Premiere Elements 2019 Windows: Conforming mts files freezes

(Replying to whsprague)

It would not surprise me if audio has something to do with the "Conforming" freeze-up.

The videos are generated on a Sony HXR-NX100 camcorder, Full HD resolution (1080/60p) with external audio coming in through the two XLR inputs. Everything is saved to a 64-GB SD card, where the video is saved as a series of ~2GB, 10min 39sec MTS files.

Early on, I would drag each segment directly from the SD card into PrE, until I noticed that the audio on all segments after the first was out of sync with the video. This problem was corrected by importing all files on the SD card (MTS and metadata) into a hard drive folder, and importing the video segments from there, per the advice on various forums regarding the audio sync issue.

I am not sure at what point PrE actually uses the metadata; PrE reports the duration of the first segment in a session as the combined duration of all segments (e.g. if a session runs 35 minutes, what is recorded includes three 2-GB MTS files -- typically 00000.MTS, 00001.MTS, and 00002.MTS on a freshly formatted card -- and a smaller final file -- 00003.MTS; when the first segment is imported into PrE, the duration given is 35 minutes).

The above describes how it worked before the freezing problem came up. In PrE, dragging the first segment onto the timeline puts the entire session there. Audio is properly synced for the entire session, and both audio and video are spliced correctly.

What happened a few days ago is that following the import into PrE of the first segment (still indicating the entire session length), the import process would be followed by a progress bar with a title such as "Conforming 00002.MTS" -- always one of the later segments, but not the same one in different recorded sessions. The computer would hang at (most recently) 6% of 00002.MTS, become generally unresponsive, and (following a Ctrl-Alt-Delete) give a low-memory error. This happened with a session with a total length of about 39 minutes; in the past, before the problem came up, I have been able to import and process sessions up to 2 hours long on the same system.

This hanging problem has occurred on two completely separate installs of PrE on separate computers.

The only recent change of which I am aware is that following an update notice generated within PrE on startup, I installed the update. This is within the past week or so, and that's when the problems started. Coincidence??

My work-around has been to render the individual MTS segments to MP4 files, using either Handbrake or VLC Media Player -- they both work, and audio is properly synced within each rendered segment. I am able to then import the MP4 segments into PrE and assemble them into one file (for adding titles and fades). At each splice point, I must then excise an audio and video blank spot of about 1 sec. After this step, although the audio is continuous and properly spliced, the video still has about another 1 sec of black at each splice.

Let me know if you need more or different information about the problem.

Thank you for your reply!

You wrote, "Premiere Elements freezes partway through conforming one of the .mts files and locks up the machine." 

I scanned the PrE help file and the only "conforming" it does is to audio files.  Can you be more detailed about what you are doing?  

Bill

I've moved this from the poorly named Community Help forum (which is the forum for issues using the forums) to the Premiere Elements forum so that proper help can be offered.