Crashing during rendering

[b308]

Hi Folks

Very new to this game, so please bear with me! I have a Sony TRV 140E, after a few false starts I managed to capture the footage (only about 10 mins!) via the new Firewire card, after upgrading to XP and investing in Pinnacle Studio 9.

My computer has an Athlon 2800+ processor, 512mb RAM and 80gb hdd. The motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-MX with 32md integrated graphics. Hope that's enough of the techhie stuff!

The problem as you may have guessed is that it keeps crashing during rendering, always at different stages, in fact on one occassion it managed to do 29 and a bit of the 30 clip video which was very frustrating!

I have checked in the manual and it suggests shutting down background tasks and suggests "enditall" software - when I go to the link it seems it has been discontinued. When I went into Task Manager I am greeted by loads of programmes which appear to be running, but only recognise a small number of them!

So, the questions I need answered:
1. Is there any other softeware i can get to sort out the background tasks?
2. Do I need to get a seperate graphics card (I have a spare AGP slot)?
3. Any other suggestions?

Sorry its so basic!

Thanks

[redwudz]

http://www.docsdownloads.com/Tier1/enditall.htm

Or you can Google for it.

You would have to be running a lot of crap programs in the background to cause crashes during encoding.

BTW, graphics cards have nothing to do with encoding. On-board cards suck up some RAM, but usually not enough to cause problems unless you have less than 256MB RAM.

If you just upgraded to XP, not as good as a clean install, but should work. Random crashes during encodes are often a sign of bad memory modules. Do you have crashes during any other memory intensive programs? You might want to run a memory test like Mem86.

You could DL the trial version of TMPGEnc encoder to see if that crashes also, to eliminate the possibility of problems with your present encoding program.

Give all that a try, then get back to us if you are still experiencing problems.

[northcat_8]

My computer has an Athlon 2800+ processor, 512mb RAM and 80gb hdd. The motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-MX with 32md integrated graphics

We can read your computer specs using the computer button at the top of your post window That's a nice little feature Baldrick installed that saves you from having retype your tech info everytime.

The problem as you may have guessed is that it keeps crashing during rendering, always at different stages, in fact on one occassion it managed to do 29 and a bit of the 30 clip video which was very frustrating!

There are several reasons this could be happening.

I have checked in the manual and it suggests shutting down background tasks and suggests "enditall" software - when I go to the link it seems it has been discontinued. When I went into Task Manager I am greeted by loads of programmes which appear to be running, but only recognise a small number of them!

So, the questions I need answered:
1. Is there any other softeware i can get to sort out the background tasks?
2. Do I need to get a seperate graphics card (I have a spare AGP slot)?
3. Any other suggestions?

Several suggestions actually.

With Pinnacle Studio programs Video card does play a role in the stability of the program and could cause system hangs. I have S8 and my system would hang when encoding MPEG-2 files from DV-AVI. I upgraded my video card and problem solved. I wouldn't get all fired up and run right out and buy a new video card, there are many other things you can do to your system that won't cost you any money.

Also in S9 make sure you don't have "background rendering" selected. I don't even know why they have that option, it hangs the system everytime.

First, shut down all background programs. If you cannot find "EndItAll" on the web, email me and I'll email it to you. You can also download "Ace Utilities" that program has a startup manager and will allow you to delete startup entries from your msconfig startup tab. EndItAll will allow you to shut down programs that are already running on your PC. You can shut down most of them by right clicking on your clock and selecting "TASK MANAGER" and then selecting the "Processes" tab. Right click items you don't need and select "shut down", Windows will warn you that it could be hazzardous Just make sure you don't shut down "explorer.exe" The difference between Task manager and EndItAll is that EIA shows programs that may be hidden from TM. Don't worry about shutting down programs with Task Manager, if windows needs it, windows will either restart it, or won't let you shut it down. Caution: Some of those that you shut down may prevent you from accessing the internet. If you accidently shutdown something you needed, just reboot the PC.

Second, is your file system NTFS or FAT32? FAT32 has a 4 GB file size limit, where as NTFS does not. With Pinnacle products, 4 GB is about 15 minutes of DV-AVI video

Third, with only 512 MB of RAM, I suggest you change your page file to 1280 MB or 1536 MB. You can do that by going to:
Control Panel > system > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced Tab > Virtual Memory "change" button > select your HD, select custom settings and fill in 1536 for both the minimum and maximum > click the "SET" button, then click "OK" all the way out. You'll need to restart the computer for changes to take effect.

4th, you are trying to read and write video to the same IDE channel, you really need another HD. Partitioning it won't work..still the same IDE channel.

5th, make sure your HD has DMA enabled

6th, make sure your HD is not heavily fragmented

7th, check out www.blackviper.com and look for the "XP Services" by default windows has many services running that you simply don't need. This will also save you some memory as well as background tasks.

As a point of reference, when I am running video on my desktop, I have 16 processes running on my Task Manager Processes Tab and no hidden programs running. That is including the Studio 8 software. I shut down all anti-virus, I don't have windows restore running anyway, I shutdown the firewall, and anyother software running, you can see my PC specs under the computer button at the top of this post.

From my experience Studio programs are just very buggy, whatever you do don't listen to their tech support...which by the way is "uninstall > reg delete > re-install"... and their forum is just about as useless, since every post that puts their product in a bad light is instantly deleted.

Email: dcohio@bright.net

[tomwil]

7th, check out www.blackviper.com and look for the "XP Services" by default windows has many services running that you simply don't need. This will also save you some memory as well as background tasks.

www.blackviper.com seems to be a site under construction. Is there another link we can refer to?

[northcat_8]

I would just wait until it comes back up.

There is another one, something like call kelly, or kellyswindows or something like that, you can find the site link on microsoft's support boards.

But Blackviper is much better, that dude is way too deep into windows.

[spectroelectro]

Your problem is probably not your computer or OS; more likely it's Pinnacle Studio 9, which is a very poor program. I run Adobe Premiere 6.5 and Ulead Media Studio Pro on a P4 2.4 Ghz with 256 megs of ram and a 60 meg hard drive nad have never had a problem with a crash during rendering. If rendered output is too large to fit on the HD, Premiere will stop with ane rror but won't crash the computer.

Somewhere around 1/4 of all the reported problems on this board probably trace back to Pinnacle's crummy capture/editing software. If I were you, I'd ditch it and get a really good NLE AVI editing program. There are only 3: Vegas Video, Adobe Premiere (or Premiere Pro) and Ulead MediaStudio.