Producer Crashes Unexpectedly

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PhotoCin

Producer Crashes Unexpectedly

Postby PhotoCin » Sun Jul 01, 2007 12:02 pm

I am new here and this is my first entry - and I have never belonged to a forum before, so please excuse my ignorance...

I have used ProShow Gold for 2 years and been pretty happy with it, so I upgraded to Producer to use in my business. So far I love it, but it keeps crashing at the weirdest times and for no apparent reason. Has anyone else had this problem, and if so, what can I do about it? I have not contacted Photodex yet, but it is on my schedule for this week.

Thank you!

Cindy

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Postby gpsmikey » Sun Jul 01, 2007 7:30 pm

Which build are you using ?? The earlier ones crashed a lot
more than the current ones (although they still have some work
to do to make it work as they sold it to us ... )

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Sun Jul 01, 2007 8:31 pm

I am using 3.0 build 1942. Judging by the "1942" it's gotta be bad luck, eh? (Altho it was a pretty funny movie...)

Thanks for replying - I am not really sure how this site works or if this is the correct place to respond to you.

I look forward to hearing from you again.

Cindy

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Postby gpsmikey » Mon Jul 02, 2007 5:37 am

Hah !! You just dated yourself by remembering that movie (and yes, it WAS funny!!).

I am still running a slightly older build and have not had any issues recently, but
one thing you might do is make sure you have the latest drivers for your sound
card and video cards installed. They can cause some really strange "things".
There have also been some comments recently from some people that have had
crashes after one of the more recent windows "updates". I am running XP Pro, SP2.
Everytime I am about ready to let my machine update with the latest patches, I
see posts from poeple running into problems with some recent patch from M$.

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

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Crashes!

Postby DanDan » Mon Jul 02, 2007 5:55 am

Hi Cindy, Welcome to the forum!
I am using build 1935, Producer has been very smooth running for me. I did experience another disappearing act yesterday. I believe in my case I had a corrupt photo file. When I re-opened Producer, I got the "Do you want to open the last Autosave". When I did I deleted the last slide I had worked on, added another and saved. I did not have any other problems. This has happened only a couple of times before. But each time I was able to recover and continue. I think some members have reported a corruption of the .psh file.
You might try deleting your last slide and rebuilding, to see if it might work for you. :)

_Dan
Slideshows: PSG 3. & Producer, Photo Editing: PSP9, PS Elements 5.0 (begining), Google Piccasa

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Mon Jul 02, 2007 6:50 am

OK - this is going to sound totally lame, but I cannot tell if I am responding to DanDan and gpsmikey - or if I am responding to just one of you. Sorry for being such a noob. I clicked the "Reply" button on the bottom of the screen and it appears I am responding to both of you, so, "Thanks Mikey - I will check out my drivers and make sure they are up to date," and to DanDan, "Thank you too - I have had situations where my photos have been corrupt, but I do not think that is the issue here. I will keep it in mind tho."

One more thing, the guy I spoke to at Photodex said that my antivirus software might be interfering since it is constantly running in the background. Does that make sense to you guys?

And to Mikey - of course I dated myself - no one else would have me... haha

Cindy

Mike S.

Postby Mike S. » Mon Jul 02, 2007 12:22 pm

PhotoCin wrote:OK - this is going to sound totally lame, but I cannot tell if I am responding to DanDan and gpsmikey - or if I am responding to just one of you. Sorry for being such a noob. I clicked the "Reply" button on the bottom of the screen and it appears I am responding to both of you, so, ....snip

Cindy,

Each post has a small box in the upper right corner that says "Quote". If you click that, it will allow a reply to that specific person and the result will look like this reply to you. When you click Quote, it will automatically put a copy of that post in the text field. You can edit the quote text field to omit parts you are't responding to like how I omited parts of your post.

Just enter your reply after the last "Left-bracket/quoteRight-bracket". Click the "Preview" button to see your post without actually sending it. Click the "Submit" button to actually submit your post for all to see.

If you click "Post Reply" at the bottom of all the posts, it will let you add your reply to nobody in particular.

After your post is posted, you can edit it by clicking "Edit" at the upper right corner, or delete it.

Happy posting,
Mike S.

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Mon Jul 02, 2007 3:56 pm

Mike S. wrote:
PhotoCin wrote:OK - this is going to sound totally lame, but I cannot tell if I am responding to DanDan and gpsmikey - or if I am responding to just one of you. Sorry for being such a noob. I clicked the "Reply" button on the bottom of the screen and it appears I am responding to both of you, so, ....snip

Cindy,

Each post has a small box in the upper right corner that says "Quote". If you click that, it will allow a reply to that specific person and the result will look like this reply to you. When you click Quote, it will automatically put a copy of that post in the text field. You can edit the quote text field to omit parts you are't responding to like how I omited parts of your post.

Just enter your reply after the last "Left-bracket/quoteRight-bracket". Click the "Preview" button to see your post without actually sending it. Click the "Submit" button to actually submit your post for all to see.

