When working on a project, large or small, Premiere will randomly close with no error message. I'm editing HDV footage. My system specs: 4GB 800Mhz RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.16Ghz, 1TB RAID 0 hard drive and Vista Ultimate 32bit. Any ideas?

Welcome to Premiere.

If you are doing everything off a single HDD, that could be part of the problem. As you've found out, Premiere is very finicky, especially with HDV. Ideally you should have at least two, preferably three, separate physical hard drives.

Also, moving up to Vista 64 may help -- it is supposedly more stable and will allow Premiere to utilize your memory a little better, even though PPro is still a 32-bit app. Right now you are wasting at least 1 of your 4 gigs of RAM.

I used to have this problem all the time until I moved up to Vista 64, but I'm still on CS3.

The RAID 0 does have two separate hard drives. I also have a ATI Radeon HD 3870, driver version 8.510.0.0, with 512mb memory. The video was shot on the Canon XH A1s in the 1440 x 1080, 30f mode. The project I'm working on now has over 100 videos and is about 15 minutes long. I'm using the HDV 1080P30 preset in Premiere. Would it help to buy a Matrox card for my system?

It sounds as though you have both your video files and Windows an the same RAID 0?

If that is the case, then as Adam says, you need to add another hard drive to your system. Use this for Windows and all your programs, and reserve your RAID for the video files.

This will not guarantee no crashes, but you should get a lot fewer.

I have a Matrox card, Windows/programs on one drive, project files on a second, video files on a third, and Preview files etc on a fourth, but I still get the occasional crash.

The RAID 0 does have two separate hard drives.No, if the drives are in RAID 0 they count as one drive, because that's how your system sees them. (Edit: D'oh! Alan beat me to it.)

You need one system drive for OS and Programs, and another for projects and media at the very least. You'd be better off splitting your drives up as JBODs.

Your video card is not likely the issue, although with Premiere anything is possible. Could even be a corrupt audio driver (I've had that happen).

If you have Vista Ultimate you should already have the 64-bit version. Try installing that and splitting up your drives before you spend any money on new hardware.

You need one system drive for OS and Programs, and another for projects and media at the very least. You'd be better off splitting your drives up as JBODs.

If you have Vista Ultimate you should already have the 64-bit version. Try installing that and splitting up your drives before you spend any money on new hardware.

Ok, so how I split up the RAID 0 drives into two separate hard drives? And how do I convert Vista 32-bit to 64-bit?

Well, it's not for the faint-hearted. Your RAID controller software, presumably onboard, will have a way to do this. You need to delete the whole array and tell the controller that you want no RAID. Doing so, of course, destroys everything on the disks, so be prepared for a complete reformat (after you've backed everything up to an external drive, of course). And once that's done, you should just be able to pop the 64-bit Vista install disc into your DVD drive. Probably will need to set up your BIOS to boot from CD before doing any of this.

I realize this is like saying to play the flute you blow over one end and move your fingers up and down the outside. If you're not comfortable mucking about with your OS and PC guts you may be best advised to take this to someone who can do it for you.

It seems drastic, but video editing is pretty specialized and to do it right you need your PC set up properly.

Adam,

What is the ideal number of drives and setup for running premiere?

1 for OS/programs
2 for data
3 for ?
etc...

Thanks

I really don't think that the hard drive has anything to do with the crashes. HDV is very compressed, down to a data rate of approximately 3 MBps. Now surely two modern 3Gbps SATA hard drives working together can handle that, right? Is my 3.16Ghz Core 2 Duo processor fast enough for editing HDV footage effectively?

Mitch, it's not that simple. By having everything on one virtual drive, you've got your CPU mercilessly banging on the disk for OS, Program, Project, media reading and media writing. It's enough to stress any disk. That's why Adobe recommends you separate all that out. But you're probably right that it isn't the only, or even the most important, culprit here.

I think your chip is underpowered for HDV, and having the 32-bit OS restricts the amount of memory available to OS and Programs.

Joe, IIRC, Adobe recommends one drive for OS and Programs, one drive for Projects, and at least one or more for media. If you had only two drives you could put projects and media on one disk. But you could go completely insane, and do what Harm and I have done, with way too many disks for any human to have. There are a couple of threads on this both here and in the Adobe forums.

