Premiere Pro “Serious Error” woes…

[Dennis Radeke]

Hi James,

Sorry that you had some issues with your project. The command you’re looking for is ‘alt/opt’ and the ‘+/-‘ keys to increase or decrease the track height of the audio tracks. Video is the same but with the ‘cmd’ key.

Couple of suggestions if I may for the future. If you’re doing a feature then I would strongly recommend doing it on a computer with at least 32GB of RAM or more. I’m assuming your laptop had 16GB as I don’t know of a Mac laptop being able to have 32GB of RAM in it (or I would own it!)

You did the right precautionary measures for sure and perhaps those helped contribute to the project working out okay. One thing to look for is at the bottom right of the Premiere Pro interface. If you see a progress bar there, it may be that your audio is not uncompressed or may need to be read in order to display the waveform in Premiere Pro. This might have accounted for the problems after your initial crash. Once the files are regenerated (If you’ve trashed media cache, this will happen) then performance is sluggish until it is finished.

One other thing that you can possibly do to help troubleshoot in a crisis is to create a new project and then import the other project or timeline that you need into that. It can also resolve some issues in practice.

Good luck and congrats on the feature.

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Robert Withers]

Thanks for the helpful information, Dennis. I’ll file it away and meanwhile quicken my plan to upgrade my Mac laptop memory to beyond the officially supported 8 Gigs.
Best,
Robert

Robert Withers

Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City

[Craig Shields]

Hey Dennis,

A lot of folks edit on their Retina MacBooks and other laptops. How about Adobe make it so PP is more stable with these computers? I don’t think we should have to buy desktop machines to get stability. When my company used to edit with FCP 7 it was rock solid on laptops.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Craig Shields] “A lot of folks edit on their Retina MacBooks and other laptops. How about Adobe make it so PP is more stable with these computers? I don’t think we should have to buy desktop machines to get stability. When my company used to edit with FCP 7 it was rock solid on laptops.”

I said this in the context of the project he was discussing, namely a full length documentary, probably with 10,000 or more assets in it. The larger the project, the more RAM is useful to keep the performance the way editors expect it to be. My main point is that you can and should use more RAM if possible.

Premiere Pro is very solid on MBP and that is my main laptop. To reiterate, I would never suggest that you need to use a desktop or workstation to use Premiere Pro effectively.

[Craig Shields]

In my recent projects I don’t have that many assets and I have been getting the same “Serious Error” messages. For a very important project I was working on for our shareholders, I lost count of the crashes but every other crash or so I would re-save/name the project. The final ended up being version 10. So by my estimates I had at least 20. Prior to that I had red frame issues and audio dropouts. I need stability. I don’t need one more new feature before then.

[Dennis Radeke]

There could be a lot of factors related so lets get down to it.

Here’s the first round of things to try
1 – Make sure you’re on the latest version (8.2)
2 – Clean your media cache
3 – Trash your Premiere Pro preferences
4 – Do a computer restart
Second round
1 – Run your computer’s diagnostic software and make sure everything okay there
2 – If you have the one project that is problematic, create a new, blank project and then import the sequence or entire project into it. Does it help? If no, there might be some corrupt media in the project
3 – Are you using 3rd party I/O? If so, do you have hte latest drivers? Do the problems go away if you turn off the 3rd party i/o hardware?
Third round
1 – this will usually address anything within Adobe’s control – CC Cleaner Tool Follow these instructions exactly – don’t take shortcuts

Beyond that, I would post your system specs (CPU, RAM, GPU, HDD Setup, OS version, Adobe version, summary of the problem, etc.) and allow other Cow users to chime in or contact Adobe support. Hopefully, the above will put you on the right path.

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Ryan Whiting]

Hi CC Community ~
I am working in Premiere CC (v 8.2).
The project has (A) R3D media at 5& 6K, and (B) .mov files recorded on a GH4 camera at 4 & 3.8K, and I am editing these together in a 4K timeline. That’s all fine and good.

However, when I import a 3rd media source – ~600′ of 16mm transcoded to an .mov file – the project encounters a ‘serious error’ within a minute or two and quits, then shows this error on start-up from then on.

The transcoded 16mm footage is a single file: 106+GB, Apple ProRes 4444, Color HD 1-1-1, Data Rate 847.67 mbit/ sec.

My system is: MacBook Pro, OS 10.8.5, Processor: 2.7 GHz, 16GB/ 1600 MHz DDR3, Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M/ 1024 MB.

Please advise.
Thanks,
Ryan W.

[James Barry]

Have you tried starting a new project file and moving the footage in question into it’s own time line? If so do Premiere encounter any errors? It could be a trans-coding issue.

[Ryan Whiting]

It’s a good question James – i created a new project and imported the footage in question, placed in its own timeline (with settings matching its own) & did some basic cutting & manipulation…no problem.

My original project keeps crashing, however – it seems that whenever I introduce footage that doesn’t match the R3D files settings into the timeline, it’s only a matter of time before I get the “a serious error has occurred” message and am forced to quit. This is now happening with footage shot on the GH4 (3.8 & 4K) as well.

Could it be I just don’t have enough computing power or graphics card capability to edit all these different formats – 3, 3.8, 4, 5 & 6K – on a 5K timeline? I’m already struggling to get a reasonable playback at 1/8 resolution with only 1 layer visible.

I’d like to end up with a final timeline in 5K…do i need to work with proxies?

[Dennis Radeke]

It could be that your system isn’t up to the task of that much large frame footage – there are a lot of factors.

Two things to try
1) if the large 100GB file comes into a new project without error, then perhaps you have a corrupt file on the project you’re working on. Create a new project, import the 100GB file, make sure it is fine. Then save the project. Then, import the other project into the new one. If you point Premiere Pro to the existing project, you will have the option of bringing in select timelines or the entire project. You can use this method to see if a clip or sequence is somehow corrupt.
2) You can try to bring the project over to a computer that has more RAM (32GB or greater) and see if the project can successfully import that one large asset.

HTH,
Dennis – Adobe guy