Mac Pro Freezing Up in Premiere

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Mac Pro Freezing Up in Premiere

I have recently purchased Adobe Premiere, and I can edit stuff between 5-30 minutes, but then some small edit I will do will bring up the pin wheel and I have to hold down the power button to restart. Force quitting will wipe the program off the screen, but if you keep pulling up force quit in the finder, it will keep showing it as running. Also, the little arrow on the icon is the toolbar will be there as if the program is still up. Sometimes I will have this same problem with Firefox, Pro Tools etc, where Force Quit makes the window disappear, but doesn't seem to stop it from running.

I have a Mac Pro Quadcore 3khz with 5 gig of ram, and my system monitor will say I have 3 gigs of ram available while running Premiere.

I want to update to the newest ProKit update as well as the Firmware updates to see if that helps, but last time I updated (10.4.11), My computer became a brick and would only boot into my Bootcamp partition. Luckily I had a Mac laptop and I was able to hook the computrs together and do an update via firewire to get things back to normal. Does anyone know if those issues are resolved now? I would hate to update and get another Mac OS partitioned brick.

Thanks for any help and advice!

Swaff

Mac Pro Quadcore 3khz, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 5 gig ram

Posted on Jul 29, 2008 10:18 AM

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Answer 1

swaffdawg Author

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Jul 29, 2008 11:39 AM in response to swaffdawg

As a followup, I just ran Rember to test all the ram, and it says all the sticks are good.

Swaff

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Answer 2

swaffdawg Author

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Jul 30, 2008 1:20 PM in response to swaffdawg

I have also tried recording using the system drive and an external, and the external doesn't help matters any. Any other ideas?

Swaff

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Answer 3

The hatter

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Jul 30, 2008 2:29 PM in response to swaffdawg

I would start with using some internal drives for audio files.

If you don't use SuperDuper or something to clone your system, add that to your routine.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Your boot drive is getting punished with those hard restarts and the directory and filesystem plus files are probably getting scrambled. I'd order MicroMat TechTool Pro 4.6.x and/or Disk Warrior to straighten things out.

Something is corrupt but hard to know, or find, what it is other than to have an earlier backup from before the problems. And search Adobe for ideas. You should not have trouble with Firefox other than corrupt prefs, cache, or something. Cleaning out browser cache (or disable disk cache).

I keep the OS and apps on their own drive. My home account is on drive #2 along with media files. Scratch and editing on separate drive or partition. The whole thing runs smoothly.

Sometimes I've spent days trying to find out why, only to give up and just restore or reinstall the OS which was quicker and solved problem. Sometimes creating a new test user account is suggested to try to isolate it to personal home library or something.

I have to say that having an emergency boot drive is an essential that you can use to repair your boot drive and other drives, along with backups of your data, and of your "working system" (when it is back to working reliably).

Best bet to get through this is to focus on a fresh install on another drive and carefully update it to 10.5.4 and then backup; then install all your programs and make a second backup. Then gradually import and add prefs and files.

And watch the temperature of your RAM, drives, etc to make sure heat or high temps aren't a factor.

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Answer 4

swaffdawg Author

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Aug 24, 2008 5:50 PM in response to The hatter

Thanks for the ideas, Hatter. I bought Disk Warrior and ran it and cleaned up my system, but I am still getting freeze-ups. When this happens, I can't get Premiere to quit totally it seems. I can force quit, through the finder, but if I bring up the force quit dialog again, it will keep showing Premiere over and over as if it's not really quitting. Also, I can't make the computer restart once I get the "pinwheel of death" in Premiere. The only way I am able to restart is hold down the power button to shut down.

Maybe it is the temperature? How can I keep an eye on the temp to see if that might be it? Other than that, any other ideas, anyone?

Please help!

Swaff

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Answer 5

swaffdawg Author

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Aug 24, 2008 7:15 PM in response to swaffdawg

As a followup, I installed smcFanControl, and the cpu is not getting over 32c. I don't think overheating is the problem.

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Answer 6

swaffdawg Author

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Aug 25, 2008 5:24 PM in response to swaffdawg

Any other ideas anyone?

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