Pro CS3 Freezing on CFHD Render

[Robert Young]

When I use the CS3 Fast Color Corrector on several CFHD clips at a time, during render of the previews Premiere will become non responsive and need to be closed . If I render a single clip at a time it seems to be OK.
I'm using WinXP SP2, an Intel Quad processor, 4 Gig RAM, RAID 0, and the page file is on a different HD. The CPU is only running 30% during render so I'm thinking the bottleneck might be related to data read/write, or not.
Does CS3 color correction sometimes not play well with Cineform, or are there some WinXP settings/ hardware config that I need to tweak to smooth this out???
Thanks

[David Newman]

I have not heard of this, please file a trouble ticket so support can test your workflow.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

When I use the CS3 Fast Color Corrector on several CFHD clips at a time, during render of the previews Premiere will become non responsive and need to be closed . If I render a single clip at a time it seems to be OK.
I'm using WinXP SP2, an Intel Quad processor, 4 Gig RAM, RAID 0, and the page file is on a different HD. The CPU is only running 30% during render so I'm thinking the bottleneck might be related to data read/write, or not.
Does CS3 color correction sometimes not play well with Cineform, or are there some WinXP settings/ hardware config that I need to tweak to smooth this out???
Thanks

Robert, I just did exactly the same thing, with almost exactly the same computer setup. It crashed completely out of PP the first try, but after returning into PP and rendering immediately (which we have to do quite often with 1920x1080 stuff...32 bit XP and PP sucks!) it finally rendered.

I think your prob is the same as many of us are having: PP CS3, like all 32 bit progs, can ONLY run with 2GB RAM under ANY version of Windows. Even though CF only occupies a small amount of memory, the way Adobe works, it is often just is too much for the 32bit and small RAM memory to handle.

One thing that has really helped us, is breaking up all our current productions into smaller chunks. We make a copy of the same project under various names (project1A, project1B, etc) so all the common elements we use are there. That way, a much smaller number of things load in memory at any given time. It's a pain in the "you-know-where", but works.

Another thing is to NEVER insist on rendering after PP gives you an error message while trying to render. Save your work, go out of the project and reload, then immediately try to render again. Also, keep your rendering sections small.

It works for us.

[Peter Ferling]

What are your rendering to? Direct to CFHD? Try rendering to a wrapped avi. That is, "Microsoft AVI" with CFHD codec option, med quality.

Then convert the wrapped avi to cineform HD using HDlink as post process (very quick -not a re-render but conversion). Much less tedious.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Peter Ferling

What are your rendering to? Direct to CFHD? Try rendering to a wrapped avi. That is, "Microsoft AVI" with CFHD codec option, med quality.

Then convert the wrapped avi to cineform HD using HDlink as post process (very quick -not a re-render but conversion). Much less tedious.

What's the dif, Peter? All renders are "wrapped" AVI's or MOV's, aren't they? Not only that, if it's been done as a CF production, those options aren't even available, are they?

[David Newman]

Using the "Microsoft AVI" means Video For Windows, but you still end up with AVI. CineForm HD Export uses DirectShow, which it a faster export, and higher quality, but more of a memory hog.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Peter Ferling

What are your rendering to? Direct to CFHD? Try rendering to a wrapped avi. That is, "Microsoft AVI" with CFHD codec option, med quality.

Then convert the wrapped avi to cineform HD using HDlink as post process (very quick -not a re-render but conversion). Much less tedious.

Peter, I'm not following you or David. Robert is talking about "preview" rendering. So how would you alter that?

[David Newman]

Talk to support, the forum so easily goes off topic. Both Peter's and my post are not related to preview rendering.

