Sony Movie Studio 13 keeps freezing and or crashing?

[Jeff David]

I can try the Cineform too but just want to see what the SONY tech rep comes back w first.

At the SONY forum, someone else suggested using MEDIAINFO a third party app download from the net.

You may remember before I stated how I had tested out the export feature on MS 13 and successfully exported 2 hours of footage and burned it to the blu ray no problem. However that was simply 2hours of footage I loaded in and I did not edit them at all as it as just a test to see if I would have the same export problems.

And I have noticed that loads of people do have trouble rendering/exporting w SONY. It’s all over the SONY forums.

Do you go to the SONY forums?

Thanks.

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1

[John Rofrano]

[Jeff David] “Do you go to the SONY forums? “

I do. I’m JohnnyRoy on those forums and I was very active on them at one time but I don’t go there often anymore because there is no notification of when someone makes a post and I don’t have the time to check back and see if someone asked me a followup question. If the Sony forums had notifications like the COW I would at least be able to monitor the threads I’m active in but they don’t so I tend not to post there.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeff David]

Yes – I understand. I was thinking the same. I was wondering why I wasn’t getting notifications until I saw in the FAQ’S they don’t give them.

What I did, and you may have too, is just do a search under my username and it brings up all of the posts I started. Being as I only have a couple, I then just go in there and look.

Being as I only have one or two posts, it’s not too bad right now doing it that way, however, I understand what you are saying as once you get like maybe 10 posts, it will/would be bothersome to have to look through them all to see if there were any new responses.

Plus if you responded to someone else’s post then maybe that would not even show in the search.

Like I said one dude did tell me to try MEDIAINFO download the app for a possible fix so at least I learned that.

I just heard back from the SONY TECH and he said he only is just downloading my footage so I’ll see what he says.

Like I said before, if he doesn’t get me a fix I’ll try the CINEFORM and if need be the MEDIAINFO.

I’ll do the CINEFORM anyways, even if I get a fix before trying it as you know, it preserves the quality so I like that.

Not sure if I mentioned this before but the error mssg I get in SERIF is C++MOVIE PLUS!!!

(I don’t get any error mssg in SONY MS 13).

Now the tech reps at VIRTUAL FORUM told me -,”LOOK THAT INDICATES THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH MOVIEPLUS! I.e. when it says movieplus in the error thats because THAT’S WHAT THE PROBLEM IS!!

Sorry for caps, not yelling but basically they told me GET THE HECK OFF THE VIRTUAL forum w that question because it’s telling you to contact SERIF.

Of course SERIF denies there is any glitch in their software but I’m going to start a post in their forum C++MOVIEPLUS ERROR MEANS MOVIPLUS ERROR!!!!!

AS I understand it, the problem is that there is a conflict w my computer system and the software or a driver or bios.

Today, soon as I tried to edit it froze immediately!

I contacted Lenovo as I have the Lenovo Thinkpad w530 to see if there was anything else that could be done to goose up my computer and they said not much can be done as it’s a laptop. Not that it’s not powerful enough but I was just going to goose it up anyways.

They said I could put in a solid state drive. They weren’t sure if I could put in a second internal drive. Something about Raid.

I think I will put in the solid state drive though.

Assuming I don’t have one already. Pretty sure I don’t

This is a workstation category computer even though it’s a laptop.

thanks!

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1

[Jeff David]

Oh yea – also going to try editing w computer in CLEAN BOOT.

As you know that will shut off most or all of any conflicts.

I should have tried that before. Only just thought of it.

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1

[Jeff David]

PROBLEM SOLVED!

Here is the fix provided by SONY tech rep.

I did as described and had no problem editing tonight!

Sooo relieved to get it to work!

Thanks for all the help!

SONY TECH REP SAID:

Thank you for writing back. I was able to reproduce the issue and fixed it pretty quickly. First, can you please delete any and all .SFK files from the directory that you store your media. Delete only the files that have the extension .SFK. Once those are all deleted, please open your project.

When your project opens, do not click or press anything. You will see on the top left corner of the program that there is a process occurring, which has a % (# out of #). Wait until that process completely finishes. Now try playing back and editing your project. Do you find that it does not hang any longer?

.SFK files are metadata files that hold the waveform information for your audio. So basically, when you see a waveform in the timeline, that information is being stored and retrieved from the .SFK files being created. Whenever you import any type of media with audio in it, a .SFK file will be created.

