Newbie Premier question
 

Ok, I'm just starting out on Premier. I've done a fair amount of work on my school's macs using Final Cut, but I'm switching to my own pc and so to premier.

I've got it capturing fine from my camera, but now that I've started assembling clips, I've hit some problems. The biggie is that I crash -- a lot -- not a full system-blue-screen of death thing, but Premier stops responding and while keyboard, mouse and other programs still respond, Premier is toast till I restart. Anyone know what might be causing this? and how I might go about fixing this?

Thanks in advance for any info you can give me :)

Premiere can be quite unstable, depending on a couple of things.
First tell us what hardware do you've got, what OS you are
running and what version of Premiere.

Mostly this will be the cause of the following:

- poor OS (anything that is not Windows 2000 or XP)
- small amount of memory (I advise at least 512 mb for
Windows 2000 and 768 for XP)
- old version of premiere
- buggy installation. Make sure your not working with a crappy
installation done 3 years ago with lots of hardware changes
and all kind of applications. The best is a clean system not used
for anything other than movie work (and audio for example,
although even these two can bite if you have some exotic audio
hardware)

I'm using Win98 SE. Premier 6.5 which was installed about a month ago and no significant hardware changes since. I've got 512mb of ram. All of my equipment is fairly standard, I've got a Athlon processor (can't remember which one exactly but it's near 2gig), Gforce4 video card, capturing off of a Sony VX2000 off of a firewire card. If you need more info on my setup, I'll try and figure it out...

It also seems pretty erratic as to when it crashes and when it doesn't. Right after I posted i got about 3 straight hours in and finished assembling the clip i was working on with no problems.

I'd still like to get some more info on what's causing it in case it happens again though. Thanks for the response ;)

Could have guessed on the 98SE. It's a fairly common issue. Bottom line is you really should think about upgrading to Windows 2000 or XP (I use 2000 Pro with Premiere 6.5 and have no stability issues (just other issues with Premiere)). As Rob points out there are lots of possible reasons other than 98SE, but it's difficult to isolate them when you're using such an inherently unstable OS. Memory is usually the second issue if you're doing simple capturing and editing.

Now I know they'll be lots of folks who say they've been using 98SE without problems, etc., so it may be that more focused questions will get you an answer....other than (or instead of) 98SE.

*sigh* I've been fighting going to 2000 for a while now...oh well looks like that's done with.

Thanks for the info!

You won't regret the effort.
You'll loose the 4GB restriction (building with NTFS) and you'll be able to edit without walking on eggshells looking over your shoulder for the crash to come.

Just a note to keep around, I had the crashing problem everytime I used the provided/upgraded MainConcept MPEG encoding. Premier would abort during the encoding. This was very repeatable. (W2KPro)

The following trick cured it and that was the last Premier crash I've seen.

In the Prem60.ini file:

[Override]
PreferDSCodecs=1

There are discussions in the Adobe forum regarding this setting and it appears that some systems need it and others don't. Just a note to put in the shoebox.

Good luck.

I think the combination Premiere 6.5 & Win98 is especially unstable.
Best to stick with 5.x or 6.0 for Win98. Better yet upgrade to
Windows 2000.

As pointed out you will gain stability, > 4 GB file support (movies
longer than 18 minutes) and a lot of other nice things....

Good luck!

I have been more than happy with Premiere running with XP. Just thought I would throw in my .02 since everyone else so far seems to be using 2k. Anyway, I haven't had any problems or crashes that I can pinpoint to premiere and xp.

If your running Premiere on a Pinnacle platform i.e. DV500 or Pro One. When it crashes or seems to crash and you still have mouse and keyboard control just click on the windows start menu and then click into Premiere again, see what happens.

All the best,

Ed Smith