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Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
April 15, 2009
16 replies
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I installed Premiere Pro CS4 this last weekend 11-12 April 2009.

I have a Quadcore 3.0GHz with 8Gb of RAM, a 150Gb C: drive fo rthe op sys Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 and programs, a 500Go 😧 drive for general data and a K: drive 2Tb RAID0 volume useable about 1.8Gb.

My C: drive was healthy after installation of Premiere Pro with tens of gigabytes free at least. Then I started experimenting with building projects. I put my files on a mix of the 😧 and K: drives especially the AVCHD video assets on the K:.

While importing these AVCHD assets I eventually got a message from Vista that the C: drive was full and I did a clean up and that gave approximetely 30Gb free, I went back to importing, in a couple of hours the 30Gb was gone, this can only be Premiere Pro CS4 eating the C: drive and never returning what it takes. This of course is a disaster precisely because it is my op sys drive and Vista will periodically want to make new restore points especially before applying downloaded updates from Microsoft. I ahve run also chkdsk and defragmenter with no effect. I think Premiere Pro is using some sort of secret work files on the C: drive somewhere and that they just accumulate, of course this would be a bug.

Support Center does not appear to let me open web support issues even though we are in the 90-day bug fix period and I have registered the product with the product key so that is another bug that gets in the way of fixing the first.

Any ideas please?

Thanks!

Peter.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer

Well thanks for the suggestion, but no the problem was allocation of .PEK and .CFA files to the C: drive by default and that at least in my environment those were invisible and could not be reclaimed. I since restored from a backup to the point just after installation of PrPro, then went into Edit->Preferences->General->Media and set the two files therein to be on the RAID0 drive along with the imported AVCHD assets, now when I imported the assets C: drive remains normal and the .CFA and .PEK files appear in the same folder as the imported assets. And I think that each of the subsystems of PrPro have their own Media file settings to be set also, but those are not proving to be big consumers of space. Anyway having now completed a large part of project setup I am moving forward with other lessons from the Adobe 'classroom in a book'.

Message du 28/04/09 02:14
De : "tmsatterfeld"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Greetings, it sounds to me like your space s being taken up by an ever increasing number of restore points being created. In Vista, unlike XP there is no simply GUI with which to adjust your max allowable space to be used to create restore points. Instead you must launch a command line and set a limit through the VSSAdmin as is is the Volume Shadow Copy which takes the snapshots, you can only find out as well has limit the amount of space allowed for these snapshots through the command line to the VSSAdmn. If your system is set to "Unbounded" there is no limit and it can eat your entire drive away until you get a drive low warning. Since you cannot "See" restore" points or there size, this may be your problem. TMS

menego11

Participant

Wow! I had the same problem and reading all this large discussion helped me very much...

Well, just another question... after moving all the cache files from C: to another HD, how can i delete them from C:/? Is there a way to show the folders? Or they automatically disappear when you change the destination folder?

Thanks

Anonymous

There is only one known way to me.

Use your prior Vista backup disk in conjunction with your Vista DVD-ROM to restore from backup with a C: reformat.

So long as you have a good backup made by Vista from before the disk eating episode then you are OK and it takes much less than an hour.

Message du 13/05/09 02:48
De : "menego11"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Wow! I had the same problem and reading all this large discussion helped me very much...
Well, just another question... after moving all the cache files from C: to another HD, how can i delete them from C:/? Is there a way to show the folders?
Thanks

h2ofun

Known Participant

Man, I just ran across this issue on Windows 7. I noticed I only had 1 gig left on a 300 gig drive.

I could not figure out what was going on, so I searched for large files and guess what, there was 200 gig of

adobe file in the media cache folder. This is nuts it does not clean itself up. So, I just deleted them all.

