Please Help - system randomly freezes
 

Hello everyone, I'm hoping someone can help me with this issue. Whenever I'm playing video or scrubbing the timeline in premiere, the whole system just freezes without warning.
I installed the patch for Premiere and it hasn't helped.

Here are my system specs for reference:
P4 3.06
1 gb pc2700 DDR Ram
80 gb system drives
2x 120 gb hard drives used for editing
1 160 gb drive also used for editing (this drive along with the previous 2 are connected to an IDE adapter card)
Lacie 400 gb firewire 800 drive connected to Lacie firewire 800 card
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS
Radeon 9000 128 mb video card driving 2 displays

I have received a lot of mixed info from people, but none of it helps, so I'm hoping you guys can help me firgure out what the problem is.
By the way, I have already tried reformatting and it didn't help and the problem occurs no matter which hard drive I use.
Thanks for your help

What version of Premiere are you using? How often does it freeze up?

I'm using Premiere Pro 1.5.1.
The system usually freezes 3 or 4 times in the first hour of editing which gets very annoying, sometimes more often. After it freezes a few times and I reboot my computer, each time, it's usually fine for the rest of the editing session, but it begins all over again the next time I turn the computer on to edit after leaving it off or in standby for some time.

What happens if you just leave the computer on for a couple hours before you start editing? Does it ever freeze up by itself?

It's a shot in the dark, but some friends had a machine that would randomly lock-up while it was still "cold." It turned out to be a couple of failing capacitors on the motherboard. After replacing those (resoldering on a mobo... not something I like to do everyday), it's been working fine ever since. It's possible that this is your problem, though unlikely on such a new machine. Perhaps if you can tell us what brand of motherboard you have someone will know their reputation for quality components?

Often, this type of problem is video card or video driver related. Especially if you have dual display running.

Try disabling your secondary monitor and editing that way for a length of time (I know, it sucks when you are used to all that screen space). If the problem is gone, then you've narrowed down the problem to a very common cause.

At that point, its a battle between you and ATI tech support. Obviously download the latest drivers for your Radeon if you haven't already. Sometimes the video card tech guys can tell you just what setting to change (either in your display card settings or CMOS). Sometimes theay are no haelp at all (cough--3D Labs--cough!).

Okay, thanks for the tip - I'll try it out and let you know how it goes.

I continued editing and I was able to edit for 2 hours without any problems, so I'm assuming it was the video card being on dual display that caused it. So now that I know it is the video card, what should I do? Would buying a new one solve the problem, or is it a setting I need to correct? If I should get a new one, what are some good ones people are using?
Thanks - I can finally get this production edited:) (except I am missing dual display)

Assuming your Radeon drivers are up to date, I would email ATI support and explain the issue in detail--including the fact that it works fine in single display. They should give you some things to try, settings to change, etc. As I mentioned before, it might help or it might not.

I had this problem with my 3D Labs Wildcat, and they sent me a long list of things to try. Nothing worked until they came out with a patch that seemed to fix everything.

You seem to have alot of data directed through pci ports. Have you tried using only the primary and secondary ide cables direct to the m/board?
Your speed should improve which could be the root of the data logjams especially when disks approach capacity. 128 megs of video ram should be fine for dual display 16bit true colour 1280x960....

yes, I've tried using only one drive connected to the motherboard and it didn't help. The thing that bothers me is that this wasn't a problem until recently, so I'm confused about why it suddenly became a problem.
I will call ATI's tech support and ask them what to do - thanks for all the excellent advice.

Just an update, but so far, ATI's tech support isn't being very helpful. All they keep telling me to do is update drivers and stuff which I've done. Guess I'll call again and see what they say after I tell them everything's up to date. I went on Adobe's support forums and this seems to be a common issue, but no one seems to have a solution.
Does anyone here know what else I can try?
Thanks

Seen this one. Before I suggest I'll tell you what I do now to alleviate problems like this. I have a separate drive (dual boot) with only Windows, Premiere, AE, and any apps pertaining only to editing or graphics work. My video is captured and stored on 2 raided drives and some network drives. I only use certified drivers and I do NOT install any unnecessary codecs, media apps, features, etc. I disable any devices, ports, services, etc. not needed for editing and the like. I do all supplemental work in my "general windows" OS (another drive). I also play games there, encode the video files, test new software yada yada. Having a Windows install exclusively for editing makes for a VERY fast and stable editor. ...in case you don't already do/know this.

Now, I have seen this on my own machine with an ATI 9200 a while back. I have since upgraded to the Nvidia 6600GT. I went to ATI and they suggested the latest driver, I was already using the latest driver! So I went back a few versions and found an older certified driver, problem went away.

My friend had a similar problem; his solution was a BIOS flash from the video card manufacturer's website to get it to work with the latest drivers.

Another thing you could try is to download a free app for your card to allow you to adjust clock speed of the GPU and VRAM. Clock the memory DOWN a tad and test. OR start with the GPU, your choice. If the issue stops, your card's mem or GPU may just not react well to the output demands of dual mons, may have an issue, or may not be 100% compatible with the board, other hardware or software, etc.

Make sure the APG aperature in the motherboard's BIOS is set to the amount of memory on the video card or higher.

If this just suddenly became a problem, what changes were made to your computer hardware, driver, or software structure? Have you noticed a trend in any particular vendor, make or model card, computer setup, etc. in the forum you researched?

Hope this helps.