[Mahmud Lund]

I use HDVsplit to capture and have had random occurrences of PP CS4 setting the frame rate for a clip erroneously to 100 fps. The project is in Sony/HDV 50 at 25 fps. Thus the affected clip plays 4x the rate of everything else. The other anomaly is the sound portion of the clip is at normal speed but only the first quarter of the true length is available because the video/clip is only a quarter of its true duration. The same clip opens in every other app correctly. I haven’t found a cure, only workarounds.

[Mahmud Lund]

The only two suggestions I could offer, which it isn’t clear to me whether you’ve already tried them or not, are:
1. go to the Premiere Auto-Save folder and try to recover your project from the project files automatically saved there. Auto-saved projects are in a folder located where your project files are also located.
2. open a new project with the same properties, i.e. format, etc. and then import the original project. You are given the option of importing the whole project or just sequences. Also, you could use this importing option with an auto-saved project file, work backwards if necessary from the most recent to find out where the project file corruption began.

Once you are able to either recover or re-open your original project, even if it means you lost some work, save it with a new name and you might try the method mentioned in the previous post, i.e. closing sequence panels to limit the amount of material that premiere is dealing with.

Hope that helps. Let us know how it works.

[Mahmud Lund]

Well, the way I am working with CS4 now is not what I consider the way it should work. But the time lost in trying to do things that are seemingly destined to finally crash is better spent doing successful work-arounds. In this case, one forum suggestion that seems to help is to immediately close timeline sequence panels when you are not actively working them.

Break your project up into a number of sequences and keep open only the ones you are using.

I have some 35 HDV tapes which I keep each one in its own sequence timeline. That way I can open the HDV files as required. Trying to have too many sequences opened leads to the kinds of things you are experiencing.

In order to close the sequence I think the the command is: panel close [my email computer is not my editing computer and therefore I can’t remember the exact English menu command] but rightclicking on the sequence timeline tab opens up the options and you should figure it out from there.

My CS4 is running on a pretty powerful i7 system with 12 Gb of RAM (but since Premiere Pro CS4 is still 32-bit it only uses 2Gb) and large 1 or 1.5 Gb dedicated SATA harddisks for program, project, video and previews. I still suffer from white screens, and other unexplained periods where CS4 simply stops responding. I now just wait the seconds or sometimes a minute for the problem to resolve itself. It causes less headaches for me at the moment.

CS4 also fails to hold video and audio in synchronisation over long time lengths with *.m2t HDV captures so I use shorter HDVsplit captured files. Even then without any explanation every so often when CS4 imports the file it sets the 100 frame per second flag on a particular capture, even when the exact same file will play back correctly as 25 frame per second (I am in PAL land) using VLC or even Premiere Pro 2.0 !!! Proving that the anomaly is within CS4. Where this flag gets erroneously set and how I don’t know.

I hope this has been understandable to you and some sort of help.

[Mahmud Lund]

You can try what Tim has suggested.

Another possibility, which revealed both the problem I had which was similar to yours, and an unfortunate oversight in the way CS4 works, is to open a new blank project with the same settings and then try to import your project. When I did that then immediately CS4 returned that the project file was corrupted (damaged) and couldn’t be opened. [why doesn’t CS4 tell you the same thing when it trys to load the project from the opening screen?]

Someone else here recommended going back to an auto-save version of the project, I did that, selected all assets for ‘offline’ so it didn’t waste time loading and then picked specific assets that I needed to re-construct my project.

[Mahmud Lund]

Tuncay,
Thank you for the suggestion.
I was not seeing the forest for the trees. I followed your idea.
That worked for me, in that I could at least recover the settings for the trailer by selecting offline all the auto save file loaded, i.e. with no actual files but the accurate editing details.
From there I could load the necessary HDVSplit captured files one by one and get back to where I had been.
In the meantime, I am slowly learning to work with CS4.
As others have mentioned I find the forced detour through AME truly disappointing for such as audio, stills and avi generation instead of the old combo keys alt+M, etc.

[Mahmud Lund]

I just had something similar happen yesterday.
Had completed a 3m40sec trailer version with a soundtrack, played it multiple times and was continuously running the sequence render entire work area command each time I tweaked it.
Finally when I had what I wanted, I hit the enter key as normal to initiate playback from the beginning and every time the playback stopped at a certain point near the beginning, about on the third video clip. There was nothing to be seen in terms of anything unusual on the timeline, no markers no bad video or audio, nothing, no clue at all.
However, using the HOME key to go to zero and then simply hitting the space bar played the sequence perfectly.
Also the AME outputs are all flawless.
And today, having left the system on all night running a range of AME outputs, no changes to the timeline at all, it now plays without a hitch when I hit the ENTER key!
Inexplicable.

[Mahmud Lund]

Eric, hello,
I am not sure what you mean by closing sequences.
In the original project which ultimately got corrupted I had many sequences on the timeline, maybe 30 to 35. I thought I could have all the material for the project on hand, given the system specs, i7 cpu, 12 Gb RAM, multiple drives for project, video, previews, etc. That failed.
I couldn’t afford to waste any more time trying to get that way of editing to work and shifted to selectively importing just those files I needed. I still have five or six sequences on the timeline.
So, how do you close a sequence?

[Mahmud Lund]

Brian, I haven’t had the problem you’ve related. I hope the solution Peter has pointed out works for you.

[Mahmud Lund]

Hello, Peter,
It’s taking me a few days to respond. I was sorely tempted to bear the much higher costs (I’m in Europe) and shift to Mac Pro and FCP but the investment in learning, equipment and in the Premiere software lured me into trying once again.
I made the fatal error of thinking things would be straightforward. Bring all my material in and have it all online and edit at great speed – after all the paper specs are impressive. However, it simply didn’t work for me. The PC is as clean as I can make it, only Vista with all the extras turned off following the advice given here and on Tom’s Hardware. The only application software is CS4.
Now I am working by bringing in selected assets, going through one tape’s worth at a time – everything is still on the video harddisk in hdvsplit capture files – choosing just those files which I want and deleting the rest from the project.
This way the project load is only a minute or two.
I also am v.disappointed with CS4 as it still fails to maintain video:audio sync in large files which VLC, and any other player handle with ease.

[Mahmud Lund]

Thank you for your input Peter,
Your experience is just what I wanted to know. Exactly how big was/is your project? What format, ie. HDV or …?
As I stated in my first post, our project has over 300 Gb of HDV assets across some 3000+ files originally successfully imported into CS4 by tape=bin into some 35 sequences.
Having once shut down the project simply hung forever upon loading.
In my case the waiting was hours and hours and still no progress.

After following the advice from Marc Brown about hiding the assets I was able to start CS4 from whence I could use the import command to try and access that same project.
Here is where I think Adobe has failed us: the import command returned immediately that the project was damaged and could not be opened. If the project load command had only done the same then it would have saved me literally days.
Using WordPad to open the prproj file I could see that it was truncated abruptly and had no proper ending in comparison to other project files. The command language seems fairly similar to html programming and I wonder if anyone/anywhere there is a repair tool that can identify unclosed objects, command structures etc which would allow at least a chance to redeem certain elements from a project?