Something screwey

[CaedenV]

OK, so I rebuilt my rig recently to better handle video editing for HD content in Premiere Pro CS5.5 (see specs in sig), and I am having some wierd multimedia issues.

The first thing I noticed was that Quicktime Pro (while functioning properly if you open it and tell it to play a video) will not work in either Chrome or IE. Also, if I click to open a QT file it will give an error saying that it does not recognize the file type, but if I open the movie from within quicktime then it plays fine. Also, I have the pro version, and I tried an h264 export in premiere and everything seems to work fine.

Today I needed to un-split a split track CD for my wife, and found out that WMP is also acting up. It will not allow me to import, or change any import settings, and it gives a rather nondescript error message. It also burnt a few coasters on me, but that just may be my burner going out as I think the process went well. Also, in WMP I have noticed that videos look decidedly worse. This could be that I switched over from VGA to HDMI and the old VGA would smooth over some of the imperfections in some things, but I get the feeling like some postprocessing that use to be going on is now not. It is especially noticeable on h264 compression, making text in specific look a little pixelated and blocky compared to the smoothe lines I had before.

Lastly (and likely unrelated?) Windows feels a little sluggish for running on such a good system. I mean it felt quicker on startup and shutdown on the old c2duo (not much slower, but going from a c2duo to an i7 should feel faster, even if I am on the same old HDD).

I am fairly sure that all the new hardware is working fine. Video editing on 8 threads and 16GB of ram is heaven compared to 2 threads and 4GB lol. Games look really sharp (to the point where I notice design issues) now that I have a good GPU. And audio is incredible now that I have both a computer and amp that do optical! I mean, it blows me away on clarity and I am noticing things I never could before!

I may just reformat and give it another go, but if anyone has suggestions I would love to save a few hours of my life on something other than reinstalling/updating windows.

 

[nikorr]

Are u still waiting for the SSD? Which one?

I had C2D E6750 and now 2600K@4.5 16GB vs 6GB I have Vertex2. What a differences!

Its like 10yo Civic vs. 2011Corvette.

I know what u are going through. The CS5.5 is flying now. And if it is something small to encode, u can stick around, soon to be done!

Just upgraded 2 weeks ago!

Good luck.

 

[CaedenV]

my situation was even worse; I went from an e6550 with 4GB of ram and an absolutely bare-bones mobo to the 2600 and 16GB of ram, and a killer GPU! The old system was only meant to be a glorified HTPC, and still works well at that, but when I got a camera worth using again the editing bug kicked in, and I would love to do wedding videos again. Video editing is super fast on the new rig, and while I wasnt sure I would really use the GPU acceleration, it really helps with color correction and a few other things.
My wait for an SSD is not so much for a particular tech, or a particular price point, it is more that purchasing premiere, and the new hardware tapped out my budget, and I have to recover from that before getting anything else (like the new version of Audition, an SSD, bigger HDDs and that 2nd GPU). When building it I figured that I would get the most bang for my editing buck to upgrade the core system, and that SSDs (while a nice perk) are not necessary, and will only go down in price while I wait.
As of now I think I would go for an 60GB Agility (one step up from my wife's solid3) and set it up as SSD cashing with my 500GB drive, but the way SSDs are falling in price I may be able to spring for a ~250GB SSD and run it native, and then raid my 1TB drives (or replace them with newer 2-4TB drives and raid those while using my old drives as scratch discs). But I have been in the game long enough to not be 100% partial to any brand, so I will go Crucial or Intel if they were near my price point per GB when I am ready, or someone else if QC was better. But as of now it looks like the only real players are OCZ, Crucial, and Intel, with hope for Corsair but I am not holding my breath.

Anywho, that was all besides the point. Having a computer that can edit professional level video, but is incapable of ripping CDs is unacceptable (especially with Christmas around the corner and a lot of music on the list lol). If anyone has any ideas, then I am all ears!

 

[CaedenV]

Success!

1) Quicktime was having issues because WMP somehow had taken the file association for QT files. Everything works fine now

2) WMP was being sabotaged by my password of all things. This was a tough one to track down. I have used the same password for years and years and years, and recently changed it. Well, I store all my files on separate drives from my system drive, so every time I re-install with the same username and password it picks up the old permissions with no trouble. Except this time I used a different password, so I had to take over the permissions for everything on the old drives. WMP was set up BEFORE fixing the permissions, and the ripper only checks once for permissions when you pick a new save location. So, even though I had changed the permissions already, I still had to remove the music library, and reassign the music library for the ripping portion to figure out that I can rip music, which then fixed all the problems

3) I thought that windows was running a little slow, especially during startup, and that there were some loss of video quality, especially in h264 videos which seem difficult to upscale properly to begin with. Well, it wasn't in my head! It was Virtue! On a whim I looked through my running processes and noticed that virtue was eating a fair amount of ram (nearly 1GB), and uninstalled it, just to see what it would do, and it shaved a good 10-15 sec off of the boot to password load time, and now when I load into windows it is responsive from the start instead of having to wait 20sec for things to begin working, and my old videos upscale much nicer. This is unfortunate as I was looking forward to those super fast transcode times that virtue provides, but it is quite possible that I had something set up incorrectly and will need to try again later. On a related note, after uninstalling Virtue, Dragon Age Origins stopped working, so I will have to re-install before I can play again 🙁 but at least everything else works much better now!

Thank God I did not have to reformat again after installing all those updates! Hopefully this will help someone down the line!