Premiere Elements 7 crashes and freezes ->unusable

Report · Oct 18, 2008

Hello all

For a long time, I was looking for a programm to cut my AVCHD clips taken with a Canon HF100 camera. In the past I used for DV videos Adobe Production Studio (Premiere CS2, Encore CS2). I have tried AVCHD with AVCHDUpshift to convert the AVCHD clips to MPEG clips and cut it with Premiere CS2. The final video I have tried to burn with NERO 8. But this is very cumbersome.
I recently saw, that Adobe has released the Premiere Elements 7 with AVCHD support. Because of the many negative posts of Pinnacle Studio 12, I expected better stability and performance from Adobe Premiere Elements 7. I gave it a try.

Installation was OK.

I tried to add about 50 clips to the AVCHD project -> takes a long time but OK.

Playback quality of the clips is very bad. Video quality is bad (blurry), audio quality even worse (2 seconds you can hear sound, 2 seconds no sound, 2 seconds sound, 2 seconds no sound ....). With PowerDVD playback of the clips is fine (video and audio).

I have put 6 clips on the time line (total of 1 minute with dissolve transitions). After pressing the Enter key, it takes a long time to render. Why? No smartrendering seems possible.

I tried to add a disc menu -> crash. Tried again OK, tried to remove disc menu -> not possible, tried to drag another template to the disc menu-> crash..

Tried two times to select the blu-ray output medium -> crash. Tried it again -> OK.
Tried to export this one minute to blu-ray -> freeze after some minutes saying, not enough memory (in the taskmanager about 2.2GB of the 4 GB are used, premiere.exe used about 1GB)
Tried with different export option MPEG-2, H.264 ->freeze after some minutes, always saying to low in memory.

Tried to export H.264 to file -> OK. But then I have only the movie, and no disc menu. I don't want another program to create the menu and another program to burn it...
Export to Blu-Ray seems impossible.

I have tried to work for 4 hours. I had at least 10 crashes and freezes, then I gave up and deinstalled it.

The support recommends for example to disable Anti-Virus, running Vista in very basic mode (no glass etc.). This is not what I want and this is not the way users have to do with their computer. Not a single bad program has to define the functionality of a good running PC to the minimum.

The bottom line:
This is the worst program I have ever got from Adobe. I would like to know, if somebody had success to burn a blu-Ray disc.

My HW: New HP DC7800 Quad 2.5GHz, 4G Ram, 1x250G Raid1 C:, 1x750G Drive D: Data, OS Vista Business all latest Driver, Blu-Ray Recorder LG GGW-H20L

Report · Jul 24, 2009

Hunt,

The BIG difference between PE4 and PE7 is that PE7 can edit and work with AVCHD video files, which have become the standard in the past couple of years; particularly for HiDef cameras. It also works well for all the new Hard Drive, and Memory Card (non-tape) cameras that are not available. AVCHD is a format which compresses an absolutely HUGE amount of data into a very small space; thus making it ideal for Hard Drive and memory cameras. However, when it uncompresses all the data, it throws all that data at your computer and editing software; oftentimes overwhelming both of them..... Thus, the crashes.

Another thing people don't realize is that, the longer your video sequence is, the more data you are asking your software and computer to handle. When you edit video, you are not just editing one picture at a time. Rather, when you make a change in a single clip, the software, in turn, has to edit and completely reorganize the entire timeline and everything in it - which can be composed of thousands or even millions of pictures. Therefore, if you start out with a video that is 1.5 hours long with the intention of editing it down to 15 minutes of final video, you are asking your computer and software to do an absolutely huge task. To minimize that task, be conscious, when taking video, NOT to let your camera run, and run when recording. Keep your shots short and sweet. Next time you watch TV, notice that the sequences shown on TV are hardly ever longer than 5 seconds, and are usually on an average of 2 seconds. Not only does this make it easier and more pleasureable for viewers to watch, but it also makes editing much easier and faster; for both you and your computer. It also reduces the liklihood of a crash!

Kent

Report · Jul 24, 2009

hi Kent -

I understand what you are saying. I am editing a travel video down from 80

min to 50 min - I do shoot pretty tight shots but also edit down to even

tighter. that's the reason I even do editing - I grew up with film, my

father was in a movie club in the 1940's making their own films from script

to finished product, and it is a family heritage thing. So I'm pretty

ruthless about cutting stuff out, but I don't think it is an outlandish

expectation to work with an 80 minute file to start with. I am either going

to give the computer to an IT professional to straighten out or just go back

to PE2, which did used to run on the old machine that I had, so hopefully it

will run on the newer bigger more powerful one. Since I am shooting AVI

mini-DV tape, with a camera I bought in 2005 specifically so that the output

would be editable, I am not taxing it with AVCHD. and since I can't open

the current project in PE2, I either have to re-do the entire thing or get

the computer fixed.

