Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

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Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby dzacco » Sun Oct 20, 2013 11:22 am

I have owned the 5.0 version for a year but this is the first time I have tried using it. The show is 150 frames with six songs using motion video clips as a separate layer in five slides. The size on the bar is 1000 which I assume is 1GB since it goes to 4700 which is the capacity for a DVD. When trying to burn either directly to DVD or save as an ISO file, the show stops with 43 seconds rendering time remaining. The message says that Proshow has run out of memory and the program must shut down. I have burned larger shows in Gold so I'm stumped. I'm using Microsoft XP and I don't think it's a computer problem. The show dumped right at 43 seconds four times and the last time I removed a song to test the possibility of a corrupted MP3. I also shut off the exe option and tried standard DVD output to not avail. The show size dropped but rendering still stalled at the same place. The show did render OK in exe format. I'm using MP2 for audio which I will change to PCM on the next try.
What can I try? I see there are various video formats that can be used as an output but I don't know one from the other.
Thank You for any suggestions.

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby im42n8 » Sun Oct 20, 2013 11:43 am

First off, is it release v3310? If not, update ASAP.

Running out of memory could be any number of things. If there are two slides, one after the other, that have a lot of "weight" to them, then, during a transition, you momentarily have the memory requirements for both slides drawing upon the system memory. It's possible that the limit to the memory allowable for a 32-bit application has been exceeded. You can watch the task manager while this is occurring to verify that the memory requirement as jumped to around 3GB (where the program typically fails for this kind of problem). It's possible that the problem is a transition or a style. You need to monitor the memory usage at the region where this problem occurred . . . and, if memory use did spike at this point, look at the slide or slides involved to see what the problem might be.

This is where I'd start to look for problems. If it's the slide content that's causing the problem then, depending on how your show is built, I'm move the slides around (so 2 large one's aren't back to back) or I'd change the content just a bit (for instance, changing the slide style, removing layers ... or changing them.... etc).

Dale
What's New: Tools for ProShow: v11.42a Access ProShow capabilities Photodex doesn't provide (For PSG & PSP).
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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby dzacco » Sun Oct 20, 2013 12:13 pm

Dale,
Thank you for the quick reply. My version is 3280. I'm now loading 3310 and will give that a try while watching the power monitor as you suggested. That might very well be the problem since there are three back to back video clips within the slides at the very end of the show, Each clip is roughly 50mb but still nowhere near 3GB. The last slide is just a jpg with minimal motion. This is where it locks up but it's probably lagging from the prior slide.
Thanks again. I'll post any results.

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby im42n8 » Sun Oct 20, 2013 12:53 pm

The program has a tendency to latch onto memory that is far in excess of the actual weight of the layers. I'm not sure what it is. However, it's probably a certain amount of memory per layer in addition to the memory actually required for that layer (video, graphic, image, or gradient/solid). I don't think it's a dynamic quantity, at least not in my experience (and I routinely stress the program).

Too, you might add an empty slide between each of those slides containing video such that their transitions don't overlap (they overlap instead with a blank slide) ... if you can make it look good. All you're trying to do in this case is to minimize the overlap.

Dale
What's New: Tools for ProShow: v11.42a Access ProShow capabilities Photodex doesn't provide (For PSG & PSP).
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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby dzacco » Sun Oct 20, 2013 1:40 pm

The memory usage stayed fairly consistent between 900mb and spiked to 1.1GB through those slides and it crashed again in exactly the same place. I'll try a few test runs with redistributing the slides or even removing them entirely. The problem is that it takes ~45 minutes to get that far through the rendering process.

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby im42n8 » Sun Oct 20, 2013 3:22 pm

With 1.1GB being used there should be no crash ... unless your system is limited in RAM. How much do you have installed? If it's only 2GB you might consider adding another 2GB (memory is pretty cheap). If you already have 4GB installed then there's something else going on.

