Error compiling movie: out of memory !!! Premiere CS3

Question

Hey every1 --- desperate need of some guidance here. I've been all over the internet and these boards --- have seen this come up with a lot of people but no real solid answers that I'd seen or that have helped.
First off, my comp is an imac 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB memory. (just bought the computer last year)
I'm shooting with a canon 7d in HD (1920 x 1080p) and I'm editing using Premiere CS3. I've noticed that editing has become very difficult since I started using HD; playback is very choppy and the 'quality settings' in the preview monitor are a joke and do absolutely nothing whether it's on draft or automatic.
Anyway, despite the choppiness and slow editing, I was able to get a 3 min clip completed. These are my export settings:
Export > Movie
H.264
960 x 540
23.976 fps
Square pixels,
100% quality,
recompress: unchecked.
Once exported (I was able to export smaller timelines previously--- say, 50 secs of footage or so) the files look AMAZING and from there I use them for online video via vimeo -- stuff looks really awesome.
Anyway, recently I'm getting: 'Error compiling movie. Out of Memory. Change optimization preferences to memory', etc. etc. Well, I did as it asked and that did absolutely nothing.
So, I decided to open up my activity monitor and watch what's going on with my memory while premiere is exporting. I also closed ALL unused applications. System runs at about 2.16gb free memory before I start exporting. Memory seems stable during export UNTIL around the 50% exporting mark, and then its starts climbing like crazy and my memory just gets eaten up --- finally resulting in a crash at about 70% render.
I really don't know what else to do. Does my computer not have the power to export 3 min of HD footage??? This seems surprising to me ... I don't know what else to try.
Thanks for any help !!!
-Mark

Answer 1

Hi Mark,
Hope you are having a wonderful day.
Sorry to hear that you are having such a hard time. Although I did not specifically get the out of memory error, I can only be convinced that that is the problem.
Although I am not a computer whiz, I have learned my share of things. I have been troubleshooting a video all this week (really, a couple of months), but I had to put it aside and come back to it.
I tend to be talkative; so I will get back on topic or at least try to stay on topic, so bare with me. Smile....
Here is what I have learned and maybe it will help you with yours if you have not found a solution already.
Based on your hard drive specs and ram, I was thinking the same thing e.g. hard to believe that you are not able to render 3 minutes of video in HD. I primarily work in HD/1080p.
The place where we are similar is that I eventually could get the video to render by reducing the workspace that is rendered piece by piece until I was able to render the entire file. When I tried to encode the video, I kept getting error compiling messages. I tried different codecs, deleting xmpses, not rendering xmpses, etc. I could not figure out the keyframe trick so I just put in a black video from after effects. By the way, all of my videos intro the same and no problems with the other videos fading from black to a still photo.
Here is the problem from what I could gather.
Simply, out of memory. I was rendering and trying to encode a 45 minute video with after effects compositions and the dynamic linking kept timing out once the file reached a certain size. There were no other true fancy effects. I do alot on the green screen and just use after effects to make a white background. Smaller videos, rendering has been slow, but doable. This massive video would never compile. I won't bore you with my system specs, but know that similar to your situation, the system in theory should have been adequate.
Work around...
I ended up exporting the video as 3 separate 15 minute video clips. I could not get them to encode as .wmv files so I encoded them as .mp4 files. By the way, I still encoded in HD.
Here is the kool stuff.
After what seems like forever, I found a converter that could convert .mp4 to .wmv and rejoin the files to play as one large file with the same quality as my source file and no audio synching issues. By the way, I do not work for this company. I just found this encoder at 4 o'clock this morning after trying all of these other converters that were straight garbage or were free to try and not really free if you wanted quality. By the way, the conversion tool is not only user friendly, but free which is awesome.
The name of the software is Media Cope. Just visit www.mediacope.com.... Be sure to send the owner an e-mail to thank him and let him know that Mark sent you. I just sent him an e-mail earlier to let him know that I was going to post on Adobe what a wonderful software he created. I just needed something free, quick, easy, and user-friendly.
Whoops... got off topic....
I'll do a summary at the end for my recommendation to you.
Here are some other tidbits that I learned as well that may save you some time.
When editing this is what I do now...
1) I use CCleaner from www.piriform.com to quickly clean my system especially temporary files before I start editing and if I am switching from project to project.
2) In all of my troubleshooting this week, I found a kool little software call Smart Close. (Just google to find this one.) It closes all of your non-critical background files in order to maximize system resources. (When I am done editing, I just reboot and all of my background programs start up again. You do not have to do it that way, that's just how I do it. The nice thing is that it is a wizard interface; so you do not have to try to figure out if a process in the background is critical or non-critical.)
3) Depending on my mood and if I did not forget, smile.... I change the priority to high for the adobe products in the task manager.
More things that I learned...
1) We are not able to change the temp file for how Adobe encodes. My logic was if I could change the encoding to a hard drive that was simply empty so Adobe can render there, then I would be good. Wrong.... Adobe does not allow you to change the temp location. (Note: This is what I discovered in the different forums; so encoding to an external hard drive is not the best move. Read more to se why.)
2) It is best to have your scratch disks as your internal disk. If you have multiple internal disks, then you shoud check some other forums for the best way to set up your scratch disks. When I was just starting out, I bought an external hard drive enclosure with the thought that I would work primarily off of those external drives with the option of doing some RAID work. Bad idea... Even the simplest of tasks took forever. It was best to work off of the internal drive. By the way, I still use the enclosure hard drives for backups in order to allow me to free up some space on the primary hard drive. When rendering, it is truely a use of the RAM and the hard drive space in the editing process.
I'll leave you with this...
I take back what I said earlier, you do need a new computer with more RAM. If you can get 16 GB, great. The primary reason is that if you are editing in Premiere and if you do anything with dynamic linking into your after effects, it will cause your ram to climb as the file gets larger. Of course, be sure to get the largest hard drive possible as an internal drive, the maximum on processor speed, 64 bit operating system, etc.
I know you are like by now, Mark, what is the point of all of your gibberish... Really, it was to share with you and others on some really kool work arounds.
My recommendation for you are as follows.
1) You have already proven that you can render and encode 50 second clips and you are very happy with those clips, so create separate smaller clips for this particular project.
2) Once you have the final clips outputted, then use Media Cope to rejoin the files as one large file and you are done.
(Note: The one thing that I did notice is that there is a small break right between where the files are merged. The nice thing is that as a video editor/film maker, you will be the only person likely to notice it because you know where the breaks are. The other nice thing is that the untrained eye will not notice it and if you had to submit your work to a television station especially on DVD, the video system should recognize the file as one large file and play all the way through. Note: For the last sentence, I said 'should play all the way through' as I have not had a chance to check this one yet as I just finished this project today and still have to turn in all of my videos. I still have some more videos to merge.)
By the way, the only specs that I will share are that I work on a PC and it has 8 GB of ram.
The summary of the summary is that sometimes an error compiling message could simply be that your system does not have resources to render and the encode that large of a file. At least that is what I learned this week or at least my specific situation. The confirmation is that I just finished shooting a documentary which was one hour and some change and was able to render and encode to .wmv with no problems. Of course, I was not using after effects for this particular project.
In either case, hope all the information helps you with your project.
Have a wonderful day and happy holidays everyone.
Mark