Premiere Elements 7 crashes and freezes ->unusable

Response comments by Dean and Paul.

During Blu-Ray burning with PE7, the progress bar makes a full excursion from left to right (showing an estimated percentage completed) while the project is "encoded" to whatever format you selected (one of the multiple H.264 or corresponding MP2 formats). After "encoding" is complete, the progress bar starts another left to right excursion for the actual burning. However this progress bar display appears to me to be faulty (or at least misleading). The progress bar appears to start out and "get stuck" about 10% across (rough estimate). The system appears to be doing nothing. There is no hard disk activity and nothing happening on the burner drive. After a long pause, (varies by project) the burner drive begins to show activity and the disk is eventually ejected automatically at the end of the burn while the progress bar disappears after having appeared "stuck" through the whole process.

If the burn fails at this point (after encoding) I have found below the progress bar the words "Fatal Error". If there isn't an obvious error message, it may look "stuck", but could be progressing normally. The visual indications provided by PE7 at this juncture are woefully inadequate for monitoring the progress and/or success of the burn.

Has anyone tried PE7 with Vista "Readyboost" deployed?

Just in case..... are you sure it is really "hung" at the Burning to Folder stage? Is there zero disk activity? And for how long? After it encodes, I think there is still considerable work to do creating the DVD files themselves and if you are not looking at the disk activity it could appear to be "hung".

I'll have to try the /3GB switch again (with the dual boot thing enabled so I can recover from a failed boot) and see if I can get it to work.

I'm also playing with Windows 7 (64 bit) and PE7 seems to be very happy on a 64 bit OS with 4GB RAM although I have yet to really stress it.

Paul

Typo in previous post. From about 6 hours to approximately 2 hours.

I used the /3GB option since I am running XP. I have 3GB of physical memory.

I did see some improvement. The encoding phase went from 6 hours to about 12 hours.

Unfortunately, it still hangs at "Burning to folder" with nothing in the progress bar.

Any other ideas? I have already read the Adobe FAQ. My automatic disc burning was already off. I have approximately 100GB free on both of my drives. Nothing else is running.

Nice! Recently I was trying to find something that went the other way, limiting the amount of RAM that Windows sees. This BCDEdit looks like it has the option to do that.

Reply to mbkoks,

I had to access the RUN command as follows:
START BUTTON -->ALL PROGRAMS -->ACCESSORIES-->RUN

What I actually keyed into the box was:
BCDEDIT /set increaseuserva 4096

After than I clicked "OK". I saw a window appear briefly on the desktop which then disappeared before I could see what it contained.

I then rebooted my system and proceeded to burn Blu-Ray 1920x1080 H.264 disks 2 hours long without difficulty.

Keep in mind I have 8.0 GB RAM, so this still leaves 4.0 GB for other processes.

Please note the cautions posted by Paul LS and Paul Goelz. Depending upon what other processes may be using memory, you could impact other applications or even make your system unbootable. Make sure you have a way to recover your system before trying this.

Good luck!
Delane

Question to Adam....

I too am running the Windows 7 beta (and liking it BTW). In my case, I am running the 64 bit version. I have not tried editing a large h.264 project yet and I am curious.... do you know if Windows 7 (64 bit) allocates more than 2GB per application by default? Or does it too require a switch? In my case, I have 4GB installed but as I understand it, the limitation is how much virtual RAM the OS allocates per application, not the total installed RAM. That's what the page file is for....

Paul

Delane,

I am using a 64 bit Vista as well, quad core with 4 GB.
Did you do anything else or did you just issue the command?

Kudos to Adam Contoret for providing the key to solving my PE7 problem!

I have a 2-hour video which switches between views from two simultaneously operated HD cameras. The primary camera was HD at 1920x1080i and the secondary camera was HDV (1440x1080i) placed on separate tracks and synchronized in the timeline. Various titles, stills and music were also added on a third track. Full HD Menus were created including motion buttons, etc.

Although I had previous good luck with PE7 doing similar DV projects with output to DVD, this HD project was clearly much more demanding for my laptop system to handle. I was using Vista, 32bit on a DELL Latitude D830 has Core 2 duo T9500 @2.6 GHz with 4.0 GB RAM (3.581 usable) and 320GB Seagate 7200 rpm drive. Although I could successfully output to DVD media, all attempts to output to Blu-Ray failed. (I am using a SONY Blu-Ray drive in an external enclosure on a USB 2.0 interface.)

Editing was a CHALLENGE with frequent crashes and freezes. I gained some improvement by stopping unneeded services and other program activity and could then burn 1/3 to 1/2 of my project sucessfully to Blu-Ray, but only in MP2 format. H.264 failed with transcode errors or encoding errors no matter what I tried.

Suspecting I needed more processing power and more memory, I moved the project to 64-bit Vista running on a DELL Studio XPS 435MT with Core i7 CPU 940 @2.93 GHz with 8.0 GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive. I was delighted with the improvement in editing performance. All my freezes and crashes during editing seemed to disappear and everything operated smoothly and quickly. HOWEVER, I still could not burn a Blu-Ray disk. The encoding would complete and the system would CRASH (Blue Screen) just before the actual burn was to begin. I could burn half the project at once, but not the whole thing.

After reading Adam's post, last night, I researched the web and decided I could safely increase my limit to 4096. Not being sure if PE7 runs in 32-bit compatibility mode on 64-bit systems, I wondered if it would work, but I didn't have any better ideas to try.

IT WORKED PERFECTLY! I am now happily cranking out Blu-Ray copies after nearly a week of frustration and multiple failed attempts. A BIG THANK YOU to Adam!

Incidentially, a 2-hour Blu-Ray video at 1920x1080 in H.264 takes about 10 hours to encode (with four menus including several motion buttons). The same project in MP2 (and slightly compressed to fit the media) encodes in about 6.5 hours. These times are approximately half that required for the same encoding using the laptop system.

I have not yet confirmed that this project can be burned from the laptop system, but it appears likely that a 3072 GB memory setting would solve the problem....I have not yet had motivation to try this since the system is obviously slower.

I will contact Adobe to suggest that they provide better warning messages when PE7 needs access to more memory.

Be careful.... I tried the /3GB switch while booting XP Pro (I have 4GB RAM) and the system would not boot successfully. I had neglected doing the dual boot thing (seemed like such a harmless change) so I had no way of undoing the /3GB boot switch because the OS wouldn't boot far enough to edit anything. I finally managed to boot into BartPE and manually edit the boot file to remove the /3GB switch.

Not sure if Vista handles things more gracefully or not.

That said, in my experience, many errors I have received seem to be resource / RAM issues so making >2GB RAM available should make things run a lot better.

Paul