Inspiring

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Troubleshooting chronic Productions crashes

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 18, 2022
6 replies
1712 views

I've been working on a show for the past few months with three other editors and for the most part this has been a pretty smooth workflow (this is my first time using Productions). In the last week, we've been experiencing an increasingly large number of crashes. It started with one editor's computer (iMac Pro) and spread to two others (cheese grater Mac Pros). The crashes seems to happen with projects dealing with a specific character, so media involving that character could be an issue which we are trying to figure out.

Here is my workflow. All of the projects I will mention exist within the Production for this show

I have a master project where I ingest all of my camera and sound media. This is where I do my syncing and sorting. Once everything is broken down into scenes or interviews, I create merged clips of the camera and sound and lay those clips out in a timeline based on time code. From there, I create a new project for each scene or interview and put those merged clips and timelines in there. In those projects all of the logging and selects are done. When one of us starts to actually edit a scene, a new project is created and the only thing that exists in those projects are sequences and sometimes maybe a music track. We pull from the logged project so we can keep the project from getting bogged down. Finally we will make an episode project and copy and past from the scene edits. There are also projects for music and archival material (all of which has been ripped in After Effects to ProRes quicktimes).

Everything was shot on a Sony FX9 so I do the Color Space override to REC709. We originally started this show in Premiere 2020 where we didn't need to do that (I've gone back and changed the color space to all of the media imported using 2020 and recreated/replaced the merged files) but switched to 2022 to take advantage of the transcription feature.

One thing I noticed today is that one of the projects that has been crashing a bunch, which only has one sequence of a 2-3 minute scene is 24MB while full episodes are less than that and some of my master proejcts with TBs of media are only about 10MB. We're not doing any effects and any graphics are simple text layers for lower thirds and simple titles.

We're all working from a QNAP shared storage with media and projects are different drives. All media cache files are going to local internal storage.

1 trash can Mac Pro

2 cheese grater Mac Pros

1 iMac Pro

all running Premiere 2022.4 and Catalina 10.15.7

I'm sure there will be questions so throw them at me. We have a dealine and this crash issue is really slowing us down.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Jon Coyopa

It seems like this whole issue was just do to a single clip with Warp Stabilizer on it underneath another clip. The file size still seems kind of large at 14MB but we can work and that's all that matters right now.

This makes sense as the editor that first used it, was the first one to have crashing issues and why it seemed to spread to the other computers.

I'll keep you posted if something happens where crashes come back but I think I we're getting out of the woods.

J

Jon CoyopaAuthor

Inspiring

Does anyone have an insight on this? The issue has slightly evolved to opening and saving taking 10+ minutes

Bruce Bullis

Legend

That sounds like a very different issue. Opening and saving what, specifically?

Those files with GUID-like names are temporary projects, which PPro was somehow not permitted (for some reason; permissions? concurrent access error? disconnected ethernet cable?) to rename. Those are safe to delete.

J

Jon CoyopaAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

It seems like this whole issue was just do to a single clip with Warp Stabilizer on it underneath another clip. The file size still seems kind of large at 14MB but we can work and that's all that matters right now.

This makes sense as the editor that first used it, was the first one to have crashing issues and why it seemed to spread to the other computers.

I'll keep you posted if something happens where crashes come back but I think I we're getting out of the woods.

Bruce Bullis

Legend

> In the last week, we've been experiencing an increasingly large number of crashes

What changed about the projects in the Production, and/or your systems' configurations, in that last week?

>The crashes seems to happen with projects dealing with a specific character, so media involving that character could be an issue which we are trying to figure out.

We don't (yet) have character detection in PPro, so it's likely a problem with the media itself. 😉

>When one of us starts to actually edit a scene...

Did the editor on the iMac Pro begin editing a new/different scene, about a week ago? Perhaps the other editors integrated that editor's work into their own, over the course of that week...?

About starting in 15.x ("2020") but moving to 22.x ("2022"); that move happened more than a week ago, right? Also of interest: You cleared all editorial machines' media cache, when you changed PPro versions, yes?

