Constant Crashing of MS9

geraghtyg · Post by **geraghtyg** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 1:15 pm

OK, this a problem that has been going on quite a while now. Upgraded to MS9 some months agao. All was fine for a while but in the past few months, I've been having terrible problems with the program crashing on me.
It happens when I'm working on a project in the edit mode and I go to play the project somewhere on the time-line (not in clip mode). A lot of the time, it plays ok but every so often (way too often!!!), instead of playing, the program will just hang when I hit play. The sandtimer will just sit there and when I go to task manager, the program shows as "not responding". I then have to close MS9 down in task manager and restart the whole thing. Very annoying and time consuming.
Thia has also meant that I'm pressing "ctrl+s" to save the project every single time I perform an action. If not, I tend to lose recent changes to the project.
It doesn't matter whether I working with AVI's or MPEGs. All projects are affected. I've already reinstalled the program, deleted old projects and video that is not neccessary. I defrag the drives regularly. PC is a 2.8GHz P4 with hyperthreading and 2GB RAM. HD's are both 7200MB speed - The one used for video storage also has an 8MB cache. So the system is capable.

ANyone have any ideas because this is really starting to annoy me and I'm so behind with various projects now

Thanks

Graham

BrianCee · Post by **BrianCee** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 6:37 pm

You may get a more meaningful response if you post this in the MediaStudio Forum

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 7:19 pm

Mediastudio 8 is in beta, there is no Mediastudio 9 yet. I suspect he's talking about Videostudio 9.

Constant crashing like that can have many causes, from hardware problems (bad RAM, overheating CPU, failing power supply) to software problems (viruses, spyware, corrupted or old system DLLs, codec packs).

geraghtyg · Post by **geraghtyg** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 10:49 pm

Apologies - Yes, it is VS9 - My bad

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 10:50 pm

I would first like to know how long you let the sandtimer hang there before terminating the program. A minute? Two? Or more?

I ask because I have very occasionally had the same situation in VS9, but perhaps I am just a bit more patient. I have to confess that I have never had it happen with Project replay, and my computer specs appear to be similar to yours (though I have a 3.0 GHz P4). But first, I would comment that Project replay is a fairly resource-intensive process and depending on the computer, could take quite some time for it to compose itself and manufacture a preview on the fly. This would be particularly the case, I would imagine, if you wanted to start Project replay some way into your video. Still, I would not imagine it would take more than a minute or two...

My own situation recently was with a video which I knew to be problematic (MPEG-2 which I had had to 'rescue' using a rescue program from a damaged DVD) in that it took ages to load in whatever program I chose, including VS 9. It would take nearly two minutes even to appear in the timeline, with the sandtimer showing all that time (and Task Manager, incidentally, showing that the program was not responding in that time). But it would eventually show up and I could use VS again. Similarly, when I made a few edits to the problem video, I had even longer waits (upt to 5 minutes or more), with sandtimer showing and Task Manager saying the program was not responding. The first couple of times I did as you did and terminated the program manually. But one time I went out to get a coffee, and when I got back, found that the edits had 'taken' and the program was responding again... That particular job took ages, but my point is that it worked. All it took was a bit of patience (and luck with the coffee break!

)

geraghtyg · Post by **geraghtyg** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 12:38 am

Thanks for that Ken. I'll leave it for a few mins next time it happens. Most I've waited before is maybe 1 minute.

Thanks again for such a prompt and detailed reply. I really appreciate it when people take their own time out to help other.

Have to pop to bed - its 01:30 here. I'll reply when I've got results, good or bad, for this problem.

