I’ve been in warp/project size hell for the past 3 days, working 15 hour days, trying to deliver this 2 hour show on a deadline.
The show needed a lot of stabilizing so I started using the Warp Stabilizer until I realized that the project was becoming unstable north of 100MB. When the project grew to 138MB. Auto saves started to take more than a minute and stabilizes, already analyzed and rendered turned into black for the duration of the shot or a freeze frame of the previous shot.
It was not the hardware (HP-Z840, 32G RAM, Quadro K5000, fast internal SSD raid) or choice of sequence format (Quicktime DNxHD-SQ). It was Adobe hating me again, taking my money but not delivering software that actually works. A search on the internet for any of these symptoms is unhelpful and even shows annoying posts from Adobe saying big projects don’t matter. They know they have to fix it and come up with an Avid style system where projects are saved into separate bins that are actually self contained files. To add insult to injury they just announced Avid style collaboration workflows but I’m sure still not radically rewriting their code to break up the project into separate files.
Thank you Adobe for giving me the opportunity to work late at night, unpaid, in empty offices where everybody else has gone for the weekend. The project got done, and exported after I discovered that there is a saturation point after about 100 warp stabilizes. At that point the sequence and the project are retaining so much useless tracking information that things start to go bad creating those black or freeze frame shots. Removing the stabilizes and either doing without or linking to AE and doing them there is the solution. Adobe please tell one of your 14,156 programmers to:
1. After a warp stabilize is analyzed and applied, delete the tracking points. (this is what Avid does)
2. Rewrite the code to break a growing Premiere project up into smaller chunks to improve performance.
