Adobe Premiere export problem

[Scotness]

Hi everyone - I've essentially finished the rough cut of In MY Image (there's a few sunrises and sfx shots courtesy of Roger to be inserted - but otherwise it's all there) - but I've found I'm having trouble exporting it from Adobe Premiere to a camcorder via a firewire card. My system specs are farily modest but the thing is I used to be able to do this okay - the only thing that's changed now is I've now got XP and some more hard drives and it's a bigger file - the film is about 2hrs and 5 mins at the moment - but I'm playing a series of smaller rendered scenes on the timeline.

Anyway my system is:

Adobe Premiere 6
Windows XP
CPU is a Celeron 400
320 mb RAM
32 mb nVidia video card
Hercules firewire card
3 ide hard drives - all seagate 7200 rpm - two are 75 gig and one is 30 gig - the operating system, premiere and the rendered scenes are all on the 30 gig hard drive and are being played off the timeline in Premiere to the camcorder

But the problem is the image on the camcorder keeps dropping out - I get a blues screen and it then picks up a few seconds later -- is it simply just a case of the system can't keep up with the information? I used to be able to export and import alright before (I'm now getting dropped frames on capturing)- but that was with one hard drive and Windows 2000 - and a different firrewire card -- should I go back to Win 2000 - disable the other hard drives (do they take up cpu time even though I'm not reading anything off them in this process) -- also I'm not playing back on the desk top - just straight to the camcorder

Any suggestions - I've been so frustrated with this and a few other problems - at least I can do it all on the computer but I want to review it on my tv - at the moment I'm thinking of taking the hard drive in to a post production facility and getting them to run it off

Any ideas anyone?

Scot

[MovieStuff]

Hi, Scott!

I've heard that XP is cranky. I still use NT on my system and it's solid. Win2000 is supposed to be the next version of NT so perhaps it might be best to go back if that won't rock the boat.

Beyond that, I would install (if you don't already have it) a full version of Norton Speed Disk. I use Premier and the lite version of Speed Disk doesn't have the nads to do an effective defrag and nothing fragments a drive like nonlinear editing. Also, you need about 20% head room (ideally) on your video drive for maximum effeciency so I don't know how full it currently is at the moment. But I would delete all my Adobe Preview files (as well as any other un-needed files) and then do a complete defrag of the video drive. Norton will give you a choice of defragging just the free spaces or the spaces and the folders. Choose both, which can take a while but is worth it. Then go ahead and attempt a new export of the timeline (which will mean new renderings for the preview files). It will take a bit of time but I think it will go smoother after a hardy defragging.

Roger

[TA 152]

Do not know the setup you use (I always used the MACs) but one possible factor may have similarities to problems I experienced 10 years ago and that was well known at the time due to much faster data transfer rates of that time (20+ MB/s than the actual rate of DV: 3.5 MB/s.

AV disks.

I am quite sure that this problem still remains to some extent as I have been reading a little here and there about it without remembering the actual reference right now.

The problem with "standard" disks is that if they do continous relatively fast transfers the disk heads need to cool down due to high temperature and take a rest to do so. Thus the dropouts.

If you contact Seagate and ask them if they offer high performance AV-disks I believe they can tell you if this may be a relevant problem for the setup you use.These disks were quite expensive 10 years ago: about 2500.- USD for 2GB if I remember correctly and very often RAID arrays were required as well.

From what I think I have noticed IDE disks may not be the best suited system for high transfer rates.

Check SCSI interfaced Seagates, preferably AV rated. Need different disk drivers.

Based on older MAC experience more disks in operation may drain power from your CPU. Stop the disk(s) you do not need for the playback. FWB disk tools offer a software that can stop and start disks independent of the system operation thus reducing the strain on the CPU.

I may be wrong but it is worth checking.
I will try to check some if the AV issue is still relevant.

Just a thought: Can you dump your movie to DVDs and play back from there to the cam with (minor) quality loss?

R

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ October 16, 2002 06:39 PM: Message edited by: S8 Booster ]</font>

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ October 16, 2002 06:40 PM: Message edited by: S8 Booster ]</font>

[seekaee]

Might be good to upgrade the Processor and Motherboard. XP can run on as low as a Pentium 2 300 MHZ, but it's really optimized for the faster stuff (1 Gig or higher) also, it takes a HUGH amount of Ram in its swap file (350 megs to be exact)

Check out pricewatch.com. You can find some excellent deals over there.