I am trying to get my posts deleted so no one else has to spend time

answering them - I think the suggestions you and others have already given

are sufficient for now

thanks

just wanna edit....

Report · Jul 24, 2009

http://http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402169.html

Josephine,

Taking your computer to an IT professional won't help because he/she won't know what do to in order to optimize your computer for video editing. Go to the above web site, which is part of the Adobe Knowledgebase and then follow the optimization instructions it gives you. Not only will Adobe Premier run better, but everything will run better on your computer. If that does not work, then return to the forum and start a new post, and many will be willing to jump in and help you out.

With all respect, please remember that this forum is a place where people help people, and, we will help you! However, it is not an appropriate place to discuss what you will do if you can not get your problem resolved. Please take the time to do the suggestions in the above web site. Then, if that doesn't work, come to us, or to Adobe Technical support and we will pursue the problem(s) with you.

Last, but not least, rest assurred that PE7 works very well on the majority of computers that it is installed on. If it did not, Adobe could not sell or market it. Likewise, if a problem existed within the software that caused the faults you are experiencing, then everyone would experience the same problems. And, if that was the case, Adobe would then provide a patch or fix. However, that is not the case. Please allow us to help you by following our suggestions (as with the above web site) rather than giving your computer to a person who is not familiar with the demands that video editing places on a computer.

Best Regards,

Kent

Report · Jul 24, 2009

Kent,

Wise words indeed.

One reason for the fora is to provide info for people, who might come here in the future. Discussions on problems should be available to those people.

Now, starting a new thread is a great idea, as has been mentioned. Someone, who might get help from something on page 3, may never read that far, especially as most of the beginning of this thread may not apply to their case. Yes, the fora do help people solve a particular issue, but how many people bother to search via the forum, or Google, or ?, and end up solving their problem, because of some older thread here. We cannot count those, who have come, read, learned and solved their problem, only to not post.

As for the IT professional, I have to agree. Most can set up a computer for word processing, or spread sheet work, but that is usually where it ends. I had one client, who was the only person on a major campus, who did image and graphics work. Her IT department knew how to work with all of the 1000+ computers for others, but had no clue how to set up, or work on a graphics workstation. She'd sneak me in, after hours, and I would straighten out her computer. We even set up special security for her unit, so IT could not come in and break anything, as was their practice. She got her work done and that was all that was necessary. When she needed to be ready for some network change, we'd remove the security and then I'd put on my ninja suit and come back to find that IT had changed everything around for only one reason - they had no clue what a graphics workstation was about.

When I lost my main workstation builder, I interviewed about six potential suppliers. In seconds, I knew that five had no clue. They could probably build an e-machine in their sleep, but that was not what I needed. Finally, a medical researcher gave me a name. I spoke to him, and knew in moments that he was my man. He was in the process of building 20 graphics workstations for working with medical videos and 3D imaging. I told him what I needed, and in a day, he had the answers and solid recs. He's still doing all of my work, and will be doing my next workstation. Most IT professionals do what they do very well. Graphics and Video are not part of their toolbox and it shows.

To all, good luck,

Hunt

Report · Jul 23, 2009

hello Hunt -

can you please delete my posting - I don't want to take up people's time

responding when I am just going to pull the plug on this software - thanks

Josephine

Report · Jul 24, 2009

Josephine,

Unfortunately, I cannot alter the forum in any way. Steve G. is the MOD here, and of the regulars, he's the only one with a Moderator Console.

I'm just a user, like yourself, trying to help people.

Good luck,

Hunt

Report · Jan 20, 2009

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.

Report · Jan 21, 2009

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?

Report · Jan 21, 2009

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

Report · Jan 21, 2009

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

Report · Jan 22, 2009

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.

Report · Jan 22, 2009

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.

Report · Jan 23, 2009

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

Report · Jan 23, 2009

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

Report · Jan 23, 2009

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?

Report · Feb 08, 2009

Update....

I just found a reference to an additional switch to be used with the /3GB switch:

/3GB /Userva=2900

Using this addition to the "/3GB" entry in boot.ini, I have been successful in getting Windows XP Pro SP3 to boot. And I can report that PE immediately uses more memory just opening a project than it did before the switch was added. However, it also seems to be more stable and responsive. Opening and working with a 20 minute AVCHD project consisting of about 8 clips plus DVD menus brought the memory in use as reported by task manager to about 1.8GB. Previously (before the /3GB switch was added) it would have crashed long before it got to 1.8GB.