Dave

tmsatterfeld

Participant

Greetings, it sounds to me like your space s being taken up by an ever increasing number of restore points being created. In Vista, unlike XP there is no simply GUI with which to adjust your max allowable space to be used to create restore points. Instead you must launch a command line and set a limit through the VSSAdmin as is is the Volume Shadow Copy which takes the snapshots, you can only find out as well has limit the amount of space allowed for these snapshots through the command line to the VSSAdmn. If your system is set to "Unbounded" there is no limit and it can eat your entire drive away until you get a drive low warning. Since you cannot "See" restore" points or there size, this may be your problem. TMS

don_solomon-z3JEFz

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the good explanation. I presume that shutting off the use of restore points solves that problem--which I have done. I can't resist commenting that the Restore Points design for Vista is just plain stupid.

tmsatterfeld

Participant

The system restore size can only be manipulated thru the VSSAdmin tool, with this you can bot view what your current usage is and also why your current "maximum" disk space is available for "restore" points, as I mention it can be set to "unbounded" and have no limit. I think 3-5 % of the drive C total is about right since this will allow you about five points (depending) with the new overwriting the old.

don solomon wrote:
Thanks for the good explanation. I presume that shutting off the use of restore points solves that problem--which I have done. I can't resist commenting that the Restore Points design for Vista is just plain stupid.

TMS

Anonymous

Disk eating happens by default after installation and when importing large AVCHD assets, I do not say here that it never happens under other conditions nor that it happens in all installations. The cause is that .PEK and .CFA files are being created on the C: drive as these assets are imported and they have an approximately similar size to the imported asset, BUT the creation is flawed in that the files are not visible to the user nor does CS4 clean them up itself. Whether the invisibility of the files created is CS4's or Vista's fault we need not discuss, because there is a workaround. Go to Edit->Preferences->General and expressly reset CS4 workfiles therein to folders you create, then the files become visible as they are created. For full details follow the thread. Thanks for all those who contributed.

Phil Griffith

Participating Frequently

I'm glad that you are on your way to working with cs4. However, if you had done a little homework and educate yourself at the beginning, you would have saved yourself a lot of grief over all this. Instead, you jump first then complain that its a bug and it eats all your drives. Kinda like jumping into a car with blinders on and drive off into a tree then say the car was defective....it should have known there was a tree there!

Anonymous

Huh?

I was following Adobe's own educational material, "Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Classroom In A Book The official training workbook from Adobe Systems". I am doing a little homework, and educating myself. The workbook takes you step by step through basics of creating a project some edits and then generating your outputs. I am at the project set-up stage.

The C: disk eating as something done by default IS a software bug, either the origin is in CS4 or it is in Vista, but creating files not allowing the files to be seen or manipulated and not cleaning them up nor allowing user to clean them up, this is a bug, it does not matter that you then say that there is a work-around for the bug.

I am restoring my C: drive from a backup made just before project creation so that I can recover the currently permanently lost C: drive disk space amounting to tens of gigabytes which will be invisible .PEK and .CFA files, this is the only way to clean them up and recover the space. Immediately after the restore I will apply the workaround, namely expressly allocate the .CFA and .PEK files to a folder, on another disk, so they'll be visible.

I am a software developer, are you a computer systems analyst/designer/programmer? This is a bug and there is also a workaround, there we go, yippee. No I am not a professional videographer, this is a one-off special I am working up to. What I am doing at this stage is the learning, the integration testing, and finding out any issues and workarounds prior to start of proper work. This is otherwise known as user acceptance testing and training and issue resolution, it happens in large scale software development projects and is entirely legit. Of course at the moment I am on the side of the fence of the user rather than the developer.

Message du 24/04/09 17:35
De : "Phil Griffith"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
I'm glad that you are on your way to working with cs4. However, if you had done a little homework and educate yourself at the beginning, you would have saved yourself a lot of grief over all this. Instead, you jump first then complain that its a bug and it eats all your drives. Kinda like jumping into a car with blinders on and drive off into a tree then say the car was defective....it should have known there was a tree there!

don_solomon-z3JEFz

Participating Frequently

Premiere puts stuff all over the place by default on the C drive. Set preferences so it doesn't. Put it all on another fast drive in one directory. Raid is fine also. Clean out the stuff it does put on C that you can't avoid regularly. Yes, it is a royal PIA, but that is life with CS4. The rule is, keep all program genrated files off C that you can. Jim is right. Keep C small, clean, and mean.