[TA 152]

A few links on the disk issue that may be of interest:

http://www.fadden.com/doc/avdrive.txt
http://www.techimo.com/forum/t5837.html

Putting Together a Nonlinear Editing System
http://www.dvformat.com/htm/news/200...ng_system3.htm
http://www.dvformat.com/htm/news/200...ng_system1.htm

R

[MovieStuff]

A Raid configuration would be best for your set up (if doing on-line editing in high res) but there's nothing you can do about it at this point since it's already all on one drive. Beyond that, I just noticed that you have your programs and your video edit on the same drive. That's not really the best idea. Typically, you want your programs on a separate system drive and your video files on a different drive, preferrably a Raid configuration. Your scratch disk should be the same as your video drive as well. Why do you have your entire movie on the smaller 30 gig drive instead of the larger 75 gig drive(s)? Just curious.

Roger

[Scotness]

Hi guys thanks for the quick responses - I've actuallu solved it - and I think the camera was the problem - just to answer your questions quickly Roger - the film is on the 30 gig drive because i bought it just yeaterday and transferred it on there - the two 75 gig ones are full and I was having trouble defragmenting them - putting it straight on the new drive meant they weren't fragmented - this drive was also replacing another slower one - so I put the OS on that because I would have had to wipe the files on one of the other 2 if I put it on there -- the way it's arranged is all the synched takes are spread over both the 75gig ones - then the rendered scenes and the project files are on one of those two drives - and then I transferred that onto the new drive (so I actually have two copies of the rendered scenes -- bearing in mind I was thinking of having to unplug one of the drives and take it somewhere) --- so anyway how I solved it:

first of all I disabled the 2 big drives - which I thought made a difference then I noticed the drop puts still occurred - then while watching it I pressed the display button on the camcorder to bring up the timecode etc on the view finder and the picture dropped out again - so I assume it was because of the extra load on the camera - so I ran it again with out the display and it worked fine -- there could also be an issue of resampling the audio - I've borrowed the camera and don't know all the settings - but the audio on the computer is all 44.1 KHz and the camera might be set to 49 (or whatever that higher setting is) so that could be slowing it down too

Curiously though I think it was only on the "Export to tape" not the "Print to video" command that it worked -- which ever one has device control was still having drop outs - not sure which one it was - but the one with device control didn't work

So anyway I guess I won't know for sure until I watch it all on my tv - but it was droppping out alot in the first minute or two but wasn't doing that now, or anything else I've seen - so it seems that the problem is fixed

Anyway all a learning experience!

The running time is 2hrs 5mins which I'll prune back - may end up doing two edits of the film for the dvd - but at least it's getting there now

Anyway thanks all

Scot

[Mike Buckles]

I have a fairly new computer, and had problems exporting with Premiere 6...two things I had to do...one was render the finished program, then bring the completed, rendered avi back into a new Premiere timeline, and export from there using "export to tape"...another thing...premiere 6 has a download which is supposed to fix the hiccups and glitches that many folks were having when exporting...you might want to go to the Adobe web site and download this free update..version 6.02. Also, make sure you don't have any cd's in the computer or any dvd's and turn off any other programs that might be running...on my slower computer, i had to turn off the clock!!! Also, my anti-virus program decided to run while I was exporting to camcorder, which also caused skips. Alot can contribute to this problem! Of course, they don't tell you that when you buy it! Mike

[TA 152]

Turning the PC into a pure AV rig systemwise.

With the MACs up to system 9.2 at least it is very easy to turn of all "business/office" system plugs and control panels which leaves the CPU working with AV related stuff only.

This is easy using a simple setup menu.

Try to see if there is something like this available as an option for the XP from 3. party vendors. Guess it would be freeware.

This site may be a good start:
http://www.dvformat.com/

If you have a "filesharing" setup for your PC - turn it off. Saves a lot of CPU/disk power on the MAC at least.

R

[Brian Maier]

I can't even imagine what you must be going through trying to edit on a 400mhz processor. You must be one very very patient person. I think that my 933 with 512mb Ram is slow as $#@! If you are using xp i would seriously condsider a faster processor if you can afford it. XP wants a minimum of 300mhz with 256 ram, you are not giving yourself much playing room there. I belive that the recommended is 500 and allways with editing the more ram the better! As for XP I have not had any problems that new drivers did not solve, and was a huge improvement over Millienium.

My system:
XP Pro/Linux Red Hat 7.3
PIII 933
512 MB Ram
60gb XP sys drive
2x45 gb Video Raid
12 gb Linux sys drive
Canopus DVRaptor
Studio DV firewire Card for Workprinter
Adobe Premiere 6.02


Brian