[Dave Kidd]

Sorry to bump this thread but I’ve had no lucky trying to find anything in the meantime and so in case I missed anyone on here who might be able to offer advice I thought I’d give it one last shot here!

[Dave Kidd]

Further to my post earlier, I forgot to mention that the Project file size seems to be a factor too. If it’s hitting around 20MB or above it tends to increse the chances of it falling over during the trim.

Funny enough I’ve had further proof of this as I tried to trim a 21MB job this morning and it failed, so I split it into two 7MB and 14MB jobs respectively and hey preso they both trimmed!

Just to also add that when I do this I remove any unused assets from the project bin when I split jobs to doubly ensure that they are as ‘compact’ as possible (but whether this actually has any real bearing or not I don’t know!). I sometimes delete older conformed audio files and let the jobs reconform again upon re-opening, but today I didn’t bother!

Dave

[Dave Kidd]

Having worked with all versions of PP from 1.0 to CS3, in both SD & HD formats I have trimmed hundreds of jobs over the years and have experienced this problem randomly throughout on all versions of PP!

As the PCs I have used have also had a variety of configurations of drive space, processors and RAM etc, and many jobs have been up to 200GB in raw video it’s been hard to specifically determine what causes this, but when I observe the PCs perfomance in Task Manager it will generally happen when the pagefile usage hits around 1.3-1.5GB. I have tried adjusting this and have used PCs with large scratch disks (500GB plus) and 3-4GB of memory but it makes no difference at all.

The only solution I have found is to progressively breakdown the job in to smaller components and attempt to trim them until the error stops. As we have some jobs that initially occupy a single timeline that lasts over 3 hours, sometimes they will trim and sometimes they don’t so it’s a real lottery.

I would love to know why this happens as it’s very time consuming to break down and re-trim, but so far it’s the only ‘fix’ I know unless someone else has founds a magic solution!

[Dave Kidd]

I have seen this problem with Prem Pro on some of our PCs here (we’re running 1.5, but soon to upgrade to CS3) and I believe it’s a display settings / overlay issue, as I was screwing around with the display settings on my PC today and suddenly it started happening!

I fixed it by using system restore and then selecting Direct3D as the playback driver with PP and it fixed the flickering issue, but what specifically trigger it I have no idea because I changed and played with loads of display settings!

[Dave Kidd]

Thank guys for getting back to me on the subject, really appreciate it. I think I’ve pushed the encoding to the limit in line with the constrictions I have over frame rates and frame size. The reason we encode like that is we noticed that when viewing a half size video full screen, this inherently induces pixellation, where as the bigger it is to start with, the better it looks full screen and for most of our common footage this works really well, as there isn’t any quick cuts and fast action sequences. Seeing as many people are sporting displays bigger than 17″ screen, we felt it was necessary to go down this route.

I initailly hoped that by setting the quality to zero, therefore forcing the encoding to bias towards frame rate over quailty this would be enough, but any busy scenes over a few seconds still become jittery and the only part cure for this was to make it a VRB encode and dropping the audio bitrate down further, but even this wasn’t good enough to cope overall (plus it breaks a streaming golden rule!)

Due to the nature of the hosting system, we use have a one stop solution file which is used for both streaming and download, rather than separate files, so this is yet another constraint! I wasn’t sure if there was some real low level option I could have tried to tweak the encoding even more than I have, but I’m guessing not from what you’ve both said, and that the long and short of it is that there are far too many parameters I’m having to adhere to which will never allow a perfect flowing video in any given situation (so in other words it’s tough luck!)

I can’t wait for the day when average global broadband data rates are into the 1000s of kbps, then I won’t have this worry!

Regards

Dave