Anonymous

Thanks. I am going to restore my C: drive from backup to the point just after CS4 installation, reset the file locations to mostly the RAID0 drive and then rebuild the projects. After that hopefully Lesson One, setting up CS4 and importing the assets, will be complete.

Message du 23/04/09 18:18
De : "don solomon"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Premiere puts stuff all over the place by default on the C drive. Set preferences so it doesn't. Put it all on another fast drive in one directory. Raid is fine also. Clean out the stuff it does put on C that you can't avoid regularly. Yes, it is a royal PIA, but that is life with CS4. The rule is, keep all program genrated files off C that you can. Jim is right. Keep C small, clean, and mean.

the_wine_snob

Inspiring

Time Out!

I am trying to get my head around this thread, but am hopelessly lost right now. I also do not have CS4 to test it out.

It seems that some are saying that CS4 writes a "copy" of all Media Cache files to the C:\, regardless of where the Scratch Disks are set, and that these files are both hidden and remain, so long as the Project is active (or maybe even after the rest of a Project is cleared from the system). Can someone confirm this?

If that is the case, I’d ask "why?" but that could only be answered by an Adobe product person. If it IS the case, then Jim’s (and others’) recommendation to use a smaller, very fast C:\ for just OS and programs, could have unintended, and disastrous consequences. With any media, but especially HD material, even a 1TB C:\ could easily become filled with these "phantom" files.

Are the users’ observations correct, or are they looking at, and for, something entirely different?

Dazed and confused in Arizona,

Hunt

Anonymous

It is now established that in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 the Media Memory Cache file cannot be detected in the disk explorer program and that CS4 does not ever clean it up, you have to create manually a folder for it to use then you can see these files and I hope that means you can periodically safely delete them also. How on earth it ever managed to create invisible files in the first place is a mystery.

Message du 21/04/09 18:01
De : "the_wine_snob"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Time Out!
I am trying to get my head around this thread, but am hopelessly lost right now. I also do not have CS4 to test it out.
It seems that some are saying that CS4 writes a "copy" of all Media Cache files to the C:\, regardless of where the Scratch Disks are set, and that these files are both hidden and remain, so long as the Project is active (or maybe even after the rest of a Project is cleared from the system). Can someone confirm this?
If that is the case, I’d ask "why?" but that could only be answered by an Adobe product person. If it IS the case, then Jim’s (and others’) recommendation to use a smaller, very fast C:\ for just OS and programs, could have unintended, and disastrous consequences. With any media, but especially HD material, even a 1TB C:\ could easily become filled with these "phantom" files.
Are the users’ observations correct, or are they looking at, and for, something entirely different?
Dazed and confused in Arizona,
Hunt

Phil Griffith

Participating Frequently

csc, two things. First, I have never heard of, nor have I ever had to, reformat a hard drive cause of unknown files. Kind of overkill there. I would rather look for the files and delete them. The only exception I can think of would be a virus or something of that sort. I would presume that you have looked into that possiblilty (actually I don't presume anything at this point).But even then, you should be able to see where your files are. Do you know how to set up your sys to show all files (hidden or otherwise)? On premiere, can you look at your edit, preferences-scratch disk and report back what you have set up? Also, edit, preferences, media and see what your media cache is. Do you have full version of program or trial? Was it a download? (I assume from Adobe web site).

the_wine_snob

Inspiring

Phil,

I was wondering about the virus aspect. Going back some decades, there were several that did similar, and the mega-files that they created were marked as System and Hidden, because the default file viewing did not show those. Have not heard of any like that recently though. Seems that all of the script-kiddies are writing Trojans to open up a computer to either run as a zombie, or allow access to PIN's and acct. numbers.

