Okay...for about a year now we have been putting together a massive movie project with Adobe Premier Pro. The film is about an hour and a half long and there are a couple hundred clips, audio files, music files etc.

I edited each scene separately and planned to put them all together in one sequence at the end.

Now, I am at that stage and the computer simply will not let me edit for more than an hour or so--sometimes even only a few minutes--before it craps out ("A serious error has occurred and Adobe must be shut down.") or else, even more maddening, it stops playing clips of any kind; I can still move the slider around and click on things but when I press 'play' it just sits there and does nothing. Sometimes it starts to repeatedly play the same audio clip or sound effect for every clip in the audio part of the time line.

I am totally stumped here and don't know what to do. Buying a faster computer is not an option. It's strange also because mine works just fine for smaller video projects, but now that the whole thing is very big it can't seem to handle it.

Any suggestions?

This is an interesting one. I have picked up rumours over the last few years that people have trouble with large projects in Premiere pro. I've not suffered myself though. Adobe have neve acknowledged it but the marketing blurb for the new CS3 version does state it copes with large projects better. This to mine is an admission that there was an actual porblem that they have now 'fixed'. So to me you need a work around.

I'm thinking that maybe you could slice your project up into multiple smaller projects. Export the final movies from those out in a lossless format then start a new final project and bring those previous renders back in as video assets. That should work even though it may not be quick or easy to reorganise your project that way.

What is the spec of your PC by the way? Processor speed, Amount and type of RAM, disk structure etc?

__________________
I'm not young enough to know everything!

Thanks for the reply.

I tried something like this last night, problem is, I can't export the seperate scenes (sequences) out until they are basically done. What I'm trying to do now is break the movie up into 16 separate sequences with no master sequence. Then, when each scene is done I will export it as one big chunk and then import back into a master file.

I sure hope that works. Even working on it this way the damn thing crashes between half an hour and two hours into working on it.

This wouldn't be so bad if the project didn't take 10-15 minutes to get going again after a restart.


I have 1G of ram, I can't remember my processor speed but I think a dual one would be better, mine is a bit old. The only advantage I have is my 500g hard drive that all of the files are on.

Disk structure? NTFS single partition I believe.

Your disk drive setup will certainly not help you. Sounds like you only have asingle disk drive.

For video editting (and I know Adobe recommend this) you should have a first drive for your operating system and software andf then a completely seperate hard drive (not just a new partition) for vide work.

__________________
I'm not young enough to know everything!

Oh yeah. That's what I have. One 80G for programs and the rest just for footage.


Since I divided the movie back up into 16 parts it has been working fine so far. Next, I'm going to try importing the separate parts back into a new program as whole chunks.


I've noticed now though, one of the main things that seem to make Adobe crash are audio clips that I've add reverb and/or pitchshifter to. Sometimes it won't even play them without attacking my speakers with a weird squealing sound