[Beau Leland]

[Ryan Holmes] “1) what codec and format is your source material in?
2) What codec are exporting out to
3) How many layers do you have, AE links, color correction, etc.
4) What hard drive are you exporting out to (internal, external, same drive as your OS)?
5) How are the drives connected – firewire, eSata, Thunderbolt…are they setup in RAID
6) How old is your machine? What version of the OS are you running?”

Hi Ryan, and yeah, I meant 32GB of RAM. Hahahaha, oops. Firstly, thank you for your thorough response. I didn’t realize that this was such a common question, but then again, I’m glad I’m not the only one who seems a bit lost. Here are the answers to your questions…

1) I work primarily in DSLR footage shot on a Canon 60D. So by default, premiere likes to use i-frame only mpegs for its preview files. I find that using those sequence settings (which makes mpeg files) doesn’t make for the most friendly format. Maybe I’m wrong.

2) The codec I export to seems to be an ever-changing ballet. As I said above, I sometimes use the default i-frame sequence settings, or sometimes I export to ProRes. When I do expect to end up with prores, sometimes as a variable I’ll change my sequence preview files to match exactly the output mode I want.

3) I usually don’t have graphic intensive projects, but I do perform color correction. I usually have lower thirds and animated stills.

4 & 5) My media drive is an external RAID 5 setup hooked up through an eSata card. I then export my media to a two-disk internal striped RAID drive which is also my system drive.

6) My machine is a 6-core 3.33 GHz MacPro running Lion.

From all that I’ve disclosed here, what do you think I’m doing wrong? I generally need to export a master file that will ultimately end up as DVD files and various bandwidth web files. Is there a codec standard you recommend I use for premiere?

Thank you again for your willingness to diagnose.

[Beau Leland]

I’ve done absolutely nothing different, and yet the problem has stopped occurring. I think what it really comes down to is that this software is just full of stability issues and bugs. Here today, gone tomorrow, there again the next day. This software makes me quite nervous to use in front of a client.

Anyone have any news of the next release, or know of any good resources for PP news? It seems that there were countless FCP community resources out there.

Thanks for all the feedback so far.

[Beau Leland]

Yes, I am running dual monitors. However, the cut off start up screens and editing windows that I have described are occurring on the right hand side of my right monitor. My smaller monitor to the left isn’t affected. I also have a preview monitor to the right of my main working monitor hooked up via HDMI out of my Decklink HD Extreme card, but I do not have the signal activated at this time.

[Beau Leland]

[Roger Hendrick] “When you import a 16bit TIFF there is an error regarding an unsupported video bit depth.

What you’re describing looks like purely a display card issue. Have you tried exporting your sequence to mov and seeing what comes out? Can you get video sized stills to show up in your UI? Have you enabled/disabled the Mercury hardware setting in your Project? Do AE linked projects show up?”

I did receive the bit rate warning for one image, so I went in to photoshop and changed it to 8 bit, but it still doesn’t want to work. I haven’t tried exporting an MOV, but I will give that a try and let you know.

Earlier in the thread I posted a picture of my UI. That’s what it looks like when I try to load one of these images into the viewer. My mercury engine is fully enabled with my Quadro 4000. I’ve been able to stream 13 HD streams in a multicam at real time so I would think I definitely should be able to process these images.

I also had confirmed that these images were in RGB rather than CMYK. But hey, who knows, a whole weekend has gone by. Maybe my system has had some time to think about the sadness it’s caused me, and it will behave when I get to work today.

Thanks for all of your suggestions, everyone.

[Beau Leland]

I understand that video is 72dpi, but when dealing with archival images in an HD project where one needs to scale up a great deal in order to focus on a small portion of the image, isn’t it necessary to use images with much higher resolution? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think 72 would get me there, would it? I’ve long used high res images in FCP, and seldom had this issue.

[Beau Leland]

Here’s a screen cap of what I’m seeing. Crazy!

[Beau Leland]

Oh, great. That’s what I needed to hear. Thanks so much. I can’t wait to fire this baby up.

[Beau Leland]

Do you have displays hooked up to your quadro, Tom?

[Beau Leland]

Yep,

It was as simple as the M-Audio software not being installed. Please forgive me for stealing away any valuable time from you.

Until next time…

Beau

[Beau Leland]

Thanks Andy (and Danny),

I hope that I have figured out the issue, but I won’t be able to check until later this afternoon. After looking into the manual (I sometimes forget FCP comes with one) I may have narrowed down the problem to having to install the actual software driver for the M-Audio box. I’ve just setup a new machine, and haven’t had a chance to install every last little piece of software.

While my OS recognizes still recognizes the device, I think I may need the software dashboard to actually allow FCP to see the separate input channels of it.

Anyway, this may all be some crackpot theory, but I’ll test it this afternoon when my session is through. I’ll let you know.

Thanks again for your feedback.