The reason I want you to delete your currently existing .SFK files is because it seems that you have multiples/duplicates, which could be causing issues. Once you delete them all, and then reopen your project, the .SFK files for your media will be created again, so you do not have to worry.

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1

[John Rofrano]

Wow, I would have never guessed that the .SFK files were causing the problem but that’s good to know. I guess maybe some of them got corrupt. Thanks for letting us know.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeff David]

Yes and thanks for all of your help John. I’ve learned a lot.

The SONY tech rep said that I must have had duplicate sound files and that was the problem.

So like I said, I erased all of the sfk files and restarted.

MS 13 then reloads all of the sfk files.

SO I have been able to edit but I still had a couple more crashes since. Each time I deleted all of the sfk files again and restart and I am able to edit but it did crash a couple of more times so I must still have some duplicate files somehow.

When I save my project after editing, it gets saved to my C drive.

I call that the “template” because as I understand it (as you know)it does not have the media files in it but pulls from them off of the hard drive where they are. So I guess it’s like a template so to speak.

Now, like I said, I transferred all of my footage off of my C drive to my external D drive.

But I am guessing I still have the some of the “templates” and files on the D drive for when I transferred everything over so I’m going to delete them from my d drive.

Or – when I finish editing for the day, Should I be saving the, “template” or “project” to he D drive instead of the C? Prob so as you said to have everything on the external drive.

Template is prob not the correct technical term. I think the correct tech term is, “project” and then, “media files”?

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1

[John Rofrano]

[Jeff David] “Or – when I finish editing for the day, Should I be saving the, “template” or “project” to he D drive instead of the C? Prob so as you said to have everything on the external drive. “

That’s what I recommend. When I start a new project I create a folder for it on my video projects drive. That’s where all of the media gets imported into and where I store the project file so that everything is in one place. It’s too bad Movie Studio doesn’t do this for you so you have to be diligent and keep your files together yourself.

[Jeff David] “Template is prob not the correct technical term. I think the correct tech term is, “project” and then, “media files”?”

Yes, what you are calling a template is the project file.

Here is one suggested workflow using 3 external drives:

Drive 1: Camera Archive
This drive contains all of your camera archives. When you shoot some video, you plug your camera card into your computer along with the Camera Archive drive. Then create a new folder on the Camera Archive drive with the date and name of the event (e.g., 2015-02-15_Valentines_Day_Party) and you copy the entire contents of the camera card (not just the video files) into it. Over time this drive will contain the archives of all of your camera cards.

Drive 2: Video Projects
This drive contains all of your active projects. I usually like for this to be an internal drive but I have used an external USB 3.0 drive for this as well. This drive will contain all of your active projects so it doesn’t need to be too big. When you are ready to start a new project, you plug this drive and the Camera Archive drive into your computer, create a folder for your new project, start Movie Studio and use View | Device Explorer to import all of the footage from your Camera Archive drive to your video project folder. Then you can eject the Camera Archive drive and continue editing on the Video Projects drive.

Drive 3: Project Archives
This drive will contain the archive of all of your finished projects. When you are finished with a project, plug this drive into your computer and drag the project folder from the Video Projects drive to this Project Archive drive. You will now have two backups of your footage, one on the original Camera Archives drive and another on this Project Archive drive. You can now delete the project folder from your Video Projects drive knowing that your footage and project are safely backed up.

This three drive approach gives you unlimited storage for editing video because you can always add another Camera Archive drive or Project Archive drive as needed and your Video projects drive should never fill up because it’s only going to contain the one or two projects that you are currently working on.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeff David]

OK thanks for the info on drive setup. I’ll do it!

I’ve been able to edit my project pretty good.

Sony MS 13 still freezes but only after I have done an hour or so of editing and so then I just use task manager to close out and reopen it and I am able edit again.

I found this fix on youtube – there’s a bunch of them offered, everyone has a different one so looks like freezes and crashes are common.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-rsVkU1pE8

The dude that posted those fixes has some good stuff.

I did one of them yesterday (fixes) and I’ve been able to edit for a long time w no freezes so far.

I did just a little reading on SATA drives and think I will get one of those and install them or maybe have multiple internal drives.

An article I read said they even have SATA external drives now.

It also said something about being able to recover the data easier in the event of a crash.

I’ll be looking into getting the SATA.

Thanks John!

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome Jeff. Glad I could help.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com