Random freeze or stop while exporting to tape in Premiere Pro CS4

[LghtAndDrk]

I have an i7 2.93 GHz with 3GB DDR-3 RAM. I have a Zotac TX295 video card. The system is a dual boot with Vista Ultimate 32 bit/XP Pro 32 bit. I am primarily using Vista. I have 2TB between2 RAID pairs, 750GB OS drive and a separate 750GB data drive. It's an Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard.

Windows, Adobe hardware firmware, etc. is all up to date.

4 weeks ago (6/6) I successfully exported over 8 hours of DV footage to a DVCAM and a mini-DV camera. Now i keep having a tape export problem. One of two things happens:

1. The tape will not record the full length of the project, not report any dropped frames but say it was successful. It's random. It can be a minute into the project or 30 minutes into it when it happens. When this happens you see the camera viewfinder flicker to a blue screen real quick before returning to the video and stop recording.

2. The video hits a random frame and continues recording but frozen on that frame with the sound stuttering on the sound of a single frame.

As of tonight now, I have an additional issue where once you try to export Premiere slows down dramatically. But, if I turn off or disconnect the camera from the computer everything suddenly speeds back up.

All the while Premiere still reports I have about 1.2GB of free memory. I even set the Page File to min. of 3 GB and a max of 6 GB

Here's what I have tried but have still had no success:

1. I brought the project into a new one and deleted the render files and then re-rendered.

2. I exported the project out as a new AVI, brought that into a new project.

3. I exported the project out as a new AVI, switched to the XP OS, brought it into a new project in different scratch disk folders on a different hard drive.

4. I held down Shift while Premiere started to clear the plug-in cache.

5. I tried to different cameras, firewires and the firewire connection on my firewire card and coming off the motheboard.

Now the only recent changes that I'm aware of in the last 4 weeks are as follows (I listed what I did to try to resolve the issue):

1. I updated my RAID controller card so I moved the files to a non-RAID drive thinking the firmware update created a problem.

2. I updated the video card drivers so I rolled them back to the version they were 4 weeks ago.

3. I saw that there was a .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 update. According to Microsoft this only provided a security patch for Firefox.

I can't figure out what's going on. I can't export this project yet 2 projects that are from 4 weeks ago or older seem to export to tape fine. And the weird thing is if I take the exported clip of this project that won't export to tape and bring it to my friend's computer who has Premiere Pro 2.0 it exports to tape successfully every time.

I don't trust the stability of the software now. I even had a few weird instances that when mono clips were imported Premiere randomly saw them as stero clips.

Any ideas? I have another major project to start and the instability is really worrying me. Please contact me at lghtanddrk@aol.com. Thanks.

[minidv2dvd]

bring up the task manager, ctrl-alt-del. click on the processes tab and then click on "cpu" twice to bring what's using the most cpu cycles to the top. watch it as you try to print to tape. see what might be hogging the cpu and what the total usage is. if it stays under 100% and nothing appears amiss there, then i'd guess there's something wrong in your hard drives/controllers that is causing dropped frames. are the drives all in dma mode or has windows reset them to pio or dual fifo?