.
Also, I installed a CPU temperature monitoring program, but the temperature is way under anything that would make me think there’s an issue.
I’m going to leave the computer on over night with Premiere open in one of my projects and see if it freezes. It only seems to freeze during editing and playback.

[Travis Brown]

I actually solved the issue by updating my BIOS to the latest version. Now Premiere no longer freezes. I guess there is an issue with SSD’s on the SATA III ports.
All is taken care of. Thanks for your suggestions!