Here's one:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/attend-world-premiere/239509-best-way-install-cs4.html

I have my disks set up as follows:

C: System -- 10k Rpm 150GB Raptor -- OS and Programs
D: Workdisk -- 7 x 1TB in RAID0 (soon to be RAID3 w/Hot Spare) -- Project, Captured Video, Captured Audio
U: 2TB External (actually 2 x 1TB Hitachi eSATA in RAID0) -- Video Previews, Audio Previews
V: 2TB External (same as U:) -- Media Cache files
W: 2TB External (same as U:) -- DVD Encoded files and Backup Drive
X: 2TB External (same as U:) -- Final renders and Archives, Swapfile/Pagefile

In any normal universe, an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.16Ghz isn't underpowered for HDV editing!

In the CS4 universe, I suppose anything is possible..... (I'm on CS3)

So, does anyone have an idea of why Premiere would just up and quit on me all the time?

Because it's Premiere. It's just the nature of the beast. I'm not saying we like that about it, but it is what it is.

Go on over to the Adobe forums for a while and you'll see years of posts for exactly the problem you describe, and no solutions, not really. It always seems to come down to, get a better PC and don't ask Premiere to do so much. And I say this as a Premiere user who isn't contemplating jumping ship any time soon, as I simply have too much invested in this workflow to change. And for as many people as are having problems, there are at least as many for whom it's working just fine. Which camp am I in? Depends on what day it is.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Premiere is like a psycho girlfriend. You can get it to do almost anything if you know how to ask, and when it's great it's REALLY great... but sometimes it just goes off on you for no reason.

(This is where others will chime in and say, if you want stability, get a Mac. I personally have no plans to make that jump. I like living dangerously.)

(It should also be noted that Vegas has much lower hardware requirements and is known for being rock solid and stable, but it's a real learning curve if you are used to Premiere, and it lacks the multi-program integration of CS4... )

You could also consider using a Cineform add-in, which will ease your CPU load considerably at the cost of hugely expanded file sizes. You could look at Neo HD or Prospect HD, if you can afford them.In any normal universe, an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.16Ghz isn't underpowered for HDV editing!

In the CS4 universe, I suppose anything is possible..... (I'm on CS3)Graham, I'm with you completely on this. I'm still on CS3 as well; even though I've bought and paid for both CS4 and PHD4, I'm just not really motivated to install either of them just yet. And I'm running dual Xeon Quads with 20GB of RAM.

If you read Adobe's white paper on this, they really point out that CS4 is optimized for a 64-bit OS with 16GB of RAM, and they strongly imply that if you've got anything less than this you may just as well stay with CS3.

I have had my share of problems with Premiere and spend quite some time to find the best working solution and today I can say I am satisfied and no Mac user can convince me otherwise.

I noticed Premiere doesn't like a lot of clips in a project, the bigger that gets the more unstable Premiere gets. I use a Sony hvr-dr60 disk with my canon that can produce up to 300 to 400 separate clips for a wedding. I use Sony's ru_util.exe to get the files from the dr60 to my harddrive and then just imported into premiere. But Premiere got real sow then, opening up a project took almost 5 minutes, scrolling the timeline really stressed the harddrive slowing Premiere down as well and switching from sequence to sequence caused harddrive activity that made any other action impossible for about 10 seconds.
If the projects got really huge Premiere also crashed often.

Now I use womble video wizard to combine all those small clips into one large, womble is really a fantastic tool as it can combine 1 hour of footage (with a lot of small files) into one big file in less then 15 minutes. it's more then 4 times faster then realtime on my q6600.

When I import only 1 or 2 big files into premiere everything goes faster, editing, opening a project and so on. The whole system feels more responsive and stable and if I have to work on really big projects I split it up into 2 or more project files. In this case Premiere doesn't give me any problems. (cs3 on win xp pro)

Noa's absolutely right; the more assets you have in the project panel, the more unstable Premiere gets. Premiere also hates titles, stills and graphics; if you have a lot of those, be prepared to save often.

I have my auto-save set to five minutes; be sure when you restore you choose the one with the latest time stamp, not with the highest-numbered filename. Also, it's a good idea to save after every complicated edit.

If you notice that the screen is slow to update as you move your cursor about on the timeline or move elements around, save right away; it's about to crash.

Noa's absolutely right; the more assets you have in the project panel, the more unstable Premiere gets. Premiere also hates titles, stills and graphics; if you have a lot of those, be prepared to save often.

.