First thing that I'd do, should I start loosing HDD space would be to turn off System Restore, boot to Safe Mode and run an updated AV scan on the entire system.

I suspect that it's more of an issue with Scratch Disks and Media Cache files not going where the OP thinks they're going.

It could also be some form of imaging software, though most would be set to do the images on another physical HDD, and not C:\.

Last thing to look at would be something like Norton's Protected Recycle Bin. That thing can create monster files, that appear to be a single file, but contain all the data from everything deleted, even after one "empties" the Recycle Bin. If one has that turned on, deleting a few dozen AV files, but not emptying the Norton Protected Recycle Bin can eat up a lot of HDD real estate.

Otherwise... ?

Hunt

Anonymous

Yourself and the person who earlier said go to Edit->Preferences->Media are proved correct.

I reset memory cache file to use an expressly created by me folder on my D: drive and then it was the D; drive that got consumed and what is better the default file on the C: drive could never be detected in disk explorer but now the files are being created visibly in the manually created folder. The use of the memory cache file is by default turned off and I have not ticked it to turn it on, but when you import a large AVCHD asset CS4 just goes ahead and uses it anywaycreating .CFA and .PEK files close to the size of the asset imported.

Next question will be whether you can delete these yourself with no harm done and whether you should just turn on the memory cache usage permanently?

Anyway I think I will now be able to get back with my experiments and learning.

Thanks!

Message du 20/04/09 19:13
De : "the_wine_snob"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Phil,
I was wondering about the virus aspect. Going back some decades, there were several that did similar, and the mega-files that they created were marked as System and Hidden, because the default file viewing did not show those. Have not heard of any like that recently though. Seems that all of the script-kiddies are writing Trojans to open up a computer to either run as a zombie, or allow access to PIN's and acct. numbers.
First thing that I'd do, should I start loosing HDD space would be to turn off System Restore, boot to Safe Mode and run an updated AV scan on the entire system.
I suspect that it's more of an issue with Scratch Disks and Media Cache files not going where the OP thinks they're going.
It could also be some form of imaging software, though most would be set to do the images on another physical HDD, and not C:\.
Last thing to look at would be something like Norton's Protected Recycle Bin. That thing can create monster files, that appear to be a single file, but contain all the data from everything deleted, even after one "empties" the Recycle Bin. If one has that turned on, deleting a few dozen AV files, but not emptying the Norton Protected Recycle Bin can eat up a lot of HDD real estate.
Otherwise... ?
Hunt

Bill Gehrke

Inspiring

Well it must have something to do with either your French version of Premiere or Vista as I see no such problem. I have run 100's of benchmark files trying to get some consistency in performance measurements under a wide range of hardware configurations and see no such accumulation problem.I also have a couple of dozen HDV projects with no signs of any accumulating files on the C: drive. My 150 GB Vista 64 C: drive has 100 GB of free space.

Anonymous

Yes well, try it with AVCHD rather than HDV, maybe CS4 uses different code to import the different types of asset. Use large AVCHD files and several of them, then use File->Import to quickly notify CS4 about them and what you will see is that the actual import process falls behind so you have several files listed as assets but bottom right of screen will show CS4 still working on importing them. Another lovely trick to try is to shut down CS4 while this background work is still ongoing, then restart CS4, you will see that CS4 restarts the background processing from where it left off.

Message du 19/04/09 20:46
De : "Bill Gehrke"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
Well it must have something to do with either your French version of Premiere or Vista as I see no such problem. I have run 100's of benchmark files trying to get some consistency in performance measurements under a wide range of hardware configurations and see no such accumulation problem.I also have a couple of dozen HDV projects with no signs of any accumulating files on the C: drive. My 150 GB Vista 64 C: drive has 100 GB of free space.

Phil Griffith

Participating Frequently

I take it the scratch disk is a temporary work area but it should not take up unlimited real disk, whatever disk it goes on you have to be able to control it. That is what I want Adobe Support to answer to. See my other answer.