Thanks again

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 1:08 am

Take a look at my earlier post
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... highlight=

You may or may not be affected by it. In my case I "think" I was probably trying to get the program to do to much too quickly and by splitting it up into two seperate and distinct tasks, what was taking 3 hours to render eventualy only took a couple of minutes.

geraghtyg · Post by **geraghtyg** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 4:49 pm

Hmmm, interesting all right but it seems to be different to my problem. It may happen with a fairly new just created project with very little in the way of transitions. And no extra titles or audio tracks. When I play projects from the timeline, I play them on the fly, in other words, instant play rather than pre-render first.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 10:23 pm

It might help to know exactly what you were doing when you sought to make the program play back in Project mode. I did a little experiment last night to test my methods and timings since otherwise I was only going by fuzzy memory of processes which I have not really thought about when I was doing them... if you get what I mean.

I used a 17 minute project which had about 50 clips in it, and it was edited with titles, transitions and added audio, both music and voice-over. In all cases (more than 20), Project playback worked in 5 seconds regardless of where I was in the timeline. The only time it did not work and the program became hung was when I physically dragged the little downward-pointing arrow marker in the calibrated time ruler along the top of the timeline back to the beginning of the whole project. The Task Manager showed minimal CPU usage but 1.2 GB RAM usage. Following my own advice outlined in my earlier post, I let it hang for about 5 minutes, with no sign of it coming good. So I used Task Manager to terminate the program. On reopening it, I was asked if I wanted to recover the closed project, which I accepted. (That was a mistake as I have my auto-save within VS 9 set to every 10 minutes, whereas I had been saving manually after each step I took. The project recovery appears to be linked to auto-save rather than manual save, so I had to re-do a couple of steps which thankfully only involved inserting two voice-overs. I should instead merely have reopened the existing project.) So I suspect, in my case at least, the hang was caused by the physically dragging of the timeline pointer.

In all the other cases, I followed what I regard to be the proper procedure of simply putting my mouse pointer somewhere in the calibrated time ruler and double-clicking. The timeline pointer then automatically places itself at that point, including at the beginning of the project. As I say, with this procedure, when I clicked on Project playback, it responded in every case by starting in 5 seconds. I even managed to play the whole project back once using Project playback. While there was the occasional momentary flicker (which does not appear in the final burned DVD), I was a little surprised even though my computer specs are good. When I had tried this in VS 7 and 8, on the same computer, the playback had become quite stuttery after a few minutes, and usually the video playback would freeze at a particular point and the audio continue playing. So VS9 seems a very definite improvement in this regard.

Curiously enough, one thing I did notice after using Project playback a few times, was that Clip playback would not work at all. I would get a distorted view of the first frame of the clip, but then nothing. If I then click on Project playback, it would work in 5 seconds. So the lack of clip playback is not a worrying factor to me. The clips all continue to playback from the library pane if I double click on them and they appear in the program monitor.

jrbmaclachlan · Post by **jrbmaclachlan** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 10:52 am

I have had this crashing problem but only recently. I tried going in to windows task manager and removing all user processes that I could. This included Roxio v8 applications which I had recently installed. I have not had the problem since(2 days) so there may be a conflict of interest somewhere
Robert

Post by **Ken Berry** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 11:06 am

There has been a long time reported conflict between Roxio and VS -- since as far back as I can recall editing video, which I confess is only about 3 years now. I am not condemning Roxio, which I am sure makes fine products. Only, I started with Ulead, and so do not even try to load Roxio on my computers...

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 12:13 pm

On reopening it, I was asked if I wanted to recover the closed project, which I accepted. (That was a mistake as I have my auto-save within VS 9 set to every 10 minutes, whereas I had been saving manually after each step I took. The project recovery appears to be linked to auto-save rather than manual save, so I had to re-do a couple of steps which thankfully only involved inserting two voice-overs.

Ken after opening the recovered 'save' and finding it wasn't as recent as your latest manual save, you could have simply opened your latest manual save.
The Auto Save uses a different filename and location to your manual one.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 9:15 pm

Ahhh!

But I suppose the real mystery would be to know exactly what arcana Ulead uses to label the auto-save and manual-save files!!! Much less where it might be stored -- the designated working folder or somewhere else?