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Timeline takes ages to respond
I’ve been editing a project in Premiere CS4, and until recently it’s run perfectly. Suddenly, however, the timeline has become extremely slow, making it all but impossible to edit. When I move the cursor about, it takes over 30 seconds for the preview window to update with the new frame. It takes just as long if I try to play the timeline.
I’ve been working on this all day and into the night, and so far have found no solution. The one thing that has helped a little was creating a new sequence with 32000Hz audio instead of 48000Hz, and copying the timeline into it. This reduced the lag time to about 8 seconds, but that’s still unusable. What’s odd is that the audio in the timeline is 48000Hz, so it’s not as though I made it “match.” This also makes the workaround unpleasant, because I need to sacrifice quality.
My computer is very fast, with a 2.7 quad core, 8mb of RAM, and a powerful NVIDIA card. I run Windows 7 64-bit. The 7200rpm HD has over a terabyte of space left, and no fragmentation. Notably, the trouble may have started when I plugged in my camcorder through firewire, but I’ve since unplugged it completely and restarted (several times) with no improvement. I also unplugged everything but the mouse and keyboard from the USB drives.
The video is almost two hours long, with parts in AVI and parts in DV, with absolutely no effects applied anywhere. It plays fine in the Source window, and in outside programs. I haven’t added anything new to it since it last worked. The only thing I can remember doing with this relatively clean system is plugging in the camcorder and capturing video, but I haven’t even added that video to the project.
I’ve read about changing the Audio Hardware preferences to fix a problem like this, but I have only one option in the dropdown menu in the Audio Hardware tab (Premiere Pro WDM sound). Others have fixed the problem by changing that, apparently, but I don’t have that option.
Any help would be richly appreciated at this point.
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13 Replies
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It might be as simple as re-booting.
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I’d love it if it was. I’ve rebooted several times (usually after changing something, like unplugging all my devices). Hasn’t helped.
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[Kaye Abbott] “The 7200rpm HD has over a terabyte of space left”
You only have one internal harddrive? and the rest are external USB drives? what kind of source material are you editing?
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I have two internal HDs. I’ve tried it with all files on the primary HD, and then with the source files on the secondary HD. There are no external HDs.
The source material is a mixture of AVI and DV format. It used to work fine, but it stopped without me adding any new footage.
Incidentally, I’ve since done virus and spyware scans, both coming up negative.
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Try disabling your virus scanners.
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[Kaye Abbott] “There are no external HDs.”
The reason I was asking is that external usb drives can cause problems sometimes, and you had mentioned (from the USB drives)If disabling your virus scanners doesn’t do anything, try rebuilding the plug-in cache file by holding down the shift when starting Ppro and holding it till the project selection screen shows.
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Well, I would say you are storing your scratch, your cache and your source all on the same drive. Try splitting them up onto multiple drives. You should have a raid0 for your cache and scratch. I use two raid 0 and split up all my data.
Also, You may want to go to MSconfig and make sure you aren’t running any unwanted programs from the start.
Remember, your computer can be super fast, but the hard drive is the brain and it only performs one task at a time. The more hard drives you use, the more data it can pull off at once.
I would also check to make sure you are the full admin of all the drives and folders and make sure they aren’t set to read only…
“Oop, I think my render is done!”
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OOPS just read the responses… glad you got it sorted out
“Oop, I think my render is done!”
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I definitely have NOT gotten it sorted out. Thank you, everyone who’s helped so far. I’ve tried just about everything people have suggested so far (if I haven’t, it’s just because I haven’t gotten to it yet). I haven’t tried any of your advice, Ross, but I am about to.
I’m about to restart the computer to see if any of these change helped, I’ll update in a bit.
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Well, here’s a generalized update. I moved the scratch disk and project files off onto my secondary internal HD. I disabled my virus software (ended up uninstalling it for now). I’ve held shift during Premiere’s startup, and created a new workspace, then reset that as well. I disabled a few extraneous startup programs and services, but the computer’s pretty clean, really. I’ve rebooted the computer many times in the course of all this.
None of this has improved the speed even slightly. 🙁 Sorry, guys. The only thing that helped, still, is when I created a new timeline with lower audio quality (and otherwise identical settings and content). That timeline’s delay is still intolerable, but it’s about a third the size of the original timeline’s delay. Because of this, I was wondering if anyone has any insight about how audio could relate to the issue.
I read something about making sure the audio properties matched the project properties. They appear to, except for one detail. When I right click “properties,” the source audio is “48000Hz – 16 bit- Stereo,” and the project audio is “48000HZ – 32 bit floating point – Stereo.”
I don’t know what “floating point” means, but it’s NOT what I set the project as. I set it to the preset for 48kHz NTSC, which is 16 bit, just like my source audio.
I just performed an experiment, turning off all the audio channels. It fixes the problem!! But I can’t edit like that in the long term, so really, it just narrows down the problem. The thing is, there’s nothing weird I can see about my audio. I’ve made some adjustments to volume with keyframes, but haven’t added any effects, and all the audio is from the original video. One half is in AVI format, the other is in DV. Both halves have the audio properties I indicated above (48kHz 16 bit).
Again, this worked for weeks before stopping, and I’m not sure what I did that changed things.
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