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Why do I keep getting the spinning beach ball in Premiere 6?

Mar 2, 2013 3:03 AM

Tags: #pro #premiere #cs6_freezing

I have just downloaded a 30-day trial of Premiere Pro CS6 on the Creative Cloud. Used it for several hours today to edit some mp4 videos and found that the source video frequently froze, and sometimes the project video too. I would then be unable to quit the program except through force quit - and sometimes I couldn't click on the apple menu either, so had to force the computer to restart.

I have a relatively new 27" Mac which exceeds the system requirements published on the Adobe site.

Does anyone know why this is happening, and what I can do to stop it?

328 Views 4 Replies Latest reply: Harm Millaard, Mar 2, 2013 5:03 AM

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738 posts
Jan 27, 2006

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1. Jon-M-Spear,

Mar 2, 2013 3:16 AM in reply to tessaonthecloud

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You really need to tell us a bit more about your equipment specs; source material and what you're doing with it in the timeline.

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2. tessaonthecloud,

Mar 2, 2013 3:32 AM in reply to Jon-M-Spear

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Thanks Jon - my Mac has 8GB RAM, 1 TB HD (which is hardly used), an
AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB graphics processor and is running OS X 10.8.2 with an Intel Core i5 processor.

The source clips are mostly mp4s saved off a Canon camera into a folder on my desktop, before being dragged & dropped into Premiere. They range in size between 7 and 166MB.

It also froze once when I'd created a title and dropped onto my timeline. I was adding keystones to change it's position so that the text scrolled in from the left and suddenly I got the spinning beach ball and had to force quit.

Most of the time that it happened though was when I was playing an mp4 in the source window, and would cut a piece of footage ('I' and 'O') and then drag and drop it onto my timeline. If I then went back to continue playing the source footage, that was when it was likely to not work, and I'd have to force quit the program and restart.

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738 posts
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3. Jon-M-Spear,

Mar 2, 2013 4:08 AM in reply to tessaonthecloud

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I've got a feeling that your Mac may under spec'd for HD content, although you don't say anything about the processor.

You also have a single drive which is not recommended. Is it 7200 or 5400 rpm?

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4. Harm Millaard,

Mar 2, 2013 5:03 AM in reply to tessaonthecloud

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The spinning beach ball is an indication that your system is waiting for some tasks to be finished. In your case it could be that the CPU, which lacks hyper threading, memory, which is bare minimum, video card, which does not allow hardware acceleration and a single disk all contribute to this phenomenon. You are correct that the system exceeds Adobe minimum requirements, but those requirements are only for installing the program, not for using it and especially not with AVCHD or DSLR material. See some Practical System Requirements.

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