V5.2 Screwing up PPro 1.5 Batch Capture

[Matt Dowling]

Hi Bill,

We just discovered that issue in house as well. We have done a fix and should be posting it Monday. Below is a link to the build we did yesterday to address this. Let us know how it goes.

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/downloads/software/seed/DeckLink_Windows_5.2.1b1.zip

Cheers,

Regards,

Matt
Blackmagic Design

[Bill Buchanan]

Thanks, Matt. installed the fix, and you’re right. I solved the TC issue. Unfortunately, the “Sorry, a serious error has occurred…” is still with us.

Here’s how it played out: Following installation of your driver fix, I opened the project. Captured a clip, saw that the TC didn’t disappear. Good. Then, I pulled THAT clip over to the timeline. No crash. So far so good. Dragged some other clip over to the timeline, and the moment it hit the timeline, got that damned error message.

Prior to installing your fix, I had V5.0 installed and was unable to make the project crash, no matter how quickly I adjusted lengths of clips, moved them around.

Thanks again for getting the batch capture issue fixed. No doubt you guys will get whatever’s causing the crashing fixed soon, too.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Baz Leffler]

Bill… re the crashing problem… I am not experiencing what you described but I am getting a random crashing which I have traced down to a dramatic increase in VM usage. Can you try what you do while watching the VM in your task manager and see if it coincides?…. I have not yet discovered what I am doing in premiere that triggers it’s dramatic jump from 0.4G to 1.4G. This is usually caused by a memory leak within the system and I know a long time ago it occurred when draging a transitions duration in the timeline. This was later addressed with newer BMD drivers.

cheers
baz

[Matt Dowling]

Hi Bill and Baz,

Glad to hear the fix was good for the TC. With the “serious error” how big are these projects? Is it possible to send me (offline) Just the project file so we can see what the timeline looks like? We can then match the type of edit in house and see if there is anything we can do to address this.

As i am sure you both know – PP 1.5 does have some problems with really big projects with relation to memory management. I am hoping it is something we can change in our code though.

Baz : please keep me posted what you find. (BTW Baz is one of the best testers/bug tracking guys i have ever dealt with – If he says he is having a problem i know we have a bug)

Thanks!

Regards,

Matt
Blackmagic Design

[Bill Buchanan]

Matt/Baz:

A bit lengthy, but perhaps this description will help. As I mentioned before, the project at hand is huge in terms of the number of clips in the bins (over 5,000 clips). But at this point, the timeline is empty! So, Matt, I don’t know if sending you the project file will help you or not. If so, please send me your email address.

I’ve just finished capturing everything and am ready to begin cutting the show. The project file is just under 40 megs. A 10-bit ntsc project, every clip was captured via SDI at 10-bit uncompressed, using about 3tb of Raid 5 storage.

Coincidentally, I thought it might be a VM issue that had something to do with the crashing, and I’ve tried any number of VM settings all the way from “system managed” to as low as 100megs initial and max to as high as 1gb initial, 3gb max (my sys has 3gb RAM with the memory extension “switch” activated). None of these settings seemed to make a difference. With the 100/100, I did get the message window after a few minutes “Your VM is low and Windows is increasing it…” Often times with the 100/100 setting, I would wait until that message came and went before moving a clip to the timeline. Still, I would usually get the crash.

Again, the crash has only occurred ONLY after restarting the sys and opening the project. I usually don’t get the crash if I re-open the project without first restarting the sys. However, on occasion, I’ve gotten the crash the second or third time I re-open the project. If the crash does not occur when I move the first clip to the timeline, then I can work all day without another crash.

Another important point: Yesterday I uninstalled V5.2 and reinstalled V5.1 and 5.1.2. With those earlier versions, the crashing still happened. BUT, when I installed V5.0, NO crashes, and I tried everything to make it crash. Wouldn’t happen.

Back to the memory issue. With V5.0, in Task Manager, the PF Usage would level out at about 1.24gb after the project finished loading. But with V5.2, it levels out at about 970megs, then momentarily drops to about 700 (with no clip picons/thumbnails activated). When I start activating thumbnails in various bins, the PF Usage rises up to around 1.5gb, then momentarily drops down below 800gbs (apparently the memory they require is being moved to VM.

That the crashing it so intermittent, makes one crazy as an outhouse rat.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Adrian Tecson]

Off topic for Bill;

I noticed you are running on RAID 5. I always thought that RAID 5 couldnt cut it and I had to always use the fast but fragile RAID 0. What RAID card and drive configuration are you using? Thanks

[Bill Buchanan]

Adrian:

My setup: Two RAID 5 arrays across 2 8-channel Broadcom RAIDCore SATA controller cards tied to 14 300gb sata Seagates. It’s fast as hell, about 400mb/s read and 280mb/s write according to BMD’s disk speed utility. This setup is really overkill for even 10-bit uncompressed SD work, but provides ample storage for the size projects I typically shoot and cut. RAIDCore SATA controller cards are I believe one of the best if not the best available. In fact, BMD has them at the top of their list of approved cards for their SD line. And RAIDCore support folks are second to none.

Anyone doing long-form work, capturing enormous amounts of material, and not using RAID 5 or some other redundancy level, is in my view dancing with the devil. On two occasions within the last 6 months, I’ve had 3 drives go south–one at one time, and later, two at the same time, and because of raid 5, I didn’t lose a single file nor have any down time while the arrays rebuilt themselves. Faced with having to re-capture thousands of files TWICE had mine been a RAID O setup, I’m certain I would have done any number of controlled substances.

On the other hand, for those folks who really get off on capturing the same footage over and over, then RAID 0 is definitely the way to go.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Bill Buchanan]

Baz:

Watching PF usage (and all the other I-have-no-idea-what-they-mean readings) in Task Manager, there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual happening when the crashing occurs or when it doesn’t.

BTW, I increased the page file size setting to 1500megs initial and 4500 max, and still get the error on occasion.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Matt Dowling]

Hi Bill,

I was thinking about this more last night – When you get the serious error or hang, is Premiere “conforming audio?” I am wondering if the audio conforming is causing an issue when you place the clip on the timeline as it is conforming. Especially if it is a large clip.

It maybe worth just for a sanity check – do the same thing you doing now but with video only clips. I’d be really interested to hear the results.

Cheers,

Regards,

Matt
Blackmagic Design

[Baz Leffler]

Also Bill… another thought…. try using the project with all the clips ‘off line’. The quick way to do this is to rename the drive/folders where the clips are stored and then open the project and when prompted for the clips go “make all offline”. Then do what you usually do and see if it crashes then. BTW. DON’T SAVE YOUR PROJECT OR YOU WILL HAVE TO RELINK EVERYTHING AGAIN! (or you will have to go back to an autosaved version.)

The rationale here is maybe it is something to do with corrupt media (as I have experienced in the past). If you do not get the crashes then slowly re-introduce clips back in. This can be a very long process but your crashing problems seem far worse that what others are experiencing so maybe yours are more specific to the environment you are working in.

cheers
Baz