Dale
What's New: Tools for ProShow: v11.42a Access ProShow capabilities Photodex doesn't provide (For PSG & PSP).
FPVP Blog "Making the Difficult Easier," FPVP News

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby gpsmikey » Sun Oct 20, 2013 3:56 pm

The fact it crashes in the same place makes me suspicious of a corrupted file. If it were memory, it would tend to not be the same place each time since there are always various things running that take different amounts of memory. Is there by chance a sound clip at the point where it crashes ? We have seen issues before with mp3 clips that were corrupted that caused strange crashes. One simple test you can do to see if it changes things - copy the .psh file for your show to a new name - test_my_show.psh or something like that in the same folder. Open that one in Producer and delete the front half of the slides (chop the show in half). Try rendering the new short show - see if it crashes in the same place. If it does, then start deleting things from the test show until you find which one "fixes" (un-breaks) the show. Producer is pretty good, but it leaves a bit to desire in the error reporting sometimes :roll:

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
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Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby im42n8 » Sun Oct 20, 2013 4:08 pm

I don't know about that Mikey, not in this case. If he has a limited amount of memory and the place where the crash occurs is always pushing the limits of the available memory ... he's going to have a crash, reported as "out of memory." 2GB of RAM isn't much these days but a lot of XP machines only have that much memory in them. That will consistently happen no matter what you do short of removing the videos . . . or extending the distance between the slides with the video such that there's no possibility of one being in memory (even momentarily) while the other fades over it.

However, it is definitely NOT in the realm of possibility that there's a corruption going on ... it might even be the transition itself that's the culprit. Hard to say exactly. Worth a consideration tho.

Dale
What's New: Tools for ProShow: v11.42a Access ProShow capabilities Photodex doesn't provide (For PSG & PSP).
FPVP Blog "Making the Difficult Easier," FPVP News

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby dzacco » Sun Oct 20, 2013 5:41 pm

Thanks guys,
I was able to identify the troubled frame through the process of elimination. I do have 4GB of ram installed but I am using a clip of a church contrast in sunset with clouds in motion. I inserted a gif of a dove flying into the sunset which turned out to be the problem. When I removed the video all worked well but when I inserted it in the beginning of the video, it crashed at that point. All I had to do is remove the gif which was very small in size. I even replaced the MOV video clip with an avi clip which is larger and it works well as long as the dove layer is removed. I don't know if it matters or not but I used the clip as a layer, not background. Maybe I can use this as an excuse to buy a new computer....
With 4GB of memory this really shouldn't have happened so I'm wondering if the ram is working correctly. I'm not a computer guy but the hard drive is only about 100GB from being full.

Mikey,
I removed the songs and it didn't help. When I spread the video background slides out it crashed immediately following the church. I am convinced it is memory related so I might start looking for a newer puter. Any suggestions?

Thanks again for the help.

David

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby im42n8 » Sun Oct 20, 2013 5:52 pm

Gifs have had a troubled history . . . so, it's not surprising that it was the culprit. That it generated an "out of memory" problem is interesting tho. Well, it's solved. Hate it when something so simple ends up being the problem ... but which required many hours of testing to narrow down the problem.

Stuff happens .... :D

Dale
What's New: Tools for ProShow: v11.42a Access ProShow capabilities Photodex doesn't provide (For PSG & PSP).
FPVP Blog "Making the Difficult Easier," FPVP News

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Re: Producer Crashes While Rendering ISO

Postby gpsmikey » Sun Oct 20, 2013 7:25 pm

I would not expect memory itself to be an issue, but that is relatively easy to test - go to the memtest.org page ( http://www.memtest.org/ ) and about half way down the page, you can grab a pre-compiled ISO (in a zip or .gz container) that you can burn to a CD with something like the free Imgburn (one of my favorite utilities). Burn the CD from the ISO, pop it in the CD drive in your system and reboot (you may have to change the boot order in the BIOS to boot off the CD). It will load the free Memtest and run it - it will run until you stop it, but it does a pretty thorough job of testing all available ram for you. Just let it run overnight. I have a copy of the CD in my little case of handy "utility disks".

mikey
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mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
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