Running PPBM on Windows 7
 

I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 and CS5 (yay! it arrived!) and now am trying to run the statistics.vbs from PPBM4. I have tried just about everything I can think of pointing the correct path, but for some reason it always comes back as "file not found". This is a local drive it is pointing to, nothing tricky. Not sure what I might be doing wrong.

First of all, you will need to edit the Statistics.vbs file itself (right-click on that file and select "Edit"), and look for any entries labeled "Benchmark_1.avi" and "Benchmark_10.avi". Change "Benchmark_1.avi" to "Benchmark_12.avi" and "Benchmark_10.avi" to "Benchmark_21.avi". Be sure to save the edited Statistics.vbs file.

Also, when you run the PPBM4 benchamrk in Premiere Pro CS5, when it comes time to saving the project after rendering the timeline, save the project under the original "Benchmark.ppproj" instead of the default "Benchmark_1.ppproj" (this is the default name after the original CS4 project is converted to a CS5-compatible format).

However, if you didn't know better and just saved the project under the default "Benchmark_1.ppproj", then you will need to look for all entries in Statistics.vbs labeled "Benckmark_1.avi", "Benchmark_10.avi", "Benchmark_1.m2v" and "Benchmark_10.m2v" and change those to "Benchmark_1_12.avi", "Benchmark_1_21.avi", Benchmark_1_1.m2v" and "Benchmark_1_10.m2v", respectively.

Craig, email Harm for his beta CS5 version.

Thanks guys. Randall, why the renaming of the output files? Those don't seem to be changed at all. I should try "save as" and save to "benchmark.pproj" though. I've been using the "_1" file name.

This is because there is a flaw in Adobe Media Encoder CS5 in which the filenames continue to be sequential even though the extension has changed. After encoding "Benchmark_10.m2v", the first AVI encode should have been named "Benchmark.avi" - but instead, it gets named "Benchmark_11.avi". Then, what should have been "Benchmark_1.avi" gets named "Benchmark_12.avi" instead. And so on.

Thanks Randall. I didn't even check the output files to see what they were named. That was the issue.

Craig,

There are number of limitations in the PPBM4 script that you need to be aware of.

The script assumes all requested files are available and if not, then comes up with an error.

In the PPBM4 benchmark it looks specifically for the files:

Benchmark.AVI, Benchmark_1.AVI up to and including Benchmark_10.AVI and

Benchmark.M2V, Benchmark_1.M2V up to and including Benchmark_10.M2V

In addition it looks for the preview files.

If you have run the test before and want to rerun the test, I suggest to make the following preparations:

Delete all .AVI, .M2V and .XMPSES files from the PPBM directory. If you want to rerun the render test as well, navigate to the Benchmark.PRV directory, press CTRL + A to select all files and then press SHIFT + DEL to delete all files, but not the Benchmark.PRV directory.

Be aware that if you run the render test again and you have not deleted the preview files as described here, you may get inaccurate results.

Now take the following steps:

1. Open AME and make the complete queue, 10 instances to MPEG2-DVD and 10 instances to Microsoft AVI with all the correct settings as described in the instructions.

2. Go to File / Save Queue. Exit AME.

3. In Explorer go to:
C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Media Encoder\5.0 and copy batch.xml to batch - Copy.xml or another name to your liking.

4. Now reopen AME and the whole batch file is recreated for immediate testing.

5. Run the queue.

6. To rerun the test, copy batch - Copy.xml to batch.xml

7. Start AME and run the queue.

If you want to rerun again, delete the files as described above or the incremental file name issue can cause problems.

If you want to try the CS5 benchmark, give me a PM.

Hi Harm. I've run the PPBM5 and wanted to get the results, but get a VBScript runtime error when running statistics.vbs

Line 131, Char 1, Error: Overflow: '[number: 1E+99]', Code: 800A0006

This is on Windows 7 on my old Core i7 920 box and a new Core i7 2600K box (wanted to compare). Any thoughts on the VBS runtime error?

Thanks,
Allan

Allan,

If you remove the files and preview directory as instructed in the readme file, and then rerun the test, it should work OK. If not all the preview files were deleted, you can get this error message.

We are looking into an easier data submission method for the next version.