> One thing I noticed today is that one of the projects that has been crashing a bunch, which only has one

> sequence of a 2-3 minute scene is 24MB while full episodes are less than that and some of my master
> proejcts with TBs of media are only about 10MB. We're not doing any effects and any graphics are

> simple text layers for lower thirds and simple titles.

Sounds like you've narrowed down the problem, substantially. Can you provide a project, with media, that reliably reproduces the crash you're seeing? [I've emailed you a link to some upload space; we everything uploaded is treated as confidential.]

J

Jon CoyopaAuthor

Inspiring

I'm not sure what prompted me to try this but I just duplicated 25MB project and the copy is only 2.10MB.

J

Jon CoyopaAuthor

Inspiring

Bizarre! Does the 'compact' one open correctly?

I opened a different project to look for somethign else and when I looked back at the production window, the duplicate project files was now 23.8MB. I duplicated that and got another small version but when I went to open that I got an error message. I got the error message a few more times and each time the file size got bigger until it finally opened the size grew to 20MB.

I also just noticed these unix files in the folder that contains the actual project files

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi,

Sorry for the frustration. It's rather hard to get at the heart of your problem as there are several possibilities. What standard troubleshooting steps have you taken so far? Dumped media cache and preferences yet? Can you give us a Media Info screenshot of your media properties from the problematic footage you mentioned?

Are you using proxies or transcodes for these legacy machines and your 4K footage? I don't think Sony footage works very well in iMacs with the Xeon chips as there is no Quick Sync available (which also explains why the trash can is best). You would need proxies or transcodes there too. Shared storage can also be a source of performance and crashing issues, especially a NAS. You can troubleshoot that by taking that out of the workflow and testing without it. Hope we can help.

Thanks,

Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

R Neil Haugen

Legend

First, you definitely need to go through this new resource:

Adobe Long-form and Episodic Best Practices Guide

It's highly detailed, practical, and well laid out information on practical use of PrPro for basically anything.

One thing I see in your comments above is you mention using 'merge clips' to marry video + audio. This is NOT a "best practice" as that is simply meant for a quick joining of two dissimilar 'clips' for practical use. It does NOT keep the audio metadata though, and will NOT work if you need to do a turnover via AAF or whatever to an audio person working in ProTools or basically any DAW.

The proper joining of video with separate audio for nearly all uses is the sorta mis-named "Multicam Process". Whether it's actually multiple cameras or not is irrelevant. This is the best way to join video files with separately recorded audio in any pro workflow.

And is covered both in the above document and further on Jarle Leirpoll's blog ... Jarle was the senior writer for the above doc, btw ... which is why it's so practical and useful.

Jarle’s blog expansion of the pdf Multicam section: Premiere Pro Multicam

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

J

Jon CoyopaAuthor

Inspiring

Thank for that info. I'll go over it and see if I can implement any thing that might be helpful.

The one new thing for all of us working on this is the Productions workflow, which has been great most of the time. For all of the time lost this week, it has made things speedy overall.

We all have long form experience and after a discussion of merged v multicam and some tests it was decided that merged clips were the best way to work with how the other editors work. Plus, if run your final edit through Resolve and bring that Resolve XML back into Premiere, you have a sequence with original camera media and orginal audio files thus preserving the audio metadata (this was double checked in Pro Tools). I've done a bunch of long form/feature stuff with merged files before with very minor issues. It's an extra step but the effort is minimal and it works. Plus it's too late to turn back now.

We think we've narrowed it down to a specific interview which is a common element in all of these problematic projects. I'm going to try to use the files from the back up drive and see if that helps anything.

It's probably nothing but I'm curuous as to why this one project with minimal media in it has the largest file size.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

This is perhaps a good time for @Bruce Bullis to pop in ...

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

J

Jon CoyopaAuthor

Inspiring

I should note that all of the computers have plenty of memory and internal storage available to handle the work, plus the trash can Mac Pro, on paper, has the worst specs but has been performing the best.

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