Do I give up on Premier?
 

I have to ask you guys using premier if its time to move on to something else. I build my PC's so the PC is not the problem, but I am so sick of Premier crashing and lately locking up on rendering to Encore.

The wedding I have been working on has locked up 3 times, I just cut it down into 3 sections so I can try smaller sections then put them together in Encore.

My problem is as I use photoshop, every day so the production suite was a nice way to get good edditing at a decent price, and I have also purchased Cineform so I do have quite a bit invested in my Premier Pro CS3.

Is anyone else having problems like this, is it more stable in CS4, or do I cut my losses and move on to something else, if so what?

I had that problem with PP1.5. I have been very happy with PP CS3. Most of my projects are very large... 10 tapes. The key is not to render the video for preview. Looks like PP can't handle the large amount of preview files in sequence. Things are dead slow once a sequence is rendered for preview.

My experience with CS4 was not great. It does not handle my progressive footage correctly.

Tried FCP. However, the multi-cam function, which I use a lot, is inferior to PP's, in term of ease of use.

Denny, I was confirmed Premiere for several years, through Pro 2.0. Got a bit tired of Adobes updates and complications. To me, it seemed like they wanted to link all their products into one system, so we have to buy them all, whether needed or not. I don't need full bore Photoshop, Elements or Gimp handles my limited needs just fine. It also seemed like Adobes stuff does not efficiently use system rescources, and I also experience problems, especially with USB drives. I went with Vegas, and am quite happy I did. My next step is to try to see if there is some Vegas compatible plugins or stand alones that can take us to the After Effect level processes.

I kept banging my head on PP crashes. Turned out to be an audio codec problem. Now I can edit DV and HDV all day until it runs out of memory. Usually once a day. Sometimes none. This is a dedicated machine with little else beside CS3.

If you have all the Adobe updates, there's probably something wrong at the system level with your PC. If you have the time and want to save some money, you might want to rebuild your system software from scratch. Be sure to take out any extra plug-in boards you might have in the card cage that you don't use or need.

oops double post

Hi
I found the first edition of Premiere Pro was very unpredictable and I lost a few hours of work through crashes on my older PC...
Since I moved to Premiere Pro 2.0 on a Sony Vaio laptop it has been perfect, never a single crash or lock up. It will do SD & HDV no problem. Slowly though...
Maybe as the other poster said its a hardware related problem.
I've yet to move up to the CS suites for the same reason as has been said.. mostly because my Vaio is still on XP so I see little point.
Cheers
Gareth

So often, people start their rant about Premiere, and time after time, as the thread progresses, it turns out that it's their computer or other software conflicts.

If you want to get premiere working, and to stop the crashes, then stop imagining it's premiere, and start looking at your computer and software.

You can't change premiere, but you CAN change buggy drivers, codecs and faulty/crappy hardware.

It's not magic that other people use it all day every day without crashes, they're just using a different configuration in some way to yours.

The skill is in discovering what of your equipment is causing the problem. The chances are, it's not Premiere.

If this is all to much, then sell it all and buy a mac. They NEVER, EVER, EVER, crash or have any problems of any sort. EVER. Apparently. :-)
There isn't even a term for "the beach ball of death", they're so stable :-)

I have been very careful when building my computer for Video editing, I am using a WD Raptor Drive for C, and only have windows XP Pro and Adobe Creative Suite installed on it. All other programs are on another dedicated HD, and all storage are yet on another.

I only have programs like Cineform, Magic Bullet etc. on the computer with AVG 7.5 for Antivirus so not sure where the conflict can be.

I have run Premier Pro on 3 different PC's all very powerful with dual and quad processors but still get many errors, especially from Encore.

I have not used it in some time but Vegas never gave me the errors I am now getting.

I have spent a lot of time learning Premier I really hate to give up on it, just trying to get good results with it.

quote>AVG 7.5 for Antivirus

That could be a problem right there. I would never use anti virus on my editing computer let alone be on the internet.

It sounds like it can be a video card driver also. Are all your drivers up to date?
Are you using external drives? If so that is not good either.

I do use external drives, but not to edit on or render from, and they are esate externals just like the internal drives.

Chris, when Premiere crashes but everything else is rock solid including other NLEs and games, it`s clearly Premiere that is to blame. Not just my opinion. It`s P.O.S., sadly.

I have to agree with Chris, I've heard about people never having any problem and others constantly complaining. I belong to the group that is sometimes complaining. :)

I too have had my share of problems, especially with the first patches for premiere cs3 and with combination of the build-in titler. If I touched a title on the timeline and *poof* premiere was gone. Only the last patch/update solved the problem but still the titler is slow.

I also found that premiere conflicted with the motherboard sounddriver and I had to install an extra soundblaster card to solve it. Since there are people reporting no problems at all it has to be the hardwareconfiguration and drivers that are causing problems.

Also about Macs never ever crashing is a fairytail, just google for it and you will find enough reports on that as well, they just crash less.

With normal projects (weddings f.i.) Premiere never crashes now, only the title software is slowing my pc down so there is still some kind of conflict somewhere. But with very big projects there also seems to be a memory problem because then Premiere sometimes will complain that it's low on memory and that you should save your work. Then I usually split up the projects in smaller projects.

Encore on the other hand is running slow as well but it has handled all my projects the past months without a problem.

I'm using a dell xps quadcore btw.

I'm doing a fresh install about twice a year and that sure helps, after the "right" patch Premiere/encore have been helping me through a very busy period with hardly any problem so I'm satisfied. I'm not going to upgrade to cs4 though, cs3 works for my dv and hdv projects just fine and it should continue to do so the next 3 years.

Only if I would buy a new camera by then that cs3 doesn't support I would upgrade.

I'm also so used to Premiere by now, started with 1.5 and i can edit without thinking about it, like writing which comes naturally. :)

Noa, may I ask how come you can edit without thinking, when Adobe constantly changes editing paradigms? We had A/B tracks in Premiere 5, Target next/prev tracks in PPro - CS3 and now target patching and sync locks in PPro 4? These are completely different and force me to relearn basic editing every new update.

There was really no big difference between version 1.5 and CS3 and I never worked with earlier versions. (don't plan to upgrade to cs4 either) Since I do this full time and have spend many hours behind the editing table I don't see what's so difficult with working in premiere? In fact I find it an easy program.

Admittedly I don't work on huge projects, but for what I do, I have not had a single crash with CS3 since the 3.2.0 update. So my conclusion: CS3 is fussy about the hardware it runs on, but if you manage to find a suitable set of components it will run just fine!

I've had several cheapish video cards in my current rig recently - 6600GT, ATI3850, 9600GT - all of which worked fine. My sound is through an external firewire Presonus module, so I can give that a thumbs-up too. (Creative soundcards used to be very dire for video systems - spewing drivers through your system. Maybe they have improved but I still stay far away from them).