[James Stone]

Did you check to see that the track was turned on? (the eye symbol)

[James Stone]

The single most important factor in a video editing rig is managing your hard disks, and how CS4 uses them.

Video editing invloves creating preview files of your raw video to make the editing easier. If your hard disks are nearly full they are probably fragmented. If you are using the default settings in CS4, all of your raw video and preview files are on the same disk. This results in slow performance and frequent crashes, as a single hard drive (even on the best system) cannot keep up with the demand for data that the editor is thowing at it.

The solution is to use a different hard drive for each function – one for captured video, another for captured audio, another for video previews, and another for audio previews. (plus one for your system, and another for output files – that’s six physical hard drives if you are counting) This way, each function of your editor can operate at maximum speed, and thus you will have fewer crashes. It really works. In my opinon, this should be the minimum specification for any serious editing rig.

Also – defrag regularly, and don’t let your drives get more than 70% full or you will have problems.

Here is the article that discusses the issue:
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/PremierePro/4.0/WS369BD79A-5DF9-48d8-9F49-6B56026087C8.html#WS28D9CEC8-4ABC-41cd-BAEF-07859C21DA59

I went from having numerous crashes per day, to maybe one a month with the new system.

I also am running 12GB of RAM – i7 920 processor, 64 bit Vista.

Works like a champ, but the memory and processor are only part of the equation.