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Premiere Pro CS3 “Media Pending” forever after system rebuild
Premiere Pro CS3 was terrific, that is, until I attempted to back up my boot drive with Norton Ghost (and found out Ghost and the new SATA drives is a combination for disaster). I had to repartition and reformat my drive and reinstall Windows XP SP2 and Adobe applications on Friday. Since then, I have not been able to load many of the more important projects I’ve been working on since the second week of August.
After the rebuild, I setup Premiere for media cache on drive G: a raid volume, instead of E: a non-raid. This for more speed. It was taking Premiere almost 2 minutes to open a project with 65 video scene clips in it, prior to the system rebuild and I thought I’d move it to a faster drive.
Since the rebuild, every project I load, spends forever indexing files, but no video ever appears on the timeline. I’ve tried deleted the cache, cleaning the cache, moving it, etc., all to no avail. To make matters worse, on the wedding project, it indexes until it runs out of RAM–this on a system with 4GB of RAM and the /3GB switch in Boot.ini to give an extra gig to Premiere.
I was contemplating the possibility that the project files are somehow locked to the drive paths where the media cache files originally were when the project was first created.
The wedding project may have had the media cache files on drive E:\TEMP when it was created, although I found media cache files in D:\Premiere Projects\Media Cache, so it may have been configured to save cache files to ‘same as project file’, but I am pretty careful to setup the cache on a separate physical drive before I start any work projects, so I don’t know how the cache files got there. They were dated 8/22 for the most recent. That was probably the last capture session.
Anyway, I tried changing the location of the cache files back to E:\TEMP and loaded a fresh backup of the wedding project (I have over two dozen backups of the Premiere Pro project and have been trying to load various versions all night and into today), and Premiere would index for about ten minutes and then report that it was running out of memory (I have 4GB and using the /3GB switch in boot.ini and this is the machine that BUILT the project in the first place) and then the indexing rate would increase to about 60 files per second and repeating the same filenames continuously as RAM usage would ramp upwards toward 3GB and then finally crash Premiere.
I repeated the process after configuring Premiere for media cache files location “same as project”, given that there were 13.7GB of cache files from the wedding in the media cache folder under the D:\Premiere Pro Projects folder. However, the same indexing behavior started again and the system ran out of memory and Premiere self-terminated once again.
What’s making this tougher is that it takes several minutes to load the project, and then the indexing process takes another 7-8 minutes on my Quad core system at 3GHz. Therefore, many hours have passed and only a few iterations of moving the cache location have been tested.
I then tried deleting the cache files and reconfiguring Premiere to place the cache on the G:\TEMP location, a RAID 0 array. However, after several minutes indexing files, all I end up with are two empty folders under G:\TEMP…. \Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files and \Media Cache Files. These folders are EMPTY. Just what was Premiere doing for those ten minutes that my hard drives were churning?
Earlier in the day, I had some limited success with moving the media cache location to another drive, with a smaller, volunteer project I was working on and I actually got the video to reappear on the timeline. So I felt confident that I could now solve the problem with the wedding. But it’s been a stonewall–none of the locations to place the media cache have worked, and Premiere seems to increase it’s footprint in memory by 20-40MB with EVERY file it indexes. Since there are about 65 video clips (the first two reels were processed through HDVSplit in an attempt to cut down on capturing unneeded footage), the RAM usage would exceed 2.5GB about halfway through indexing and Premiere would warn that it was running out of memory and to save the project. I must stress that this system created this project, so I had enough RAM to build it and I have loaded it at least a dozen times before Norton Ghost destroyed my boot partition, causing me to rebuild my system drive from scratch last Thursday. I have not been able to get Premiere to open any of my projects created since before I changed the location of the Media Cache from E: to G: drive.
I has a brief bit of success with this one volunteer project, by deleting all the cache files and choosing the drive that was the cache drive when that project was created. It came back after it indexed. But the wedding, I’m sure I have chosen the right cache location at least ONCE, as there are only three possible locations, Project folder, E: and G: that I have ever used on this system. Not one of them worked.
Oddly, there was a 15-frame long clip (must have been starting and stopping the camera accidentally) that DID index and appear with it’s actual thumnail instead of the Media Pending thumbnail, but the longer clips never came out of Media Pending.
One would think that if you delete all the media caches on all drives and set Premiere to use a new location, that all prior projects would just rebuild their files on the new temp drive and everything would work. But apparently that’s not the case. There must be an invisible reference to the old location and when it can’t find it, there’s no error that is reported, but the application just indexes “nothing” and the video never appears.
