Premiere Pro CC 2014 crashes every 10 minutes

[Sam Lanes]

Hi Dan,

What footage format are you working on? What codec is being used? Where is the footage stored? If it is an external hard drive, what connetion does it have to the Macbook?

What version of OSX are you running?

Are you seeing the red render bars over the footage on the sequence?

Is this for every project you try, or just new ones?

[Dan Lacloche]

Hi Sam,
Thanks for asking. I wasn’t sure what perameters I should include in my original post…but, to answer your questions…

Footage was shot on a Canon DSLR, T2i, so QuickTime with H.264
The footage is in a folder on my desktop.
I was running OS X 10.9.4, I updated to 10.9.5, last night, hoping that might help, but no difference.
No red bars in sequence. The video footage is always yellow when I bring it in, but I like to render my timeline often, during a project, for smooth playback (especially during video transitions)
This issue only started on my latest project, which isn’t that crazy:65 second timeline with
4 video tracks, 5 audio tracks, some After Effects animations that were rendered out of AE as QT,Animation, RGB+Alpha.

[Dan Lacloche]

I noticed that my internal HD is only 5400rmp, so I moved the project and footage off my desktop to an external LaCie Rugged Mini Thunderbolt. This drive also spins at 5400rpm, but I have a year of work on there and never had a problem. Things were looking good, but it froze again running off the LaCie drive.

[Sam Lanes]

7200 RPM drives are definitely recommended and still may be the root of the issue if they are struggling to keep up with the playback speed. Drives also slow down as they get more full, so a drive that worked fine in the past may gradually slow down.

I would recommend running the Blackmagic Speed test on both drives (available from the app store). It would be interesting to see what the readings are from that.

I would try that first to try and rule out the drives

[Alex Udell]

Animation is not a friendly codec to a 5400 RPM drive for sure…so unless you need the Alpha…..it’s not really recommended for any kind of smooth playback in editorial.

that’s the only thing that sticks out in my mind…

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Tim Kolb]

Keep in mind with 4 layers of video/GFX, they all need to be decoded simultaneously…I suspect that your processor is maxed out if the drive is actually keeping up.

I would bet you’ll be able to preview render or export…real-time playback is probably limited by four layers of video compression heavy-lifting on the CPU and/or the drive speed trying to keep up…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Dan Lacloche]

After reading all the posts, I’m betting that it’s limitations of the system, be it the processor or the hard drive. I’m editing another project with a sequence that has 2 video layers, and all is well.

I kinda thought, if everything was green-barred in the timeline, that it meant it would play back without issues. Does it help to turn down the resolution in the Program window? That used to help in FCP 6.

Also, because using a laptop to edit is part of my business model, would a laptop with PCIe-based Flash Storage be a better choice?

A big thanks to everyone for responding to my post. I’m on my way to pay it forward, right now in the AE forum 🙂

[Heinrich Himmel]

The same thing is happening to me as soon as I upgraded to Premiere Pro CC 2014 8.1. I use DSLM footage at max of 50mbps. Same as you, worked fine in CC, but freezes in CC 2014 8.1. I looked into it a bit and it seems like this has been an issue since 8.1 has been released and is related to Premiere Pro. For now, if you are using Premiere Pro for a lot of your work, roll back to CC. The only difference between 2014 and CC that I can tell is increased performance with AMD GPUs. I personally use Sony Vegas on most projects, so I will just wait out until Adobe sorts things out (although I guess it has already been 4 months without a solution).

On a side note, I will agree with the above posts that QT animations are a bit much for your HDDs. Would something like DNxHD or ProRes work instead?

For storage options, if you really need speed, perhaps an SSD in a USB 3 enclosure. You should get roughly 400MB/s performance out of that and it will be portable. Mushkin makes their SSDs in USA, however I have never tried them. I personally use Samsung Pro SSDs. Note, that I do not do this myself because I need storage over speed, but I’ve read that this can get around 400MB/s read/write. Look for an enclosure with UASP to boost speed.

[Wayne Granzin]

i know this is several months later. but i’m having the same problem. crashes often (like every 5 minutes) randomly. sometimes with doing absolutely nothing. older macpro (3,1) footage is on a 3tb raid connected by esata via a caldigit fasta card. drive speed shouldn’t have much to do with it.

footage is dvcproHD (p2 from an hpx170) no graphics or effects. but it is a LONG 2 hour plus sequence.
it was however doing the same thing on a 2 minute graphics heavy project last week as well. that sequence had a mix of dvcproHD and canon 5d3 footage. animation alpha graphics etc…

only thing ive done lately is installed the magic bullet suite. but things were fine for several days after the install…