Constant lockups...

[DVX100Shooter]

I have a friend that is about to build my home theater and he uses Premiere to edit with so I figure I would help him out and post a question in here for him. He was telling me that his system keeps locking up when he is trying to edit footage in Premiere. He says he has 2 large hard drives. His video is always on a seperate drive. He has 4gigs of RAM yet his system keeps locking up for some reason either when he is trying to edit or when he's trying to burn a dvd. He's using a PC. I told him that sometimes the actual RAM chips could be bad but he said he was using the top of the line Intel chips.

I am a FCP editor so I could only think of the suggestions I just listed. If any of you Premiere users have any suggestions I could pass along for him to check out that would be cool!


Thanks

 

[David W. Richardson]

Not getting much help on this, are you?

Probably because there are a LOT of variables that could be causing his situation.

My first question would be -- Is this a standalone editing PC? My editing PC runs WinXP and my editing software, and nothing else. It's not connected to the Internet. I uninstalled everything that came with the PC, like MS Office, all the games, all the Internet stuff (I.E., Outlook Express, etc.) Basically it's Windows, Premiere, PhotoShop, and Cool Edit. That's it.

If his is a standalone editing PC already, have him check to see if his antivirus software is running. That could easily cause an issue. He might consider disabling the antivirus software during editing sessions. Also turn off screensavers. I've even heard of Windows wallpaper causing problems, though not specifically with Premiere.

Also, see what kinds of files he's working with. I've had problems in the past with Premiere choking on .MP3 files. I convert those files (in Cool Edit) to .WAV files and have no problems.

Is it a specific project file he's working in when the PC locks up? Could be a corrupt project file. Only cure I know of for that is building a whole new project.

Wouldn't hurt to see if he's got a lot of temp files on his computer. These would be found in the \TEMP folder under the \WINDOWS folder, and would either begin with a tilde character, like ~TEXT.... or would end with a .TMP file extension. If he has a lot of these, he should get rid of them.

There are possible hardware causes, though I would expect them to show up in other applications. Then again, if it's a dedicated editing PC, then he probably doesn't run other apps, so it may be worth checking out. Possible culprits would include a flaky power supply or a bad chip on the motherboard. BTW, just because he's using top of the line memory doesn't mean one of his memory modules isn't bad, so that's worth checking as well.

If all else fails, wipe the hard drive and reload everything. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet.

Good luck!

 

[TeleDan]

I agree with chapelgrovefilms. It could be any one of a number of factors. A couple more that I'll add is if your friend is doing any sort of overclocking, try running with 'standard' settings. A system can run fine until it's put under a real load and then it fails.

Also have your friend check for poor cooling. Things like blocked cooling fans or clogged filters and heat sinks. If he/she built the system themselves, it may not have adequate coolingt to begin with. My son just recently came to me saying his system was locking up randomly but particularly when he was trying burn a CD. Turned out that the fins on his CPU heatsink had gotten clogged with dust.

-Dan