Serious problems with capturing in Premiere Pro 2.0

[Floris van Eck]

I encounter serious problems with Premiere Pro 2.0. at this moment. Let me explain a bit. First of all, I am running a Core 2 Duo E6600 with 2GB of RAM and two raptor disks in raid configuration. I am also using the Cineform Aspect HD codec (latest version). I am currently shooting a theatre production with my Canon XL-H1. As I hit record and then record till my tape is full I have one big scene. So what I do is I go into the capture panel. I set in and out points and log clips (so they appear in offline modus) and when I have marked all I do a batch capture of all the clips.

The program then starts capturing but for somehow some clips are not capture while others are captured perfectly. Then, when capturing is finished the program decides to hang and all my progress is lost. This happens all the time and for me, Adobe Production Studio is NOT productive at this moment. I reckon I might be doing something wrong or maybe my method for capturing is not exaclty as it should be. But I really want to solve this. Once I have captured clips I can work without any problems (at least, make a rough-cut without problems, I have not added transitions and effects etcetera).

Is this normal behaviour? I am already looking at a trial version of Sony Vegas but I have just paid $1800 for the full Production Suite and this way, I really think that this was a waste of money. I already re-installed the full suite once. The log that appears says that one clip has bad timecode and some other clips it displays "file failed". I cannot find this back in any documentation of Adobe or on their support forums.

Earlier on I also encountered a "Sorry, this program has encountered a serious error" message which also seems to be common. The impression Premier Pro 2.0 made on me is very unstable. Is this the case for more people or am I the only person that experiences this behaviour?

[Graham Hickling]

Sorry you are having problems. I am running PPro2 on a Core2 6300, with SATA 7200rpm drives and AspectHD, capturing from a Sony HC1, and have had none of those issues at all.

What motherboard are you using?

[Ervin Farkas]

You more than likely have serious hardware issues, and not Premiere issues, so I'll second Graham. Try giving us a little more detail about your configuration. Also, if your computer has other video related software, try getting rid of them, as different codecs may start conflicting.

[Chris Barcellos]

I know little to nothing about RAID, except that I have seen people indicate RAID can actually interfere with capture capability and slow down editing, except with Raid 0 configuration ??? Make any sense ?

I run Premiere Pro 2.0 on a dual AMD 3800+ generic system, simple hard drive configuration, and capture and edit in SD and HDV... NO problems, and decent render times...

[Graham Hickling]

My drives are in Raid 1, so it can work fine .... but raid driver installation can be fiddly on some motherboards and that might be worth checking.

Throwing out other semi-random ideas - very occasionally people report bad firewire cards or cables.

Also, are you capturing 50i footage or something else?

[Floris van Eck]

I am capturing Canon 25F footage with the Cineform codec. I am going to try to capture without Cineform installed as well. I never had problems with my firewire cable before so I do not thing that that is the problem. I have a Asus Commando 965p motherboard. I recently replaced my Gigabyte DS4 motherboard which had almost the same problems. Ever since I installed Premiere Pro 2.0. I have been having stability issues.

I heard that Creative Soundblaster/X-Fi could be causing problems as Premiere Pro is said not to work very well with those. But if I pay so much for software... I expect it to work properly. I do not want to change my complete PC configuration only for Premiere Pro 2.0.

My video scratch disk is a Raid 0 with two WD Raptor disks. But I really do not think that this should be a problem. Also, all other programs on my computer have never crashed or freezed so it would be a surprise if there are hardware problems in my computer that cause PP to crash.

I am just running out of options here. No idea what to do next.

[Harm Millaard]

Floris,

Could it be that PP seems to hang, but is still preparing PEK files? This does take some time and it sometimes looks as if the program hangs but in reality is still processing the audio files.

On the SoundBlaster, yes the software often causes conflicts, they are memory hogs of the first order, but if you show some restraint on installation and ONLY install the drivers and nothing else, they do work OK. If you have installed the whole SB suite, that may well cause the problems you are having.

[Floris van Eck]

I don't think so. Sometimes I wait for like 10 minutes and then the Windows task manager says the program has crashed and I get the error reporting pop-up windows. So not sure what causes this behaviour.

[Mark Kalbskopf]

Unfortunately, I can concurr. My experience of PP and Cineform is that it hangs continually. Sometimes it is not enough just to kill Premiere. It leaves Windows in an unstable state.
It hangs 10 times a day. I just click on a new place in the time line and nothing happens. Then 'Program not responding' and I have to kill it.
I have Cineform Prospect 2K. and a 1.36TB RAID drive on a Dell Precision 380 Pentium Dual 3.46Ghz with 2GB of Ram.

Mark.