FAQ:Why are my stills showing up as black or green?


 * Some people experience this when putting a large number of stills on the timeline. It is an inconsistent problem and difficult to reproduce. The following are suggestions some people have reported to improve the situation:
 * Make sure the color depth of the stills is 32 or 24 bit. If one doesn’t work try the other.
 * Reduce the resolution of the stills. Large images often cause the problem. If you are not panning/scaling the stills, convert them to the same size as your project frame size.
 * Convert the still files to a different format. Different people experienced success with different formats.
 * creig bryan says:
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 * My posted(but as I know of, yet untried by others) solution is to lay any clip (usually black video) in a track above the green/black stills and set the opacity on that clip to 0. I've now found that I can also eliminate the problem by rendering the pix clips in small chunks.
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 * kcmoore11 reports that increasing the pagefile (swapfile) size resolved this problem. (See Windows Help and Support for instructions.)
 * Mike Morrell said:
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 * So I loaded PP1.5 on another machine (workstation #2), copied the files to its drive and repeated the process. Voilà, this time PPro works fine and there are no green stills. I also copied the prproj file from workstation 1 and tried it and it works fine on workstation 2 as well. This does tell me that there is some workstation specific setting or hardware that is conflicting with PPro 1.5 and it is not simply a PPro 1.5 bug.
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 * Mitch411 said:
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 * The other person that I mentioned previously has resolved the problem. In that instance the black video after rendering resulted from a bad connection to the IDE scratch disk. The clue for her was that when she attempted to play the rendered media files with Windows Media Player, she got an I/O device error message. When she switched the scratch disk to a different drive, no more problems. I'm not certain if the problem was with the drive jumper settings, a bad IDE cable, daisy chaining through a slow device, or something else. Anyway, it's something for you to look at.
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 * googull said:
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 * Mixed results by clearing the rendered files to force PPro to render anew. Also better results with TIF instead of PSD especially if images contain more than one layer (even though imported merged).  After coping with this for many months I am convinced it has to do with how PPro interfaces to its scratch disk.  You can move the scratch assignment and get better results for a while but eventually it creeps back - esp if you are using lots of images.  I often you 1000-2000 images in a sequence.  Though it is a HW related issue that does not mean that it isn't a PPro interface problem.  I've tried too many disks to think they are all bad (IDE, ATA, ATA-RAID), it just dosen't seem to matter.  If you are using lots of images you better plan on coping.
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 * rachandy said:
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 * After trying everything, I was going to bring up an earlier "save" and work from there when the thought came to me that maybe it had something to do with opacity. When I lowered the opacity for a photo just slightly, the photo popped back in with all the keys still correct. The change in opacity is so slight I cannot see the difference.
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 * anonymous said:
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 * This problem occurs when you either have a large number of stills, or a small number of high resolution stills (or both) on the timeline. The bug causes these stills to either be rendered as black or green frames. There are a number of temporary 'fixes' listed below, but you will often find yourself applying a fix to one still and then finding that a previously fine still now has problems. The cause of the bug is the improper way Adobe Premier handles memory and scratch/temporary files. My best guess is that when internally rendering the stills it may run out of physical RAM, and then start using virtual RAM, otherwise known as the 'Virtual Page File'. The Windows operating system handles this process for Premier. However, when Premier exhausts both the physical RAM and the virtual page file, this bug appears, causing Premier to incorrectly render the stills as black or green frames. The temporary fixes work by making slight tweaks to the still forcing Premier to re-render the sequence. If there happens to be enough RAM to complete this operation, your still is re-rendered correctly, otherwise the problems re-appears. To work around this problem you need to increase the RAM, physical or virtual, enough so that Premier can complete the rendering pass without exhausting the available memory. You can either do this by purchasing and installing more RAM in your computer, or simply by increasing the Virtual Page File size. While the latter option is a quick and easy solution, buying more RAM will allow premier to render your sequences faster. This is because the Virtual Page File is actually a file on your hard disk and as such is much slower to read from and write to compared against physical RAM.

To increase your page file size, go to Control Panel, select the System tab, then click the Settings button in the Performance panel. In the Performance window, chose the Advanced tab and click the Change button in the Virtual Memory panel. From there, chose the Custom option and increase the Initial and Maximum setting to something large enough. 'Large enough' is whatever it takes to make it work!
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