Yes Adam I agree, CS4 + all the dynamic link crap work great for 10 minute projects. Get into a wedding or a feature and you're in big trouble.
My most stable system right now is my HP core2 quad 6600 with 4Gb, premiere 2.0 and my old Matrox rt.x100 (which was never stable under any other configuration before). Only good for SD though!
My premiere pro cs4 running on an HP Athlon phenom x4 9150e quad core with 8Gb and 64bit vista is pretty much unuseable. I edited a short (3min) sequence, and the damn thing wont even let me export it. Media encoder gives me an error every time (cant find project file in a a certain location). Probably some vista security issue.

I've been working on a VERY resource intensive project. Premiere was crashing over and over. Then I got an idea, and increased the virtual memory exponentially (20GB). And it hasn't crashed once since then! But I guess only time will tell if the problem really has been fixed.

Just dropping by here.

This is exactly why I switched to Mac and Final Cut Pro a year or so ago. Adobe Premiere CS2 kept crashing all the time and I couldn't figure out why. I had been using Sony Vegas before that and it never crashed. Not once. But I didn't really like the Vegas interface. I just like the old-school Avid like two monitor up and timeline down view which Vegas doesn't have. I have been running Final Cut for over a year now and it practically never crashes. If it does (like once or twice a month) it is mostly because I am also encoding, working in DVD Studio or doing lots of other stuff on my computer (like running Parallels Virtual Machines).

All of this is stupid. Adobe charges you $1599 for the suite. Most of the programs work fine (Photoshop never crashes on me) but Premiere has been crashing since CS2. We are now 2 versions ahead and they haven't fixed it. Now that's a big shame on you Adobe.

I am also convinced that's the exact reason why Final Cut Pro has like 50% of marketshare, followed by Avid and I think Sony Vegas. Premiere Pro is just a laugh. I still hope they fix it one day because I like Dynamic Link and After Effects, Encore and Photoshop.

When working on a project, large or small, Premiere will randomly close with no error message. I'm editing HDV footage. My system specs: 4GB 800Mhz RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.16Ghz, 1TB RAID 0 hard drive and Vista Ultimate 32bit. Any ideas?

Mitch, as a strat, go into task manager, look at all the processes running and google every one of them.Unisstall everything that you don't want. There's a load of rogue apps on windows that are not well conditioned and can cause problems for premiere.

Getting past all the OT rants about other software and platforms...
Mitch, how have things been going with CS4 since the virtual memory tweak?

And to chime in with Adam and Andy, Adobe is very clear that CS4 demands a lot of memory (and system specs in general). You'd do better with a 64 bit OS and more RAM, esepcially considering you "only" have a dual core processor and don't have your clip files on a dedicated drive. Many people will not put other software on their editing computer, and at the very least you do need to make sure the system is optimized, lean, and clean. Even simple stuff like regular defragging and CHKDSK can make a significant difference.

All that said, I've been successfully running CS4 Master Collection on a laptop with a mere Core2 9550, 4GB RAM, single drive, and XP32 loaded with other applications -- and successfully edit AVCHD footage. Not as speedy as my main editing box, but gets the job done. So I'm really wondering what else might be the problem with your system. Have you run a quality set of hardware diagnostics, especially Memtest on it?

Some Premiere CS4 problems can be solved by tweaking, upgrading etc. But the fact is that CS4 is responsible for the majority of problems, because it's a buggy product, simple as that. In different machines, with various setups and different Windows, sooner or later you'll get your crash (almost never occured in CS3). And you'll get your crash without using any external plugins, the standard ones do the job.

Also true about the software slowing down when too many clips are loaded. This is unacceptable for a program that is considered to be for professional use. Not only this never happened in CS3 (at least, not like that), but it is slower at editing and rendering for the exact same projects. One will say that CS4 is slower because it's more complicated, but it doesn't stand out. Exporting a two camera editing with light color correction needs, say, 2 hours in CS3 (I am talking HDV) and 2:40 in CS4. And the bugs in many effects (black screens in time effects) are absolutely annoying.

Not that successful as a product, if you ask me.

Hey guys,

I spoke too soon. Premiere still crashes incessantly with HDV footage. I have some more information that may help.

