Premiere & XDCAM crashing
 

An XDCAM clip was slightly corrupted a month ago using Vista x64 & PPro CS4. When I first rendered the clip for client review, there was no problem. Then, about a week or so later, I re-edited the video and the clip had a brief green artifact in it. I quickly checked the backup and it was fine. (FYI, the Raid array was on a 3ware 9650SE)

Then tonight, using 7 x64 & PPro CS4, a clip being edited had a band across it with multiples of the clip inside it in one part and another part had artifacts in band going across. I noticed this in the program window so I checked the source and once it started playing the bad part, my PC BSOD'd and said it was dumping the memory which took several seconds. Normally, the BSOD screen is fairly quick but this wasn't. (Raid array on Areca 1680ix)

Also, last night, I tried ClipBrowser 2.6 and its flash band detection and removal on a different clip and it kept crashing at the same time in the clip. Those BSODs were just like tonight. I don't know if Win 7 is different in how it handles BSODs or that these crashes represent a certain hardware problem.

I ram Memcheck twice tonight and no problems with the Ram.

Any ideas?

Thanks

It f'ing just happened again while playing a clip in Premiere. The BSOD screen said "MEMORY_MANAGEMT" and required a hard reboot. I shut it down, and then pressed the button to turn it on and the button quickly flashed its normal blue but it wouldn't turn on. Then nothing happened when pressing the On button until I unplugged the power supply and plugged it back in. WTF?

Steve,

Sorry to hear about these problems. I don't envy you, also because these problems are often difficult to solve.

BSOD's are indicative of a hardware problem. The fact that it happened both with Clip Browser and with CS4 shows it is not software related. Apart from memory, which is logical to test first like you did with Memtest, I would have a look at your PSU. In my experience failures of the PSU are much more common than memory problems, especially when they show capacitor aging and if some of the rails are heavily taxed. A slight drop in the voltage can be sufficient to cause memory corruption. Temperatures are easily checked, but can also be a reason for BSOD's. Make sure that the CPU cooler and video card cooler are relatively dust free.

Let us know how you fare.

Thanks Harm. Good news is that it was a bad ram stick. For you and everyone else, memtest86 is the app to use as it fully tests the ram. For 6 2GB sticks, it takes 1hr for a single pass. The only hard part is finding which stick is bad as its results isn't the clearest. The memtest built into Windows is pretty much useless as it didn't detect anything.

Steve,

Thanks for the feedback. Sorry it was a bad ramstick, but glad you found it relatively easy.