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Premiere Pro CS6 extreme project bloating and Media Encoder
This is a bug that I noticed first in CS5 and it hasn’t changed in CS 6.0.1. It’s recently reared it’s head again as an editor I’m working with has been playing with Media Encoder and recreated the problem at the expense of our current project file being usable.
Here’s what’s happening: We have a 20MB or so commercial project, no warp stabilizer, no frequent “save as” stuff going on. We’ve been exporting sequences by opening up Media Encoder and using the “add Premiere Pro Sequence” feature. Works great. The only drag is that it can take a while for the Dynamic Link to load the project so you can pick which sequences to encode.
The editor did some reading online and found you can click and drag sequences from Premiere into the Media Encoder. I warned him against this because I had tried it previously in CS5 and 5.5 and found that it would give you really slow project save times and auto save times, which seemed to stem from exponentially growing project file sizes.
In the hopes that the problem had been fixed, he went ahead and used the click-drag technique a couple times. Now we have a 3.71 GB project file that won’t open and seemingly, so far, won’t import into a new project.
This is catastrophically bad. We have clients coming in tomorrow, have a short turnaround, and can’t open our project or import it into a new project.
Anyone have similar experiences? Any way to clean out the bloat from these projects?
In case this helps, here are my machine specs:
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz 12-core Mac Pro
16GB RAM
NVidia Quadro 4000
ATTO Fibrechannel
Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme 2Thanks in advance for any advice.
Best,
Jon“If you can describe what it is, that’s not it.”
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9 Replies
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Check the autosave in Documents/Adobe/6.0/
– No Parking Production –
2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x Prod. bundle CS5.5, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Ethernet File Server w. X-Raid…. and FCPX on trial
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a 3.71 GB premiere project file???
holy cow thats so weird.
I’ve always just exported sequences from premiere or queue them to media encoder,
but dragging the sequence from the bin to media encoder sounds much quicker
and I’d like to use it, but not until the bug is fixed.Have you looked at the project folder and witnessed it jump in size when you save?
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Hi there,
The Autosave folder actually documents the project bloating. We have our max number of autosaves set to 5, so I didn’t see the full picture, but for every export he made, the project size doubled in the Autosave folder. The earliest one is 477 MB, then it jumps to 840MB, then 1.6GB.
In fact, the problem first became apparent because of the amount of time it was taking for the project to perform its Autosaves. This is what I initially noticed back in CS5 and stopped using the click-drag method of getting sequences into Media Encoder. Since I nipped it in the bud back then, I never experienced the project bloating to this extent.
The problem is fixed by importing the bloated project into a new project, but this can take a long, long time. I let the 3.7GB project import overnight, and I came in this morning and it had made no progress. Fortunately I was able to import the 477MB one successfully, also overnight, so there was only about 90 minutes of work lost (not including the time spent trying to fix the project). Not great, but could have been much, much worse.
I opened up the projects in TextWrangler to see if there was an obvious difference in the actual code. Sure enough, the 840MB project had about a million lines of code compared to the 400,000 lines from the original 20MB project.
Most of that new, extra code appears to be devoted to links to render files. Doing some research on this problem, there was apparently a bug in CS5 and 5.5 that caused the project’s links to its render files to be duplicated within the project code whenever you did a “Save As…” command. This issue with the Media Encoder is probably connected to that older bug in some way.
I love Premiere CS6 and we’re not going to stop using it because of this, but it’s a doozy of a problem that should be addressed ASAP, in the short term by some sort of community notice so that people don’t walk into this problem and lose work, and in the not-as-short-term with an update that fixes this.
Jon
“If you can describe what it is, that’s not it.”
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just to be clear, not counting the auto saves folder.
your main .prj file is 3GB?
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Correct. The project file was initially 20MB. After a few click-drag exports from ME, it’s now 3.71GB. There are versions of the project in the Autosave folder that are 477MB and 840MB.
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Check the Adobe Premiere Pro forums I think there is somebody there experiencing your problem and a fix / workaround for it, It may require you create a new project file and import from the bloating one into the new one plus some other tweaks.
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I’ve already checked the Adobe forums. I’ve found other people experiencing project bloating but no one else reporting the issue correlating to click and dragging into Media Encoder. I posted my query from Creative Cow on the Adobe forums and have 72 views with zero replies.
My original post mentioned the fix about importing the project into a new project. Unfortunately when the project gets this big (3.7 GB in this case), that takes hours and, in my case, failed.
It would be really great to hear something back from Adobe about this, either acknowledging the bug or explaining what I’m doing wrong.
At this point, though, our project is out the door and we’re onto the next one.
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I am having similar problems. But in my case I did not really start experiencing problems until my project was 17Gb! All of my autosaves are either 6Gb or 3Gb. The 3Gb autosave took over 24 hours to get to 33%. I closed the program after that because I am rather strapped on time and need to find a solution other than waiting. My computer should be more than capable of handling such a file, but I assume premiere is not. If anyone has found a way for me to get into my Premiere file please let me know!
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The only answer I have found for this is to delete your render files under Sequence>Delete render files. That’s if you can get into a project that’s small still.
I kept saving new project names cos I know Premiere crashes a lot p and THAT’s what gave me the bug I think – now it just doesn’t want to autosave my latest project…I keep on having to check on it that it isn’t bloating again. i don’t know how to permanently get rid of this problem.
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