1. Premiere has been rock solid with SD footage, it's HDV that I'm have all the problems with.
2. When a HDV project is first opened, Premiere works great but after a while it begins to bog down and becomes unstable.
3. The more effects and animations used the more unstable it becomes.
4. It begins to slow down after scrolling through a long list of thumbnails in the project bin, and loves to crash right after closing the title creation window.
5. Seconds before each crash the hard disk activity light will go solid and Premiere will freeze and then crash.

If it will increase stability I'm thinking about separating my two raid 0 drives and getting a external eSATA (any suggestions?) drive. Using the first dive for Windows and programs, the second for the video files and the external for preview files. How does that sound? Thanks!

We've all -- or at least most of us -- experienced all the problems you describe, and all I can say is what I said way back in Post #2: Welcome to Premiere. What you are describing is very typical behavior.

To risk being repetitive, your chip is underpowered, you don't have enough RAM (because your OS won't support it) and your disks are too small and not arranged optimally.

My PC has 8 fast cores and a 7 x 1TB disk array in RAID3, and Premiere still locked up all the time, just as you describe. The only way I made it better was to go to Vista 64 and up my RAM to 20GB. It still behaves erratically, but much, much less than before. Even with this, you need to set your auto-save to 5 minutes or less, and learn how to use it. And even then you need to do a hard save after you do anything complicated that you don't feel like repeating, and be sure to reboot about once per hour to clear the memory leak. Once you establish a good workflow, you'll start to recognize the signs of an impending crash and you can do a quick save and exit before anything bad happens.

To directly answer your question: yes, the disk setup you've described will definitely help somewhat, but won't solve your memory management and CPU problems.

There's really no getting around Premiere's hardware demands. You can't reason with it -- you can only succumb. Those of you who are married know what I'm talking about.

But you know all this already. Every prior response in this thread had told you exactly what you need to do.

be sure to reboot about once per hour to clear the memory leak

Same here, I"m not sure if the memory leak is causing the problem but can't think of any other reason;after an hour I start to loose audio during playback if I'm playing the timeline. This only happens if I have more then one audiotrack and on one track the audio will go on and off every 10 seconds. Once I reboot the pc the problem is gone. That might be a new feature as premiere is telling me to take a small break? :)

I am not a computer geek. I'm ignorant when it comes to all the technical talk in here. However, I can tell you that CS3 was much more stable than CS4. In fact, I'm not in love with all of the new features of CS4. For example, making all of the audio levels even in Soundbooth was a feature that I was looking forward to. But I will never use it because it brings up the background noise right along with the low levels of a scene. This is unacceptable. The System Memory thing has been a problem. Rebooting every 2 hours has helped big time. And, currently, my present documentary is running 3 hours (end product to be around 2 hours). So I have six timelines with around 30 minutes each. This has also helped.

I like having all of my assets in the Project Panel. But perhaps I should clear as much as possible.

Thanks to everyone for their input here. I work alone in my basement, in my "man cave", and I have no where else to go in a moment's notice.

I just found out that my machine is capable of handling 8GB of ram. So, I might buy Win 7 64 bit and upgrade ram to its max. This along with the hard drive tweaks should help cut down on the crashes, correct?

Does anyone have any suggestions on what e-sata external hard drive (to use for preview files) I should buy?

Mitch... I've been using a Simpletech external RAID via eSATA for a couple of years.... very reliable with good performance.

A heads up with Windows 7. Apparently there are some known issues (with various motherboards) with onboard eSATA. Oddly enough, my eSATA worked perfectly under Windows 7 RC.

If you discover that once you get your eSATA set up and Windows 7 doesn't recognize it, you may want to consider simply getting an eSATA PCI card... it instantly solves the problem for 20 to 30 bucks.

BTW... I've always had my preview files and source footage on the same RAID without any issues. If you haven't trialed Cineform, I suggest you do. It lightens the load on your system in a big way.

How about the Iomega Professional 1TB eSata external drive?

Product Page: Professional Desktop eSATa/USB Hard Drive: External Hard Drive by Iomega (http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/external-hard-drive-desktop/prestige-desktop-series/prestige-esata/?partner=4760#overviewItem_tab)

Newegg.com: Newegg.com - iomega Professional 1TB USB 2.0 / eSATA External Hard Drive 34280 - External Hard Drives (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822186152)

Mitch... I would strongly urge you to get an external RAID, as opposed to a single eSATA drive.

Simpletech and others, are makes of dual drive (or more) RAID enclosures, preconfigured and ready for connection.

The responsiveness of a RAID 0 is superior to a single drive configuration.