-
What’s normal for you?
Hi all:
I read with interest some of the discussion below about CS4 and the relative benefits of upgrading. I have to say that the background rendering, improved DL, and the ability to discern text from the audio in video clips seems like enough reason to make it worthwhile for me….if it all works the way it’s supposed to.
And there’s the rub. Several folks have also expressed a great deal of frustration with PPro. That’s what this post is really about.
We have two systems, both with CS3 and Matrox Axio LE. For the last few months, we’re lucky to be productive for 20-30 minutes of every hour we sit in front of the system. It’s not unusual to have 8-10 crashes a day, and one system has been pretty much unusable for the last month.
These systems were built by two different Matrox certified resellers, so they were built to pretty exacting specs (or so I assume). I’ve spent hours and hours on the phone with Matrox techs trying to pin down problems. They might get fixed for a while, then something else comes up. Like CS3, I absolutely love the flexibility and performance I get from the Matrox board – when everything works right. Sometimes I think that my offices were built over an Indian burial ground, and the spirits are not at rest.
I could moan for much longer about this – much, much longer –but here’s what I’m really interested in knowing:
What’s normal for you, in terms of stability of your PPro edit system? How many times a day, or a week, do you need to restart the software or do a hard system reboot? How many times do you have to re-render something because of a glitch? How much time do you spend chasing down problems, acting as a computer tech instead of an editor?
I guess I have assumed for some time that the problems I’ve been experiencing are somewhat unique, but some of the comments I’m reading here make me wonder.
Thanks for sharing.
Larry Melton
-
8 Replies
-
I have one system and have built several others running CS3. All are now long in the tooth (P4), but Premiere runs almost flawlessly on all the systems. The biggest issue is exporting Mpeg 2 for DVD occasionally results in obscure error messages. Restarting the PC usually fixes.
-
I work at a small production facility. We have two seats of PSP CS3; one with an Axio LE card, and one with an RTX2 card. Both systems are in constant use on various projects. Both systems are very stable (and very fast).
We do run into stability issues on larger HD jobs when Premiere starts running low on memory. This is a known issue that hopefully will be delt with in CS4.
Also, large still images can choke Premiere. Sizing them down in Photoshop before importing into Premiere fixes this.
At my facility, we run very clean systems with a minimum of additional software, and no anti-virus. As far as I know, we have never had a problem with a virus on our editing systems. As a precaution, we regularly back up our system drives.
I always make sure to launch Premiere first before launching any other applications. I also wait until all the TSR applets load before launching Premiere. This may just be suspicion, but I think the system is more stable that way.
You can choke CS3 with too many applications open – again I hope that 64-bit support in CS4 fixes this issue.
-
I agree with the last post. images will choke up premiere if they are large sizes with 300dpi. Screen resolution is only 72dpi and premiere tries to retranslate the 300dpi into a 72dpi which make the pixel size of the image/s way bigger than they are at 300dpi in PShop.
I run CS3 on laptop C2Duo F3 Gaming Asus and work all day. Large projects like over an hour of edited material can get big. HD based projects also need to be worked on in smaller chunks, but that’s common practice.
I’m doubting the builds of your systems. I had a system built for Matrox RTX100 years ago. It worked, still does. 😉 I recommended the same build guy to a colleague and his ssytem which spec’d out the same as mine was fraught with booting problems. This builder refused to admit he’d built it poorly and I have never said a good thing about this builder again. In fact it turned out this builder was well known for providing work for competitors as he built systems that were unstable even though he was certified.
I’ve heard great things about Axio so if you’re needing to reboot more than once a day, I’d be doubting the components of the system… Motherboard could be not right for the Matrox Card? If it’s overclocked that makes it unstable. Bad RAM, not enough? Graphics card on lower end of spec for system? Other apps that might be running in BG like Virus/Malware scanners…
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net -
It’s likely that it’s not fault of the PC… RTX2 is inherently bugged and unstable even on Matrox-certified systems. I know, I have one (HP XW4400, every single piece in that PC is certified for RTX2 and NOT overclocked). Just look at their support forum, it’s riddled with bug reports and desperate users. It even doesn’t do things it advertises (encoding acceleration) – Matrox even changed their ads so it doesn’t misinform, but it did before. Too bad they won’t let you to this forum BEFORE you purchase and register their card. I have stopped using RTX2 and use clean CS3 and it’s much, much more stable.
-
I have RTX2….and its very difficult to stay alive for more than a half hour…wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t just freeze the whole system…loosing whatever else you might have had going on…I have spent countelss hours with tech support, reinstalling XP, changing out hardware, reloading their stuff. I know a local guy with a turnkey box from safeharbor and he gets the same lockups. I really think its epidemic and I wish there were a better windows choice…RTX2 when it works does some nice looking stuff but the stability is troubling. I have been editing mostly in PPro CS3 native to get the bulk of things done, then working in MX mode to get fx…if its fx intensive though i’m getting killed…if Edius ever gets its alpha working like everyone else while keeping its speed and flexibility they could be the dominant app in windoze for productivity…still waiting on that though…
RTX2 does get you to DVD mpeg and wmv quicky enough….
-
Hi, John,
I’d say you have a problem, because this is absolutely counter to my experiences with the RTX2. We use our system on a daily basis, and the stability is great.
One thing you must be careful of is large stills. The problem here is that the RTX2 can handle large stills, but the disk systems typically used with RTX2 systems simply do not match the power of the hardware. So if you were in Premiere alone you would have to render, but the RTX2 card makes Premiere think it can handle the stills in real time. If the disk system can’t handle the throuput (if it is a single SATA drive, for example), Premiere will crash.
Solution: Scale your stills down to something reasonable (in Photoshop), like 1400×1000 if you are animating or zooming in on them, or 720×480 if they are OK as is.
Or buy a RAID array with at least four drives.
-
I agree I have a problem, but the stills are usually within video norms….I have the problem mostly with matrox plugins (DVE, Color) in Matrox project….the machine is rock solid for evrything else including other editing apps. None of which are currently installed except CS3…I think the issue is deep in fundementally, like a PCI latency issue or something, but PCexpress isn’t supposed to have these issues… I am only working in SD here….
your drive comment is interesting as RTX2 has no tolerance for sleeping drives (not very green)….I could set up a raid (mo money) but other apps Edius, Vegas, PPro are happy with the speed…these issues hit with a mere two-three streams playing….
what Mobo do you have?
-
I’ve had this system for about a year now. It has the Intel DP965LT MOBO, an ATI 1950 Pro 512, 4 GB ram, and an Intel Core2Quad processor. I don’t run antivirus software,even though the system is online (personal choice. So far, no issues).
I do typically edit from a single SATA video drive, which can pretty easily handle 2-3 DV/HDV video streams (depending on graphics and audio). I downsize my large stills. The disk system could be easily configured as a two disk stripe set for higher performance (if desired), since it has two SATA video drives on removable sleds (The set of individual drives could be swapped out for a stripe set). The boot drive is internal.
I also launch Premiere before launching any other applications. If other applications are open, I close them before launching Premiere. After bootup, I wait until all the taskbar applets load before launching Premiere. Anal? Perhaps, but it seems to work for me.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up