Premiere 1.5.1 meltdown
 

Adobe Premiere 1.5.1 has suddenly developed critical problems that have made it unusable. I have uninstalled the software and re-installed it again, but the same issues remain.

Both monitor windows no longer work, they will no longer play clips or even show an image. The desktop wallpaper shows through where video image should be on the monitor windows.

The program does a complete crash (simply closes down with no error messages or Windows error notice) every time I try to select the Adobe Media Encoder to export a video.

The software takes up a large amount of CPU and hard drive activity whenever a video is selected from the imported clips window.

As I mentioned before, I completely removed Premiere and re-installed it from the CD with no success.

No other software nor any other aspect of Windows is having problems.

This has shut me down completely until i get it figured out.

Has anyone else had these issues?

What was the problem before the reinstall and after it? Was the problem the same (as described)?

After the uninstall, did you: 1) reboot the computer; 2) check to see if it was removed from the program files/Adobe directory; and 3) cleaned from the registry (prefereably by eye and with a good tool)?

This issue started out of the blue today. No changes were made to the computer nor was any new software installed.

When it first started, I imported a string of previously captured clips as I do all the time, nothing abnormal. I then dragged a clip onto the timeline and clicked it to trim the clip in the monitor window. At that time, the program hung for a long time with the hard drive light on, which usually is a sign that something isn't right. I expected it to crash with the dreaded Windows 'This program has encountered a program and needs to close, etc.' But it did not. The monitor window on the right stopped working, that is, it would not show or play video. This was followed by the same thing on the left monitor window.

I can export a AVI using 'export movie', and the exported video plays fine in Windows Media Player, as do all of the captured source AVIs.

I assumed something had been corrupted in the project, so I started a new one. Same problem. Rebooted the computer. Same problem still. I thought maybe the new captures were corrupt, so I tried importing older clips that I knew were good. Still the same problem.

I then uninstalled and reinstalled Premiere twice, with reboots after each step, including cleaning the registry and manually deleting all references to the software on the hard drive. Still the same problem.

I have Pinnacle 8 on this computer (for lightweight tasks), and it works fine.

I notice that in addition to the crashing and no video monitoring, Premiere is taking about 4 times longer to start up.

I'm going to try a system restore and see if that works. This PC is dedicated to video editing, so there is not much else on it. I guess I will have to wipe it clean and reinstall the OS as a last resort. I of course don't want to do that, but I don't really know what else I can do at this point.

This is a very strange problem and I wondered if it had happened to anyone else. Usually reinstalling the app fixes stuff like this.

While I'm not the definitive expert, I did have a PP 1.5 problem at one point. The system was hanging rendering scenes. After spending days on it unsuccessfully, I finally found that a combination of video effects (just the correction stuff) was apparently causing the problem reducing the number of effects caused it to go away.

Net, PP didn't protect itself from problems. This is readily scene if there is insufficent memory. It blinks at you and goes away. This is common to all Adobe software: Photoshop, GoLive, Illustrator, etc.

You may have some encoding in your file that PP is having a problem with. Can you render and save the footage as a new avi? You wouldn't have to display it. Just drag it to a sequence, render, and export.

One other note. On some video cards (including one I temporarily have in my computer) video only shows on one monitor. That include realvideo and windows media player. However, the PP monitor window does seem to show on both.

Dan,

please keep in mind that PPro is running on Windows, and Windows, although got a lot better lately, it's still Windows, with all of the problems we know. So your issues may or may not come from Premiere but rather from the operating system.

Most videographers find it easier to simply wipe the whole machine clean and reformat it. I would also strongly recommend to ONLY install those programs that you can't live without - the less programs you install, the more stable of a computer you'll have.

Windows is not as bad as an Apple advertisement. And there is no need to take those drastic actions.

However, there are many people who run sloppy systems. WHere lots of unknown, pooirly written, uncertified programs are running in the background. If that is the case, you need to clean out the junk.

I recommend using system restore to go back to a point where you know things were working okay. Then at least you can track forward to see where issue may have arose.

I had a crazy issue with Window Media player for a while. Any time I played anything on it, it had a green haze when playing HDV files. It wasn't a problem with VLC. So I would go back to system restore, and run it, and then haze issue would disappear. Since I had Windows automatic updates running, though, eventually machine would have th problem again. So I started using VLC instead. Recently, that problem disappeared, and everything plays fine in Media Player.

I just finished wiping everything clean and re-installing, since I didn't have time to try and troubleshoot. A 3-hour process after SP2 and all updates are finished. Premiere of course is working fine now as a result. Not sure what happened, but at least I'm back in business now.

Well almost - I now have to get Cineform Connect HD resintalled somehow. I backed up my emails but can't find the activation key - grrr. The joys of reinstalling Windows....

say no to codecpacks
 

For the next time You'll have same problems... It definately smells like codec issue. So If You had some codecpack installed ... uninstall them right away and install necessary codecs step by step at the moment You need them. In that case You can more precisely locate the problem source. Never use codecpacks! After premiere got in it's name word Pro appear those issues very often.