Movie File Authoring Problem (1 Viewer)

I'm working on a movie project (editing DV clips into a movie), and I'm having a problem with my authoring software constantly "hanging" and giving me the "Not Responding" message, forcing me to close the program out.

This happens with any program I've tried including Windows Movie Maker2, Sonic MyDVD, ArcSoft ShowBiz, and MGI VideoWave 4 SE. All these programs came with various hardware I've purchased, and I've tried both re-installing these programs as well as only having one on my system at a time so that I can try and avoid conflicts between any of these programs.

I'm running Windows XP on a 2.8GHZ P4 machine with 512MB of RAM.

I have the latest Norton AV updates, and my virus scan is current. I usually disable Norton's auto-protect feature as well as my firewall when working in my authoring program(s) in order to try and keep resource use to a minimum. I've zapped as much spyware as possible off my system with ad-aware and have used spy-bot as well.

Any thoughts? Could it be some registry problem? (Oh man, I hope not).

Buzz,

Thanks for the response. Two quick questions...
1. Do you have a link for a ram checker (or will google return some good leads)?
2. If the checker points out a problem, what next?

Thanks.

Buzz,

I found a couple RAM checker apps, and will try them out later today/tomorrow.

If they tell me that I've got problems, could it be something as simple as a BIOS setting that needs tweaking? I would think (hope) that with 512MB RAM I should be able to run just about any program. Thinking about it more, I have problems with any DVD authoring program, and I can't use the record function in my TV tuner card/software without getting hung up. I was thinking that the software that came with the card was buggy, but now am inclined to think it's something else since I can't even get Windows Movie Maker to work in a stable manner. Thanks for any insight.

Buzz,

I’ll give the memory tester programs that I found (names escape me at the moment; I’m at work) a shot this weekend and see if I can come up with anything. Hopefully they tell me everything is OK. The memory that came with my system happens to be one Crucial 512MB DIMM.

I was looking through the MS knowledge base and found an article that mentioned hanging issues with Movie Maker2 that might apply to what I’ve been doing with this program and the others I’ve tried. The article stated that a cause for hanging could be that movie file sizes are too large for memory to handle, and that the machine will hang. It mentioned working with smaller movie file sizes and/or increasing paging memory capacity. I took two mini-DV tapes that I have and captured them to my computer for editing in my authoring program(s). Each 60 minute DV tape is now an almost 4GB file, and I’m trying to edit each one of these into separate scenes by trimming out the stuff I don’t need. I could be overloading my system by asking it to work on ~4GB files with 0.5GB of RAM. I could try breaking apart the files and trim smaller pieces to organize separate viewable chapters vice one long movie with chapter points. Does this make any sense? Everything else on my PC seems to be working properly, and I consider myself fairly competent in keeping it tuned. I’m hoping that this is one of those things that has a simple answer (and happy ending) following an inordinate amount of work. Thanks for any insight, and have a great week.

Don't bother breaking up the files, their size has (little or) no effect on RAM use. They are streamed from the hard drive. If one needed one's RAM to exceed the size of one's video files, no one would be doing non-linear editing.

I once had a firewall that prevented me from starting Premiere, and MyDVD never worked for me when I was stuck with it. But the fact that you've tested different programs suggests a system wide issue. I'd look to the video card and capture device first.

Desktop video is fun, huh?

Hey guys,

Great points made by all. When experiencing the hanging, I was conducting editing operations within my authoring programs (only one program open at a time); specifically I was trimming the length of scenes to organize them on the storyboard. I had my firewall and Norton Auto-Protect disabled to free up as many resources as possible.

My graphics card is the ATI Radeon 8500 LE 128MB that came with my ABS system. I used the Sony-included PIXELA software to capture the video. Maybe I should recapture it with one of the other programs and start from scratch.

Yeah, desktop video is fun. I like messing with it, but I've put in my time and would like to be able to come up with some results. I was authoring a demo DVD for a previous project, and my wife was away visiting her folks when I "locked on" and pulled two all-nighters figuring out the intricacies of that one. Mission success, but I won't have the same kind of available time on this project, and I figured it'd be a whole heck of a lot easier since these programs seemed to make it easy.

I'm a bit hesitant to run the RAM checker program as I don't want to add yet another potential area of change or failure to the process. Maybe I'll just try to redo my capture with one of the programs and stick with just that one to do the authoring. I'll let you know how that works, but it will take a day or two. Have a great weekend guys!

Hey again,

Problem solved.

I did a RAM checker program and (thankfully!) found that all is well with my memory.

Reading back over the MS Knowledge Base article, I decided to check out my Paging File size and found it to be on a 766MB setting. Upping it to its max of 4096MB and rebooting has allowed me to work with and edit movie files with no problems (so far). I was surprised that 766 was what this setting was as it's not a power of 2. In any event, things seem to be OK now.

Would anyone mind letting me know what their Paging File settings are? Things seem to be working, but I'd like to see what other settings look like. This info can be found by going to CTRL panel -> system -> advanced-> performance -> settings -> advanced -> virtual memory; there's an "initial size (MB)" value and "max size (MB)" value in the "custom" mode where mine had been set; Below that, there's a "Total Paging Files Size For All Drives" section with "Minimum", "Recommended" and "Currently Allocated" values.

My values look like this: initial size: 4096; max size: 4096; Minimum: 2; Recommended: 766; Currently Allocated: 4095 (1MB must be reserved for the MS god or something )

Have a great weekend, and thanks for the earlier tips.

Mine:

Initial: 384
Max: 768
Min:2
Recommended: 574
Currently allocated: 384

And I edit many, many gigs of video... weird.