[Tim Kolb]

[Maarten Mylemans] “Thanks for the info, I can see how 8 GB could help, but since PPro is still a 32 bit application, it won’t see anything above 4 GB, so I don’t see how 16 GB will give me more workpower (because Windows 7 only uses about 1.5 GB of working RAM). The rest of course yes, that would be a big improvement :-D”

It’s true that PPro can’t use more than 4 GB…but you have 3 GB in your system and your OS uses half…leaving 1.5 GB available for everything else including PPro. However, remember that if you open your processes tab after launching PPro, you’ll see there are other Adobe app engines running, waiting for the command to dynamic link…

Even with nothing else on your machine, PPro itself is likely getting access to less than 1 GB of RAM at any given time, at times much less I’d guess. Now try an “edit in Photoshop” command and suddenly you’re splitting that RAM into smaller pieces yet. 4 GB of RAM actually available to PPro (8 in the box minimum) would likely more than Quadruple what it’s getting now on your 3 GB system.

If you had 16 GB of RAM, you could give PPro a full 4 GB (and Photoshop gets its own 4 GB, and AE gets its 4…when they’re all open, they all need resources) and it makes a runnability difference without a doubt. No, it doesn’t fix any bugs, but it sounds as if you have general instability problems with big projects, and this is one way to reduce that considerably.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Vince Becquiot] “He switched to Final Cut :-)”

Boy…you turn your back for a minute…

I’m still around, just not staring out from the top banner anymore.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Micah McDowell] “Somewhat like you, I’ve always had issues with longer form projects in Premiere.”

I have heard this before and seen some of it myself. Earlier versions of PPro had issues once the project file got above a certain size (I never was able to determine what the tipping point was, but the longer the edit, the more data, the bigger project file…)

Adobe has been promising to work on this as many of us have been pointing out this issue…I’m working on some longer form stuff now…so far so good on CS4.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

In the documentation included with the installers, be sure to check out page 82 of the IO Express manual for some info on the new Premiere Pro Player setup. The rest of the docs are in the process of being revised, but that segment will give you the basic procedure for all AJA Xena series products…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Maarten Mylemans] “Here are my system specs:
Windows 7 64-bit (only recently, all the bugs I’m talking about were also present on Windows XP)
Intel Core DUO 2.66 GHz
3GB RAM
Nvidia 8800 GTX with 712MB RAM
I have about 2.2 Terrabyte of storage in my PC, spread over 4 disks all at 7200 RPM”

Is that a two-core processor? 3 GB of RAM?

OK…your system is the bottleneck. You should update your platform.

-get the RAM up to 8 GB minimum, 16 GB preferably

-get a couple 4 core processors

-get rid of the gamer card and get a Quadro

-make sure you have some speedy drives in a RAID configuration.

…then whatever editing software you choose will run.

While you might have some problems that are Adobe-related (Vegas might run on this system as it’s very resource starvation-tolerant), you’re simply underpowered for CS4, and that has to be a contributing factor. It needs serious RAM and processor power as is helped immensely by a strong display card.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’m not really sure what the “dreaded QuickTime bug” is…you say it as if the whole world knows about it. I edit lots of QT on PPro PC…even ProRes. No issues as far as I can tell.

I haven’t had any issues with MP3s for some time…and the Media Encoder is usually not frozen, but it is often spending inordinate amounts of time gather metadata for every clip it will touch before it starts encoding. (the default setting for the software is to “use all XML metadata” which is shut off with one click, one time.

I do know that an underpowered system will have problems with Adobe products…insufficient RAM, drives that are not fast enough or are too full to operate properly, smaller processors…etc.

I know you’ve decided to move on, but keep in mind that IF your system is the issue (and if it’s more than two years old, the chances are good it is at least a contributing factor), then chances are good that your next editing solution will have some stumbles as well.

Switching from a 3 year old PC with CS4 to a brand new Octo-Mac with FCP will be an improvement…but the software will be a minor part of it.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

If you use the Sony transfer utility, all the segments are rejoined… I only use SDHC cards and I don’t have a problem.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Mocha is only included in After Effects…and not in CS3, it was introduced in CS4.

If you have an earlier version of AE, the included motion tracker/stabilization functions do work…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Can you supply a bit more information?

for instance, are you on a Mac or a PC? i don’t find any indication in your posts…the IO Express works on the dark side too.

second…can you tell us what the settings are for out put in the IO Express control panel…and what happens if you play a clip out of Machina? (this would be for a PC…I don’t know is Machina is on the Mac side)

What are you edit project settings?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

The idea with a green screen is the amount of difference to the foreground… 50 IRE or whatever number you pull out of a hat is best if whatever you’re shooting is quite different from that…

If you’re shooting something very light, a darker green will be easier to preserve grayscale…if the foreground object is darker, a brighter background will be easiest to key out.

Renting a waveform monitor would be the best because a horizontal histogram is difficult to use for this purpose.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,