Project causes Premiere to crash

[Benjamin Maas]

I'm up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Any ideas on how to get back up and running?

Long story short- was editing a project in CC 2015.4. Most of the files I'm working on are DNxHD files. I'm working on a rather complex edit- up to 10 angles of video playing back at once with bits and pieces moving around the screen (it's supporting material for a musical performance). Footage was shot on a Greenscreen and I've been keying it in After Effects. Rendering to a Transparent Background DNxHD Quicktime file. Then replacing the original footage with the stuff I rendered out of After Effects.

I've been running into a pile of problems.

1. Footage when replaced is no longer in sync. All clips start at the beginning of the clip. Not the end of the world- just more work. Went in to fix the sync on those clips for the first part of the piece.

2. Project is now crashing about 30 seconds after opening and loading all media. Can't seem to figure out why. Even made a new project and imported the sequence. Still crashed. But no other projects cause a crash.

As I said- this is a complex edit. Lots of things going on, key frames for movement, opacity, etc... Haven't gotten to color correction. And it's due tomorrow at the end of the day when this started happening (of course).

Help!

--Ben

[Steve Bleasdale]

Hi Benjamin as it happened near the end of the day it could be some sort of effect you applied later on maybe a real complex one? Maybe a corrupt file added near the end of the edit? I generally find when this happens in prem pro or cc it is usually a effect of some kind, the only thing to do is remove some effects and trail and error to see if it is that. steve

[Andrew Smith]

If it is 30 seconds after loading the project, it may be due to a file issue when Premiere is still checking through the media on a deeper level. Perhaps remove groups of files until you can narrow it down to the one/s that are suspect?

Also, it does sound like there is some sort of corruption inside the project. Try importing the PPro file in to a new project just in case that fixes it.

Andrew

PS. I'm very happy on CS6. Nice and stable.

[Peter Parker]

Have you checked the capacity of you drive with the video files on? Have you tried defragging your drive?

[Benjamin Maas]

so now that the project is done and I've been able to catch up on sleep a few comments about what ended up happening.

I was able to restore the project through the automatic backups- Lost a bit of work, but wasn't the end of the world. Actually the auto backup saved my butt elsewhere in the same edit because I replaced some clips in the sequence as opposed to in the project file (replace footage). Meant that all of my sync work disappeared. Going back to a point before I swapped out the footage allowed me to basically fix my screwup.

The project just got corrupted. No idea why to this point, but it just stopped working. It was crazy- numerous angles going in a big split screen edit of keyed footage. I did have some issues with the DNxHD files- many didn't have the alpha channel that I rendered with. Perhaps it was a codec issue. Some of the issues started after I began replacing footage.

Importing the project into a new one did nothing. Still crashed (again, leading me to think that there may have been a file that Premiere really didn't like).

CS6 isn't a starting point for me. Between the color correction improvements and the multicam improvements since then, I have to be on a more recent version. I had good luck generally with some of the early CC2015 versions. This one is somewhat less stable. I haven't tried CC2017 (or whatever it's called)

Ultimately, I rerendered a bunch of the footage that I was using out of After Effects. That seemed to help. the Quicktime Animation setting did a good job of preserving transparency.

FWIW, It's a crappy cell phone shot, but this is the performance piece that this ended up getting used for. A video to accompany the Steve Reich NY Counterpoint for Clarinet Solo with playback. The clarinetist recorded all the parts for the tape himself - hence a video to play to with basically himself playing all the parts either live or on screen.

--Ben

[Al Bergstein]

Ben, did you run a system check on your memory useage while editing? I've found that Pr begins to crash if I run out of available RAM. It happened to me when I crossed from 16 GBs, for example. Lots of crashes, no idea why. I then thought about it, and ran (on the Mac) Activity Monitor. It clearly showed me spilling out into swap RAM. I upgraded to 32 GB and all has been fine for months, on the same projects that crashed me before. It's and easy and cheap fix. Unlikely that moving back to an earlier version of the program would help, and would possibly even open up other issues as well (like 3rd party add ons issues).

Good luck.