Csc, you are completely lost on all this imo. Premiere doesn't "eat disk" and not give it back. When you bring in video files, they are usually large. That's the source files. When you edit you make changes to those files, ie transitions, titles, etc. These changes are rendered as new files and are stored where you tell premiere to. By the way, you also tell it where to store source files as well. These are not temparary files in that since. Rather they exist till you are through with the project and delete them. Premiere doesn't delete them on its on. Otherwise you never would have a project to complete. I suggest you get a real grip on how the program operates instead of saying it's a bug.! At this stage you wouldn't know a bug if it bit you. Perhaps some training would be in order here.

Anonymous

Well, my Blackmagic Intensity card running under control of Media Express 3 is able to capture the HDTV signal to my second screen, so I should probably move CS4 into the second screen along with a Vista disk explorer window and I will show you that CS4 eats disk. I could go further and show you that it eats enormous amounts of disk without any new files being visible to account for the vanishing space, but the video file would then be huge and I would not be able to send it to anyone. I just say that I am a computer programmer in a past life so I understand computers quite well, and this thing does appear to eat disk while importing AVCHD assets. So the real AVCHD assets are on my RAID0 drive but when I tell it to import then it gobbles a chunk of C: drive of equivalent size, this is not accounted for in any files in the C: drive that I can display in a Vista window when exploring the disk, this is disk space that just vanishes forever (until you restore from backup and use a disk format along the way).

Message du 18/04/09 22:28
De : "Phil Griffith"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
I take it the scratch disk is a temporary work area but it should not take up unlimited real disk, whatever disk it goes on you have to be able to control it. That is what I want Adobe Support to answer to. See my other answer.
Csc, you are completely lost on all this imo. Premiere doesn't "eat disk" and not give it back. When you bring in video files, they are usually large. That's the source files. When you edit you make changes to those files, ie transitions, titles, etc. These changes are rendered as new files and are stored where you tell premiere to. By the way, you also tell it where to store source files as well. These are not temparary files in that since. Rather they exist till you are through with the project and delete them. Premiere doesn't delete them on its on. Otherwise you never would have a project to complete. I suggest you get a real grip on how the program operates instead of saying it's a bug.! At this stage you wouldn't know a bug if it bit you. Perhaps some training would be in order here.

Bill Gehrke

Inspiring

I find it extremely hard to believe that Premiere/Vista is writing to a disk and you cannot see the files. I have never heard of anything like that. Did you do anything unusual to your formatting of the disks like changing the block size?

Anonymous

I allow Vista to format the drives inside the computer on a permanent basis as NTFS file systems with all defaults.

Just for clarity about the nature of the problem so we are all reading from the same page so to speak.

Imagine you work on 10 consecutive projects, you create edit delete each project one after the other. Lets imagine for arguments sake they all import 30Gb of AVCHD assets. You will end up with a loss of 300Gb of disk, permanently. Even though at any point in time you only have one project with 30Gb of assets. And I understand that people say that this is a scratch disk used by CS4 to help it with intermediate storage, and that there has to be some correspondence between scratch disk size and imported assets size, but when you delete a project then CS4 should free up the corresponding amount of space from the scratch disk. And the files should always be visible in the Vista file system.

Just in case this was not clear to everyone.

Thanks!

Message du 18/04/09 21:02
De : "Bill Gehrke"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro CS4 eats my C: drive in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
I find it extremely hard to believe that Premiere/Vista is writing to a disk and you cannot see the files. I have never heard of anything like that. Did you do anything unusual to your formatting of the disks like changing the block size?

excited_Genie16B8

Legend

but when you delete a project then CS4 should free up the corresponding amount of space from the scratch disk. And the files should always be visible in the Vista file system.

The files are visible. And as previously covered, Premiere doesn't delete them automatically, as it shouldn't. You do that manually when you no longer need the files.

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