Help - lots of problems - very frustrated with PRE7

Question

I've been working on a project for some time with much difficulty and once I solve one problem another comes up and different problems occur each time I work with the video. Here's where I'm at - any and all help would be EXTREMELY helpful.
- Virtual Memory - I get message often that it's low. I incresed my page file to 3048. I have all of the files on my external hard disc (200GB with 50GB free) and the actual PRE file on my computer (100GB with 24Gb free). The video is 30minutes long (when i try to burn to DVD it's 1.84GB, to .flv 70MB and to Mpeg 1318MB). The video is made up of still images, video, and music. I've already resized all images to 1000x750 and made sure all video is DV-AVI.
- Errors - I get all sorts of error messages. Some times the porject won't load and it's says PRE has to close. When I'm able to get the program to open I've successfully rendered it and saved it. But when I try to burn to DVD I've gotten transcode error at 5% or I get a message saying "The exception unknown software exception (0xc000000d) occurred in the application at location 0x78138aa0. Click on OK to terminate the program." Or it just freezes and does nothing.
- when trying to make it a .flv or .mpeg I get a message saying failed to return a video frame - cancelling operation.
Does anyone have any suggestions?? One idea is I have Premiere CS3 and I thuoght of putting the movie in there but then the whole thing appears as a sequence that I can't edit. Is there a way of editing it once converting it to Premiere or do I have to rebuild the whole thing? I'm so frustrated at this point and feel that I get different messages each time and after trying to troubleshoot this on my own for the past week I just can't figure it out.

Answer 1

- Errors - I get all sorts of error messages. Some times the porject won't load and it's says PRE has to close. When I'm able to get the program to open I've successfully rendered it and saved it. But when I try to burn to DVD I've gotten transcode error at 5% or I get a message saying "The exception unknown software exception (0xc000000d) occurred in the application at location 0x78138aa0. Click on OK to terminate the program." Or it just freezes and does nothing.
This error/error type is very often caused by a memory error, and most often with either the Page File, or by some program not reporting memory usage properly to the OS. That is why full disclosure on your Virtual Memory setup is critical. Also, what programs are also running, and what Processes are loaded? Task Manager>Processes will tell you. You likely have some loaded Process that is acting up. Also, when you get a crash, immediately open Event Viewer. Look in System and Application tabs. Open ALL yellow warning messages, and ALL red error messages. Follow all links provided. Some might give you a clue as to what is happening and why. Some will just be obscure code and of no use. Do not get frustrated if most are just code. Look for the ones with real info and also links - follow those links and read.
[Edit] For a closer look at Event Viewer, see this ARTICLE.
- when trying to make it a .flv or .mpeg I get a message saying failed to return a video frame - cancelling operation.
This is a common error when one has any gap in the Video Timeline. Zoom in to the frame-level in horizontal scale. set through the Clips, looking for any gap. If you get this message, note the % of Export/Transcoding. PE has a two-pass encoder, so you may have to do the math to really get you close to the spot, i.e. 50% of the operation is pass 1 of 100% of the Timeline. If you get it with say 98%, then you do know that it's happening near the end of your project, so the math aspect is diminished a bit. Sometimes gaps will Encode fine, other times a 1-frame gap will bring a Project to its knees.
Good luck,
Hunt