[Robert Young]

Steven's post pretty well fits with my experience and suspicions. If I color correct, filter, etc. a single clip in the timeline, the preview seems to render with no problem. It's only when I have accumulated three or more clips and try to render them all at the same time that PPro freezes.
The truth is that I have occasionally had the same experience with ordinary DV timeline preview rendering in prior versions of PPro, on my prior system (Pentium 4).
During the CFHD preview renders I noticed only 30% CPU usage, but more than 1.5 Gig of pagefile was being used. If the full 4 Gig of RAM was available for use, it would be much faster and more efficient than supplementing the 2 Gig RAM limit with pagefile use, which is what's happening now.
I too have gotten into the habit, for long or complex projects, of breaking them down into subprojects, or seperate sequences, even thru final export. I usually don't reassemble the entire project until the final delivery format encoding.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

...I too have gotten into the habit, for long or complex projects, of breaking them down into subprojects, or seperate sequences, even thru final export. I usually don't reassemble the entire project until the final delivery format encoding.

Guess we'll just have to wait for 64 bit PP, AE and anything else that needs that size of memory access. The OS's are here, the apps aren't...at least Adobe app's.

So we just limp along, with the promised power to do much (Adobe apps making noise), gas in the tank (extra RAM), a hot engine (quads)...and a lousy little bitty gas line coming from the tank!

[Peter Ferling]

Sorry Stephen, I missed the 'preview' part. (Whenever I get failed renders -as in exports, I usually go the vfw route).

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Peter Ferling

Sorry Stephen, I missed the 'preview' part. (Whenever I get failed renders -as in exports, I usually go the vfw route).

That makes much sense for exports and sounds like something we would do as well. But for these previews, this 32bit memory barrier is really a serious prob.

[Robert Young]

An update on the original post: the problem being that when PPro CS3 attempted to render previews on more than 1 or 2 color corrected CFHD clips at once, it would crash (become "non responsive").
This is probably old hat to most of you, but:
1) I put the page file on the system Drive (C:)
2) Captured media (CFHD) goes to the RAID 0 media Drive
3) Audio and Video preview files, Media Cache go to "Drive E:" a single (non RAID) large SATA drive.
The result: After color correcting (PPro Fast Color Corrector) and applying transitions to 6 adjacent clips, PPro rendered the previews with dispatch and with no problems.
Adobe actually recommends this sort of configuration in the user manual, so, my bad for not reading the manual.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

An update on the original post: the problem being that when PPro CS3 attempted to render previews on more than 1 or 2 color corrected CFHD clips at once, it would crash (become "non responsive").
This is probably old hat to most of you, but:
1) I put the page file on the system Drive (C:)
2) Captured media (CFHD) goes to the RAID 0 media Drive
3) Audio and Video preview files, Media Cache go to "Drive E:" a single (non RAID) large SATA drive.
The result: After color correcting (PPro Fast Color Corrector) and applying transitions to 6 adjacent clips, PPro rendered the previews with dispatch and with no problems.
Adobe actually recommends this sort of configuration in the user manual, so, my bad for not reading the manual.

I would have thought to put the "preview files" on the RAID and the "capture" to the large SATA drive, as the single drive is more than fast enough to input CF captures. I believe the CF'ing of the input depends mostly on the CPU's compression power, not the HDD speed. The previews DO depend on HDD speed very much, as you have to stream multiple AVIs. Someone correct me if my brain has melted down from too many years of computers and video...

That's how we have our quad ws setup, and it seems to work okay. The probs with adjacent transitions and layers (HD sizes and color depths), is still apparently one of overloaded RAM memory, which is limited to 2 GB for 32bit Win prog's. There often just isn't enough mem to handle the HD-size renders.

I can instantly provoke a render error by using a CF HD clip (with alpha layer), transitioning with a "realtime" CF (or any other!) transition to another clip...and have any other video layers involved. In that case, I have to try to make sure there is already as little in RAM memory as possible, keep the rendered sections short and often loading and reloading PP several times before it will finish. A royal pain!

[Robert Young]

Stephan
I see your point and it makes a lot of sense.
I did get the impression that Adobe suggests that the raw media assets should go on the "fastest" drive. I have the feeling that I'm not going to really see what works best until I get well into a full HD project, rather than a 5 min test project. In the past I have shot in HDV, but downconverted and edited in DV. Now, with this system upgrade, I am trying to sort out the HD workflow. It may not be as easy as I had hoped.