If you click "Post Reply" at the bottom of all the posts, it will let you add your reply to nobody in particular.

After your post is posted, you can edit it by clicking "Edit" at the upper right corner, or delete it.

Happy posting,
Mike S.



Thanks for showing me how to operate things here - it is quite different from what I am used to.

I have received a reply from Photodex; they have made several suggestions -- when I find the solution to my problems I will post it here so that others might benefit from my experience.

This is a nice place ya'll got here - thanks a million for all your help.

Cindy

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Wed Jul 18, 2007 12:50 pm

gpsmikey wrote:Which build are you using ?? The earlier ones crashed a lot
more than the current ones (although they still have some work
to do to make it work as they sold it to us ... )

mikey


Hi there - we spoke a while back about Producer crashing unexpectedly. The tech support at Photodex gave me a temporary solution of deleting the def.phd file that is created (this is found by going to the start menu, right-clicking ProShow Producer, click Properties and Find Target) - he also suggested deleting the .pxc files and some others. This temporarily fixed the problem, but now Producer will not stay open for more than 3 minutes. I have been fighting with this issue for 5 days now. I have done everything they suggested and I still have this problem.

The funny thing is that it runs fine on my dad's HP laptop, so obviously the problem lies within my computer. I have cleaned my registry using CCleaner, installed and uninstalled everything under the sun, worked in Safe Mode to check all the start up programs, turned off my security software (which is Norton, but my father has Norton too)... So - all this say/ask: Do you have a clue what I can do now or how I might be able to fix this?

Thank you so much for reading this - any advice you can offer will be greatly appreciated. I just wish I could get my money back now, altho I love the software when it works.

Cindy

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Postby gpsmikey » Wed Jul 18, 2007 3:57 pm

Well, this is going to be just some thoughts since no obvious answer comes to
mind - try the following things:
1) make sure you have the latest drivers for your video and sound cards
2) try re-installing producer - sometimes that helps and it wasn't clear from
your post if that was "one of the things under the sun" you had tried.
3) Make sure you have enough disk space and defrag the disk. (including the
"C" drive which is where the temp files often are.
4) Try working with a completely different show -- I have seen cases were
something in a show was causing a crash (corrupt audio file or image etc).
5) How much RAM do you have in the machine?
6) Just for the sake of entertainment, you might run a test of the RAM and
verify it is behaving itself ok -- you can grab an ISO of a bootable CD
for Memtest86 from http://www.memtest.org/ (part way down the page,
they have a link for "Download (Pre-built & ISOs). Burn the ISO to a
CD and reboot with that in the CD Drive. You may have to tweak the BIOS
to set the boot order to use the CD-Rom before the hard drive.

Those should keep you out of trouble for a bit :lol:
Now if I can just find out why several shows ALWAYS crash presenter on
my system (XP SP2) but most others play fine. Sigh.

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

Mike S.

Postby Mike S. » Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:36 pm

Cindy,

If you are still crashing after trying the good advice you have already recevied, here are some possible "hardware" things to look at:

1. Set your graphics card ram setting in your BIOS to 128 MB or higher even if you only have a 64 MB graphics controller. I had constant crashing problems when I used to use the Pinnacle Liquid software until I set my graphics card ram setting in the BIOS to 128 MB. Then all of my crashing stopped.

2. Are your sound and video controllers on plug in cards or integrated in your motherboard? If plug in cards and you do have integrated controllers on your mother board, try removing the cards and using your integrated controllers. I've seen where certain brand/model cards can cause crashing. I had a Turtle Beach sound card and an Audigy sound card both of which caused me problems with my video editing software. Using a simple Eqsonics (spelling?) sound card fixed my problems. Currently I only use the integrated sound on the motherboards for both my PCs with no problems. I seem to recall a post on this web site that said changing his graphics card solved his crashing problems.

3. Know the model number of your motherboard? Certain older motherboards had a bus problem when using video editing software. I forget the type of bus now but if you can post your motherboard number, I'll look it up and see if I can remember the problem bus type.

4. Maybe record "all" of the setting for your BIOS and then do a default reset and see what happens. Get someone to help you if you are not familiar with the BIOS as the wrong settings can really cause some grief.

5. This is not a hardware setting but do you know how to use msconfig?

Mike S.

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:34 pm

gpsmikey wrote:Well, this is going to be just some thoughts since no obvious answer comes to
mind - try the following things:
1) make sure you have the latest drivers for your video and sound cards
2) try re-installing producer - sometimes that helps and it wasn't clear from
your post if that was "one of the things under the sun" you had tried.
3) Make sure you have enough disk space and defrag the disk. (including the
"C" drive which is where the temp files often are.
4) Try working with a completely different show -- I have seen cases were
something in a show was causing a crash (corrupt audio file or image etc).
5) How much RAM do you have in the machine?
6) Just for the sake of entertainment, you might run a test of the RAM and
verify it is behaving itself ok -- you can grab an ISO of a bootable CD
for Memtest86 from http://www.memtest.org/ (part way down the page,
they have a link for "Download (Pre-built & ISOs). Burn the ISO to a
CD and reboot with that in the CD Drive. You may have to tweak the BIOS
to set the boot order to use the CD-Rom before the hard drive.