Now here’s the kicker: I can import DV footage and it’s fine. So I COULD edit a DV project. I just can’t edit HDV. Gee, wasn’t that the whole reason for spending, what, $5700 on hardware and software last month? So if worse gets to worse, I suppose I could recapture in DV using the camera’s downconverting. However, I don’t know if Premiere can use the capture log to re-capture the files as DV. It is imperative that I recapture all of the clips at the exact timecodes in order to preserve the 40 hours of editing work that I’ve already done.
I’m going to have to make a difficult decision in the next 12 hours, because the wedding was 8/4, and I promissed delivery in about 3 weeks. If I end up installing Vegas 7 and re-editing from scratch, it’s going to take a LOT longer. The reason for the long editing time is the synching of the video to the audio. The cameras stopped and started dozens of times, while the digital audio recorder was running continuously for an hour or more at a time. So I have to sort out all the video scene changes and go find out where they fall on the audio from the Zoom H4. Very time-consuming. I spend days just resynchronizing footage to audio. All of this because my Sony V1U’s audio is so crappy that it’s unusable…(Thanks a lot, Sony!)
So, if I can’t fix this problem, then I’ve got to start all over from scratch in Vegas, and without Multi-Camera editing, it’s going to take me 12 hours just to do the A/B/C camera cuts for the wedding ceremony, not to mention the reception footage where we have two cameras rolling on key events.
On top of all that, the client e-mailed me this morning to say that she got the albums from her photographer and she’s “freaking out” because they came out awful and she wants me to extract a whole bunch of photos off my HDV timeline, for an extra $$$ compensation. She’s worried sick about the photos, and I don’t want to her have to worry about whether she’ll get her video now, too. I’ve been up for 30 hours straight, but with a 2 hour nap a while ago, and I’ll be working on this problem through the night again. 12 hours to my self-imposed deadline and then it’s back to Vegas 7 to do this whole thing and get it DONE.
Take care,
Mark & Mary Ann Weiss
https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com -
2 Replies
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The weirdness just keeps coming…
Okay, I figure, let’s keep it simple and create a NEW project. Import some SHORT clips from preexisting media, and it should appear on the timeline, right? Nope! Pulling in some 30-second clips of existing media, to a new project, and dropping them on the timeline. There’s no HD activity after importing, but the clips eternally have “Media pending” screens.
So then I figure, why not try capturing NEW footage. So I capture a minute or so of new footage off the camera. By the time I close the Capture window, I can see the footage image is already in the bin–no Media Pending messages. It drags on to the timeline and plays well too.
So the problem seems to be that all preexisting footage is no good anymore. All of it. I can play all this footage in Media Player, but Premiere chews on it for a few minutes then the video never appears.
This is one of the biggest “head scratchers” I’ve ever run across. I’ve spent my entire Labor Day weekend eating, sleeping and importing projects on this machine, trying to find a common thread behind all of this. Just when I think I got it figured out, something else proves me wrong, and I’m back to square one, having not a clue as to why footage I captured yesterday won’t load, but footage I captured 60 seconds ago will load. It seems that every time I move the Media cache, all those prior footage files become “no good” and I can’t get them to load anymore–not even into a new project. Heck, I even renamed the footage, thinking it was permanently marked in some hidden database, but even with a new name, it still won’t load and appear, ever.
I got off the phone around 9:20 this evening after speaking with the client. Her photographer apparently didn’t take ANY good pictures at her daughter’s wedding and she’s upset about it and is asking me if I can find any of these types of shot compositions on my video. But I can’t even get her project to load at all, and not even individual clips into a new project. I’m at a brick wall now and can go no further.
Software shouldn’t be this easy to “break” beyond repair. Out of dozens of theads on a dozen forums on a Google search, not one has found a solution for this problem. I can’t run a business on software that works on Wednesday, then refuses to load any footage prior to Wednesday, after rebuilding the system drive on Friday. This is just insane. I’ve waisted what–seventy hours on this troubleshooting–that in addition to the forty hours I spent editing the wedding to near-completion. All I was waiting on was the music from the client, and this project would be on a DVD the next day. So close… yet so far now. Looks like I’ll be installing Vegas in the morning, and Premiere Pro 1.5, just so that I can capture, convert and encode using my trusty CinemaCraft encoder. What a huge waste of time this was. And it’s my fault for daring to make a client a guinea pig by doing their project on a new system without six months of testing on in-house and volunteer video projects first. Never again.
Take care,
Mark & Mary Ann Weiss
https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com -
I have cs3 after exporting to dvd mpeg test.m2v
I get media pending in encore cs3 and premiere also but if i load the same .m2v in cs2 for encore and premiere it work perfect
any luck find out what it was?
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