Adobe Premier video rendering issue

[d-taylor]

Good afternoon,

 

Our users on our network are experincing an issue when rendering a video in Premier Pro (from CS3 Master Collection):

 

Audio Preview Error

 

Error compiling movie.

 

Unknown error.

 

[OK]

 

When they launch Premier they get told the scratch disk can't run on C:\ and has been redirected to their My Documents on N:\ (which is expected due to the way our computers are set up.)

On Friday they were making basic videos with still images and had no issues. Monday, the users were trying to make videos with video clips and were reporting the issue. However, they can't render videos with still images now either.

I was out of the office Friday so didn't make any changes to the network.

I have tried giving a user an unlimted quota on their My Documents folder, this didn't help (hoped it was an issue that the scratch disks didn't have enough space.) There are no clues in the Windows application log.

Any ideas on how to fix the issue or even gather some more clues onto what caused the error?

 

I've been round in circles on the adobe website for about 30mins trying to get support, you need to register but I can't because it's a volume license key. Incredibly frustrating.

 

Thanks,

 

Daniel

[laserblazer]

Have you tried the Adobe forums? Is N: a network drive? Seems like it would be having to work pretty hard.

[d-taylor]

Yup, I've posted on the Adobe forums. N: is a network drive, and I do appreciate the strain it could cause, especially with a whole class using it. Someone on the Adobe forums has suggested it's not suitable for network use, but it's difficult to tell the member of staff this when it was working on the Friday! That might have to be what I tell I him in the end, if I do get it working the performance is going to be dire with a whole class using it at the same time, especially as all a year group are on the same server.

[RTFM]

I have spoken to Abode support and they do not support networking of Adobe. They claim it isnt built for it and networks cant handle it.

 

We have had to work around plenty of issues with our CS4 Master Collection since depolyment last Summer and they wouldnt help at all.

 

As for your rendering issue, we havent had any issues with rendering. We've had problems with severe video lag on playback when opening a project from my documents (which redirects to students home drives but uses UNC path \\fileserver\xxxxxxxx\xxxxxxxx\x etc) and Adobe just doesnt like it, we have advised they have to use the H drive mapped in my computer (H:\) and this is the same for other mapped network drives.

 

As for the scratch disk issue, we have the same problem, we always thought it was because we have restricted access to the C drive and i think i read that users need modify rights to C to use it as scratch (or something) so we make sure they

 

1) save the file to H: when setting up

2) make sure scratch is set to same destination as save location (obviously H:) as well

 

This has resolved most issues we have had with playback, saving, etc etc.

 

I am not sure if any of the above will be useful but thats what sprung to mind when reading your post

[d-taylor]

The Documents and scratch file are both on the same path, N:\ (which is the same concept as your H:\) and the students see this as N:\ rather than a UNC path.

 

I get the feeling that even if I resolve the issue there will be other issues anyway, as you say Adobe don't support network use. I will have a discussion with the ICT Resources manager and the teacher in question, I think this may be unvialble

[ict_support]

You will find that the minimum speed that you can get premier to edit across the network is 1000Mbs if your network has 100Mb switch between the PC and the fileserver with your N: drives on it won’t work

[ict_support]

Also your fileserver has to be up to the job too

[d-taylor]

We have a storage area network with 4GB/s fiber disks where servers store the users home folders, 2 of the IT suites he's been trying to run this in have gigabit switches with 10 Gigabit uplinks, but the issue persists in those rooms

[Marci]

Eliminate the network issue first by finding a machine with the current issue, and copying all required sources to local drive and try doing it all from there. If you get the same error doing it from local drive then the fact that you're using it networked is nothing to do with the problem no matter how ill-advised it is to doso.

 

1 - What resolution are the still images? Premier needs enough ram to render each frame of video at it's export resolution, and load in the images into memory to then downscale to merge them in to the export. If you're using large resolution stills then yes, you can get errors, usually as you approach the memory limits, which requires you to then downsample the images to the same res as the project file to get them to go thru. It especially hates working with hi-res tifs for instance.

 

2 - What encoding settings are you using for export? I've been doing a video for a few days from HDV source which wouldn't export as WMV or H264, but would export fine as FLV, AVI, or MOV compressed as PhotoJPEG... never found the reason.

 

3 - What format are the audio files in question? It's issue is an Audio Preview Error, which kinda hints that the export engine can't decode the audio properly... I always transcode all audio to 48Khz 16bit Wav before using within Premiere.

 

4 - If titles are being used, check fonts. Open up a Title Editor window, hit the type tool, then scroll thru the full list of fonts. If at anypoint Premiere bombs out whilst doing this then you've got a font installed that it doesn't like (rendering the fonts preview in the font dropdown selector is enough to trigger the error), and if it comes across this font during the export (ie: someone's managed to succesfully use it in a title somewhere) then it'll crash out with a spurious error.

[ict_support]

We have a storage area network with 4GB/s fiber disks where servers store the users home folders, 2 of the IT suites he's been trying to run this in have gigabit switches with 10 Gigabit uplinks, but the issue persists in those rooms

 

Well your network sounds upto it! and with the advice RTFM gave you it should work fine... I would try a local only import / render as Administrator and see if that works

[d-taylor]

OK, I've discovered running an Adobe Update and bringing Premier up to version 7.2 fixes the issue. Just need to figure out how to get all the PC's to update now (thinking maybe a Winstall package?)

 

Daniel

[jestersmith]

In CS4, I had the same message and fixed it by changing the location of the scratch disks back to under the Adobe Premiere Pro folder. Once I did that, it rendered fine. I also am on a network. I had the same problem in Captivate and wonder now if this will solve that problem as well. Bottom line is, when you first set up a new project, do not create / save scratch disk folders outside of the c:/program files/Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 folder.

 

I didn't find this solution anywhere, so please copy and paste if you're logged in elsewhere and it works for you. THX.

 

JS