Those should keep you out of trouble for a bit :lol:
Now if I can just find out why several shows ALWAYS crash presenter on
my system (XP SP2) but most others play fine. Sigh.

mikey


Thanks for your help; I'll try out your suggestions. But first:

1) I ran Belarc Advisor to see what was on my computer and it looks like I have NVIDIA audio... I'm not really computer savvy so please bare with me here. I'm not sure how to read the report - does Radeon X800Pro sound like my video card?

2) I have re-installed Producer so many times that I think I might have broken it! haha

3) I have enough room to run CS2 and that is a real hog - memory should not be an issue. I checked both my hard drives to see if they needed defragging and the report said no.

4) It appears to crash no matter what show I open. And I can't keep it open long enough to create a new test show.

5) This is copied from Belarc:

Operating System System Model
Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (build 2600) Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: nForce-CK8S
Bus Clock: 202 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 08/27/2004
Drives Memory Modules c,d
200.04 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
173.80 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

SONY CD-RW CRX230ED [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]
[Hard drive] (200.05 GB) -- drive 0 1024 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'A0' has 512 MB
Slot 'A1' has 512 MB
Slot 'A2' is Empty
Local Drive Volumes


c: (NTFS on drive 0) 200.04 GB 173.80 GB free

I did this because I am unsure how to read the RAM...

6) I will try option 6 tomorrow, when I am actually awake. I am exhausted from making a new patio garden the last 4 days -- trying to work off my frustration at not being able to promote part of my business due to Photodex!


You are a real Sweetheart for helping me like this - it makes me smile knowing there are such nice people out there.

Regarding your problem - what about the audio end of it? Perhaps you have some difference in the audio file types? That shouldn't make a difference, but I think they release these products way to soon. I didn't know we were beta testers... should they pay us?

Regards,

Cindy

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Postby gpsmikey » Thu Jul 19, 2007 8:21 pm

OK, looks like you have covered most of the bases -- according to the report,
you have 1 gig of ram (1024 megabytes) in two memory sticks of 512 megs
each. While not overkill (hey, I remember when 64K bytes was HUGE !!),
it should be enough.

Yes, it looks like you have identified your video card correctly - I don't see
anything there about your sound card. You might also search the forum
for crashing -- there have been others with similar issues and there were
a couple of temp files somewhere they found if you removed it fixed the
problem. I don't remember where they were though. This kind of sounds
like a driver issue. ( I have just spent the evening tracking down the
latest drivers for my system, but I think I will image the C drive before
I start playing with drivers (I know - chicken) since it works good now
EXCEPT for those couple of shows that kill presenter).

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Fri Jul 20, 2007 11:33 am

I think its a hardware problem. because im running an updated winxp.

hardware is:

DFI Lanparty NF3
amd 3200+ 64
ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256mb
Integrated sound
1024 gb of geil ram

PhotoCin

Postby PhotoCin » Fri Jul 20, 2007 11:38 am

Mike S. wrote:Cindy,

If you are still crashing after trying the good advice you have already recevied, here are some possible "hardware" things to look at:

1. Set your graphics card ram setting in your BIOS to 128 MB or higher even if you only have a 64 MB graphics controller. I had constant crashing problems when I used to use the Pinnacle Liquid software until I set my graphics card ram setting in the BIOS to 128 MB. Then all of my crashing stopped.

2. Are your sound and video controllers on plug in cards or integrated in your motherboard? If plug in cards and you do have integrated controllers on your mother board, try removing the cards and using your integrated controllers. I've seen where certain brand/model cards can cause crashing. I had a Turtle Beach sound card and an Audigy sound card both of which caused me problems with my video editing software. Using a simple Eqsonics (spelling?) sound card fixed my problems. Currently I only use the integrated sound on the motherboards for both my PCs with no problems. I seem to recall a post on this web site that said changing his graphics card solved his crashing problems.

3. Know the model number of your motherboard? Certain older motherboards had a bus problem when using video editing software. I forget the type of bus now but if you can post your motherboard number, I'll look it up and see if I can remember the problem bus type.

4. Maybe record "all" of the setting for your BIOS and then do a default reset and see what happens. Get someone to help you if you are not familiar with the BIOS as the wrong settings can really cause some grief.

5. This is not a hardware setting but do you know how to use msconfig?

Mike S.


Thank you for your help - I had my son take a look at this since I am in a bit over my head and the computer I am using is one that he built, and I then I bought it from him. He said that everything I have running is up to date with all the correct drivers and the correct speeds, etc. He suggested I get an earlier build from Photodex. I think I will try that.

Thanks again - you all are so very helpful.

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