Rendering problems

[jepeve]

Hello everyone,
I am new with PE8 (using Pinnacle before -nice but buggy). My problem is rendering. During the proces there are unexpected stops. Sometimes a message "unknown error", mostly without any message. I reduced the lenght of the film to max 20 minutes and then it is mostly OK (but to burn that to a DVD is pretty inefficient). I also tried to render to my harddisk in standart AVI format and merge them later before burning, but with same problem. I tried the Microsoft AVI format that took 5hrs 45min to render for 20 minutes video. Since I know RAM is often the bottleneck, I increased to 8 GB. Helas without any improvement. Source video's are in .avi format (from miniDV- Sony DCR TRV33E-via firewire) and are captured without problems (so far).
My system is an ASUS Rampage Extreme with Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83 Ghz. 64 bit Windows7 Ultimate. 4 (now 8 GB) ram Geil DDR3 Cash latency 6.0. HD for video 1TB internal and 2 CD/DVD reader/burner.
My 2 questions are as follows:
1. Does anybody know how to prevent these unexpected errors
2. Since during rendering only 40% of RAM and less than 40% of CPU's is used, I wonder whether there is a possibility to increase efficiency.
Thanks a lot on beforehand,

John

[Steve Grisetti]

Welcome to Muvipix, John! You'll always find help here!

Much depends on what you're using as your source files and which project settings you're using in Premiere Elements. You say this is video captured by Premiere Elements from a miniDV camcorder? If you're using the DV project settings, you shouldn't need to render your video until you add effects or transitions to it. (In fact, when you add your miniDV footage to your timeline, there should not be a red or green line above it.) Is this the case?

You also say you "tried to render my harddisk in standard AVI format." I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. The ideal format for Premiere Elements is the DV-AVI format -- the format the video comes in as when it's captured from a miniDV camcorder over a FireWire connection.

There could be other issues. (Many people, for instance, are getting buggy behavior from Premiere Elements 8 on Windows 7 64-bit.) But at least 90% of the time, it's related to a conflict between your source video and your project settings.

[jepeve]

Thanks Steve for your quick reaction. What I ment is that I tried all kind of different ways to prevent this problem, a.o. rendering to my computer's harddisk either in the standard .avi or in the Microsoft AVI format.
I also found the Tech Note on Adobe's Helpdesk on "Frequent and inexplicable crashes with Premiere Elements 8" and will follow their recommendations as well.
By the way, I ordered your book on this application but in order to bring transportation costs to the Netherlands down, the delivery time will be around the end of May. Hopefully by that time the technical problems will be solved.
Thanks again and have a good weekend.
John

[Steve Grisetti]

Thank you for supporting the book, John. I do hope Amazon is exaggerating how long it actually takes to ship a book to the Netherlands, however!

If it's any consolation, I've had books shipped as far away as Australia, and it's never taken more than two or three weeks for the books to arrive. I'm sure Europe won't take even that long.

[jepeve]

Dear Steve. It looks like you were absolutely right! Although they looked alright, I again captured a number of video's, this time under PE8- previously I used Corel. To my delight, no problems by burning them to DVD occurred. This is already a 300% improvement. Thanks a lot. Indeed there were no red or green lines over the time line.
The only problem I now encountered, was the fact that although I removed the checkmark at "splitting in scenes?", it did split in 141 scenes, consequently filling an enormous part of the righthand screen with all these clips. Is there something I can do to switch that off? I also have the feeling that burning to disk best can be done after a reboot of the computer in order to clear all cashes. The proces remains to be critical!
Thanks again for your recommendations.
John

[Steve Grisetti]

I've heard of this issue -- the program splitting scenes even when you tell it not to -- but I haven't experienced it and don't know a solution. Sorry.

But I'm thrilled to hear you've gotten much better quality using Premiere Elements to capture your videos!