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Taylor_Question
Participant
May 31, 2019
Question

Transcriptive plugin bug - crashing Premiere CC 2019 when switching between sequences

  • May 31, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 935 views

Hello,

I'm experiencing an issue with Digital Anarchy's Transcriptive plugin in Adobe Premiere CC 2019. version 13.1.2. and wanted to see if anyone else has had similar problems.

The overview - I've successfully imported and synced all of our transcripts using the plugin. However when we start moving between sequences, the transcriptive loading window gets hung up and premiere freezes. Force quit does not shut the program down and we are forced to do a cold restart on the system. I've found a temporary solution where if you lock the transcriptive window or close out of it, and switch between sequences/unlock or re-open, it doesn't freeze. Our editor does not want to have to do this every time we need to switch to a different sequence however.

I have found an article talking about a bug with the plugin for Adobe Premiere 2019 but after speaking with Digital Anarchy's Tech Support, they do not think it's related. They have also told me this bug has been patched in the version of Transcriptive that we have.

System specs:

Mac OS Mojave 10.14.3

Premiere 2019 CC: 13.1.2

Transcriptive: 1.5.2

iMac Pro (Baseline, brand new) and iMac (late 2015)

Just to note - we are experiencing the same issue on both systems.

Here is the info regarding setup and workflow of our project:

The project is mostly single camera string outs of about 60 active sequences ranging anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours per sequence. Transcripts are synced to about 30 of these sequences at the moment.

The media is mostly coming from an Alexa classic shooting at 4k 3840x2160, prores 4444, 23.97. We've transcoded the raw footage to Apple prores 422 proxies that match resolution and frame rate (what we're working with in the project).

The transcript syncing workflow has been: open desired sequence to sync to --> in transcriptive window I select import --> plain txt. (the file is a standard plain .txt export out of word) --> Select "detect" for all available settings --> once imported I click transcribe --> align (using the speechmatics speech to text recognition software). This seems to work once the alignment is complete. I can successfully play the sequence and jump around on the transcript to different parts of the sequence. I'm not experiencing any issues after going past the 1 hour mark either which is what tech support said would happen if the memory leak bug was the issue at hand. It's not until we start switching to other sequences where the freeze happens.

Other factors that I've taken into consideration:

1. Operating system/Program version? I may try and install premiere 2018 CC to see if that fixes the issue.

2. The length of the sequences/associated with the memory leak bug? Tech support does not think this is the issue.

3. New bug?

Has anyone else experienced this issue and have you found any solutions or work arounds?

Thanks for the help!

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

C
chuckvector
Participant
May 7, 2020

I am experiencing a similar problem with Transcriptive 2.0.2 when using it in Premier CC2020.  When I open Transcriptive on an interview timeline, after a couple of starts and stops it freezes and crashes Premier.  I don't have this problem when in CC2019.  In that version of Premier it's flawless.  I'm in Windows 10 Pro 64, on an HP Z220 PC workstation with an Intel Core i7-3370 CPU with 32 gigs of ram.  I've just reported it to both Digital Anarchy and Adobe and I'm awaiting their reply.

A
Anarchyjim
Inspiring
June 1, 2019

This is a known issue on Mac. It's actually a memory leak in an older version of Chrome which Adobe uses as the basis for the panel (Chromium v61 from 9/2017). They're aware of the issue and are working on a fix. We might also have a fix, but it involves replacing Draft.js which is what we use for the text editor, and a huge project on our end. So it's probably a month or so out before that happens. The new editor we're testing doesn't seem to trigger the memory leak the way Draft does.

If you open up the Activity Monitor and switch to Memory, you can see when the Mac is about to lose it. Initially memory will be fine and as you play back a transcript eventually, usually around the 45 minute mark, you'll see memory usage start to increase until it maxes out the memory and the Mac freezes. Probably why tech support didn't realize this was the problem is that _usually_ you don't see it by just switching sequences. But given the length of the transcripts and the number of sequences, this probably could cause it as well. I had to re-read your whole post a few times before I realized what the issue is.

So one workaround, admittedly not a great one, is to keep an eye on the memory usage in the Activity Monitor. When it starts to go up, restart the Transcriptive panel. That'll clear out memory for a while. Rinse, repeat. When we were testing this, we'd leave the Activity Monitor in the background against the right edge of the screen and pull in the PRemiere UI just enough so we could see Memory Usage in the background. So that might help a bit, so you're not restarting the panel every time you switch sequences.

While the bug does exist in CC 2018, for whatever reason it's seems to be much less of an issue. So if you can go back to 2018, it might solve it in the short term. Although, given the size of your project, it might not. But worth a shot if you can.

It's different than the Adobe bug that was causing Premiere to blow up on Mac/Windows. That's been fixed.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. It's a tough problem since the bug is deep in code that's neither ours or Adobe's. A fix is coming though, it's just not going to be a quick one unfortunately. Reach out to support again (cs@digitalanarchy.com) and let them know you want a beta as soon as we have one. You can cc me as well: jim@digitalanarchy.com

Best,

Jim Tierney

President

Digital Anarchy

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