[Marisu Fronc]

scott-

There are a couple of things that I’ve found help with those stubborn projects (most of the time, not always). First, rename the project (long names and punctuation occasionally seem to be problematic). Make sure you aren’t sending it to (or from) a complicated path – a root folder is more likely to succeed (on any drive). Try copying all used to a new location (without previews) first and then trim that clean project. Finally, make sure all the files ARE trimmable – HDV and MPEG2 files won’t trim, certain compressed audio files can jam the works also. Finally, just accept that sometimes, not often, they just won’t trim – like life, it’s not perfect!!
good luck.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

John-

Have you tried converting the images to another type (tga, jpeg, etc)? The png’s are likely the problem. I would try first converting the images in photoshop to another format and then relinking the new files and rendering the sequence. The alternative to try would be to render out the sequence to uncompressed without any of the stills and then make a new sequence with your rendered file and add the stills to it (it may still not render, but your chances are better.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

You got it – the shift in focus allows Premiere to purge most of its cached memory (watch the service in task manager and you’ll see what I mean). Good luck.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Have you tried this – right before you render minimize Premier and change focus to something else (task manager is always good) that will purge any accumulated memory in Premier – then when you maximize premiere render before you do anything else (like play the sequence). If that doesn’t work you might need to try rendering ahlf and half – see if there’s a particular section that’s clogging it up. I find the toggle away method works 99% of the time, even if it is a bit of a drag.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

What kind of TC is on your tapes (NDF or DF) and have you selected it OR did you select autoselect (which has caused problems). The times I’ve had problems with this have been either wrong TC type used in creating the batch list OR wrong type selected in the deck pull down in capture. Worth a check at least.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Louis-

I have found that there are two things that seem to make the previously untrimmable project trimmable. First use project manager to copy all to a new location (exclude unused sources). Use a project name that’s really short and has no punctuation (this seems to help, for some reason). THEN use project manager to trim this newly copied project. Then you can rename it as you wish. I’ve had success on 99% of previously untrimmable jobs (I think the subfloders in the root directory create issues, as do certain long filenames – perhaps there’s a string length limit that’s being hit when your directory structure gets too complex, especially when coupled with a “trim” operation).

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

We couldn’t EVER get shared storage to work properly with Premiere (except as RAID 0, no protection – and who honestly wants to deal with recreating tens of thousands of terabytes of data when there is a failure?!) so we ended up bagging it (after a lot of wasted time and money) and went back to swapping drives and using sneaker-net. Large projects have always been a problem (do a search in this forum and you’ll find quite a bit on large project limitations). However, after a rather intense “trial and error and error and error” period I’ve found workarounds that make the process nowhere near as painful as it initially was . . . but I’m certainly praying for improvements in 3.0 none-the-less. Good luck!

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

I back up EVERYTHING – projects in progress are backed up weekly on separate drives, finished projects get full backups (duplicate sets) on ultrium tapes and then condensed (trimmed) projects onto firewire drives. Although devoting my Fridays to backup/archiving is not my idea of a fun time, paying to have a project recovered from a damaged drive quickly convinced me it was worth the effort.

A tip for the really big projects – first I hand trim them a bit (delete extra sequences and any really unnecessary pieces like old scratch tracks) THEN I copy “used only” to another drive, then finally trim that smaller project to a new third drive. I have found that project manager is REALLY unhappy with subfolders and/or certain project names – so I generally use a stupid name like copy.pproj for the first step and trim.pproj for the second and then just rename the project file to make sense. Like I said, at this point I get what I want about 90% of the time . . .but it took a couple of years of fussing and fuming to get there. Hopefully project manager will work more smoothly in the new version.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

The only success I’ve had with that is by trimming the project in project manager(actually, to get it to work reliably I usually have to first do a “copy only the used stuff” to a new project and THEN trim it – that gives me success 90% of the time, the other 10% it just crashes and copies nothing no matter how long it’s been working on it).

Hopefully some of these things will be better in 3.0 (which is just around the corner). Wish I knew of a better way, these days it sometimes feels like I’m spending much more time moving files and doing media management than I get to spend editing!

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

It is probably more space saving (though not easier, some things just aren’t easy) to try it this way instead:

Make a folder for each project on your SAN and copy all your existing material for the project into it (it will make your life a lot easier if you remove any subfolders at this point and put their contents directly in the main project folder). Then simply open the project and point to the media to relink it – then resave. You’ll have no duplication of master clips, and without subfolders the relink should be relatively painless.

slainte,
marisu