world of hurt, CS4 crashes on Save, every time

MagicCat

Well-known member
HI

Im a 10 year veteran Premeire user and have never run into this situation, ever!!. Im finishing a large project in PPRoCS4, (approx 60% p2 720 30pn footage, 10% HD MOV, some 1080 P2 footage, and GOBBS and Gobbs of Photo's)

Premiere keeps crashing almost every time I try to save my project. I have trimmed the 16 minute piece out to smaller 2 and 3 minute chunks, removed all un-used clips from the bin, and yet it keeps crashing simply by hitting save. I have searched all over the place and have not found a similar complaint to what I am experiencing.

I will say that it does seem to do this more often in the sections that have uncompressed AVI or .MOV keyed out footage (1080 RGBA) in them. But over all, it is totally at random.

I know this is still somewhat vague, I can elaborate if anyone has had a similar experience. Both of my Editing machines are doing the same thing on this. The second machine is very similar in build, but has a lesser Nvidia Graphix card.

I really need help here, Im going to be in deep doo doo if I cannot solve it. The project is darn near half my year's income, I have a long way to go before it is completed. If I cannot save it, I dont know what I am going to do.


Win XP 32bit W/SP3
Gygabyte MainBoard
Q6700 Quad core CPU
4gb ram
Nvidia Quadro FX1700
10,000 RPM Sata OS Drive
2tb (2-1tb 7200 RPM Sata drives striped) windows-software-striped raid for project
Audio is standard On-Board "Crapsound" chipset gigabyte uses with all their boards

CS4 is up to date,
QT Version 7.4.5
Quadro and mainboard has latest drivers
All plug-ins removed
 
What do you mean by crash? like BSOD , unrecoverable or something else? any error messages or log files?

Are you in the middle of a project, when did you last successfully save, did you make many incremental changes since that last save?

Have you tried saving in other location / directory?

Perhaps hardware issues? like bad HDD, bad memory, overheating?
 
What do you mean by crash? like BSOD , unrecoverable or something else? any error messages or log files?

Are you in the middle of a project, when did you last successfully save, did you make many incremental changes since that last save?

Have you tried saving in other location / directory?

Perhaps hardware issues? like bad HDD, bad memory, overheating?
Thanks for the interest here.

* Hard drives are all good, Tested and checked properly.

* System does not overheat, in fact, it has a very high output Server/Rack fan blowing on it,(very noisy but very effective) most of the time the CPU and GPU fan does not even need to come on. Factually: I have a little temp program that tells me where everything is at, all chipsets and HDD's are running extremely cool, I can touch any heat sync in the system with my finger.

* Crash: When I try to save, it gets half way through the save process, then closes down in the blink of an eye. A crash report is generated and I usually submit them. It has always pulled the project up again no problem, it is not corrupting the files.

* I have tried multiple options with drives. Everything from Firewire800, to E-Sata Raids, to internally striped. No difference.

* I have swapped memory with other brands and configuration to no avail. I believe my memory to be fine. (that was my first suspect)

Many incremental changes have been made to the project, it makes no difference. On average, 8 out of every ten times I hit the save button, it simply closes up shop and generates a Sorry message. I trimmed it down from a 3000total resource clip bin, to a 300 clip bin, to a 45 clip project. Makes no diff.

I have never seen anything like this. I have done hundreds if not thousands of projects over the years in premiere. It is bugggy as hell, but it has never done anything like this.

Im going to go back in and render out all RGBA .MOV files to RGBA AVI's. Im going to take all my Jumpbacks and re-encode them to P2 MXF unless they are RGBA. I really have a feeling it has something to do with Quicktime encoded files. Over all, it is totally random. however, It seems to do this most often when I import, or have recently manipulated a .mov clip around the timeline. I have tried installing several versions of QT with no change.

Im really at the end of my ropes here. Im aware all the photo's can be problematic in premiere, and I should probably be operating in a 64bit environment with allot more memory, but it certainly should not do this. This is insane.
 
Last edited:
whats your ran usage like? (look in your task manager)
Im not in front of the system, however,I expect it will be maxing itself out. I only have 4 gigs, win XP only sees 3.25 of that. I set my page file to an independent drive that does nothing else but serve as a PageFile Drive. Premiere is set to Memory instead of performance. That is supposed to help.

Do you think it may not be using the 4 or 3.25 gigs properly? If so, how would I change that.

For what it is worth, I set all the photo's up as Jpegs. None are much larger than 1440x1080. Physical size's are between 500kb to 1.2 mb each. Also, The project is a custom pre-set I made up for 720PN projects. I made it up per the advice of the Adobe P2 workflow white papers here on the forum. Essentially, I just changed the the 59FPS to 29FPS. No does not have to render 720pn footage, it plays it back natively. If you use the Adobe 720 60p preset, it has to render everything from a 720 30pN shoot. (Im shooting on an HVX200)
 
Last edited:
A quick follow up here to my own post

I finally got most of the problem sorted out. Premiere is behaving normally now, crashing just a few times a day instead of every time I save. Essentially, the project was setup under the stock DVCPro720hd setting. (72060?) Anway, the problem it seems, was when I setup a new sequence, I physically copied and pasted the clips from the old sequence into the new sequence. What I did not realize is when you copy and paste from a 60fps to a 29.97 sequence, you can end up with edit points that exist/fall halfway between a frame?!!. This caused all kinds of headaches. I turned on my snap-to tool and re-alligned everything to snap to a mark, and presto, it is behaving well again. I also got rid of all QT files in the project (which were mostly graphics from AE) and converted most of the graphics to MXF or Uncompressed RGBA .AVI files. That also did wonders.

Hope this helps someone. In ten years, of editing in Premiere, this was a first for me.

Dave
 
Whenever a new version of Premiere comes out. I like to Format the system and install just Creative Suite on top of a clean OS install, and add applications/plugins as I need them. I know it takes a lot of time, but it solves alot of the random issues of having previous versions installed.

If you're operating in a professional environment, I'd highly recommend you keep all other software off the editor as well, and invest in a second PC for communications/internet usage. It will keep your editor running in top shape. The same is true for Mac environments as well.


You should also seriously consider moving to Vista 64 or 7-64 as you will have a more stable OS, as well as a larger mempool for your Software to draw upon. Don't make a big change during the middle of a huge project, unless you have no other choice.
 
Back
Top