So I guess there are two things to be learned here.... PE really REALLY wants to be a 64 bit application running on a 64 bit OS because it is such a resource hog. I strongly suspect that it was a BIG mistake to market it as AVCHD capable until there is a 64 bit version. But until there is, the /3BG switch helps.

Paul

Report · Feb 08, 2009

I downloaded Premiere 7.0 in hopes that I could end my long search for a video capture (from Sony dv camcorder)and editing software and hardware. 7 proved to be like the other Windows based programs. I have the required hardware using Windows XP. The capture would start and then stop and I would get the driver error I see sprinkled throughout these forums. I tried the winDV add on I saw mentioned.

SOLUTION: I walked the old Sony camcorder upstairs, plugged it into my son's single core processor Mac mini and it imports video fine and waits for me to edit it.

If you really want to work with video, give up on all these Windows based machines and software. The software is on every Mac and is ready to function perfectly. Bye.

Report · Apr 10, 2009

Going out and buying a new Mac is neither an easy or cheap fix. Bye.

Report · Feb 08, 2009

Mark,

Glad that you were able to get your setup working on the Mac.

Still, with over a hundred commercial DVD productions on my PC with Premiere, I find your solution to be specific to your particular situation.

When one experiences problems with most Adobe programs, it is centric to their system, and then OE as the next most often experienced situation.

This is not meant as an indictment of Mac. I've had clients who have only had them for the last 20 years. In that time, I've never been faced with a problem, that my PC's could not handle - video, or still.

Do not know what problems you were faced with, as I have not seen any, that I recall.

Still, whatever works for you, is good.

Hunt

Report · Feb 17, 2009

Adobe Premier Elements 7 regularly crashes or hangs indefinitely and needs to be killed.

No one place and not repeatable. Occasionally I get warned it was low on resources and I should save my work.

Running Vista Ultimate on a RAID1 250GB Array with 4GB RAM and a vista performance of 4.8.

I can use Nero, Sony, Creator and use MANY other programs; none of them crash or hang so don't tell me it is the drivers.
It is the program.

-jim

Report · Feb 17, 2009

Hmm. They must have sent you the buggy one, Jim. It works bug-free on my computers!

Report · Feb 17, 2009

Well, that was fun.
So I posted a reply to the message and then got prompted to login.
Which I did; and got a notice to migrate my account as the forums were changing; which I did; successfully I was told.

But my message never got posted. Seems like the web site runs like the software.

Any how, I have also contacted Adobe Support and exchanged many emails in which I was directed to existing documents and performed several "special" un-installs and re-installs all to no avail.

Any suggestions for making the software I paid money for work would be appreciated.

Thanks
-jim

Report · Aug 09, 2009

Jim,

The logged-out aspect was just so you'd feel like one of the "regulars." It happens to me, most often at Noon AZT and about 6:30PM, but can be random as heck. It has not been fun, but we all feel your pain. It has been a fact of life, since the forum changeover.

Now, for your problem. Please look down to post #24 in this THREAD. Read through the links that I furnished, as the answers to the questions posed will help us to help you.

With the necessary info, someone will be able to get your system and PrE running smoothly.

Good luck,

Hunt

Report · Feb 17, 2009

Both of your posts are there, Jim. You just need to click Show All Messages to see them.

Meantime, I wish you the best finding solutions. Your warm, positive attitude certainly inspires people to run to your aid.

Report · Feb 17, 2009

Jim,

You are not the only person to be frustrated with PE7 on a Vista system with 4.0 GB memory and respectable processing power. In my opinion Adobe rushed this one out the door without cleaning up how PE7 manages itself when needing large amounts of memory. There are potential ways for you to address this. Please be sure to click "Show All Messages" (or click on "previous" and study the other posts in this forum thread. I found post #30 very helpful. (See #30-#43 for other comments on this "tweak" which increases the amount of memory that a Vista process is allowed to use from the default of 2 GB to a specified larger value.)

You may also want to disable any anti-virus software that automatically scans newly created files; disable/stop PowerDVD or similar software that may conflict with your access to your DVD or Blu-Ray burner; and eliminate background jobs and/or services that may be competing for available memory.

I assume you are running 32-bit Vista Ultimate. You find it helpful to shut off some of the more demanding features (like aero interface and auto indexing.) I agree that it shouldn't be this difficult to make PE7 run on Vista, but it can be done (and it PE7 can do some amazing things when you get it working well). Good luck! (A previously frustrated / now happy user of PE7.)