Movie Maker 2 Hanging every few minutes

[Graeme Davidson]

Help! In a school environment, I have set up two (1.7Ghz P4 256Mb RAM) Dell
Optiplex GX260s (1.7Ghz P4 256Mb RAM) for use with Moviemaker2. Both
machines were taken straight out of the box, directed to windows update to
install every critical update (including XP SP1), DX9b and Moviemaker2. The
graphics "card" is the onboard Intel chipset with the latest drivers
installed. A Pinnacle Firewire card was added which XP detected without any
need for additional drivers. No other software has been installed.



Both machines are systematically hanging every few minutes in Moviemaker
with no error message - machine is still responsive (Moviemaker has hung)
CPU usage is 2% and I've tried everything suggested at www.papajohn.org. I'
ve updated the video drivers from Intel but that didn't help either. Turning
graphics hardware acceleration down to 3 has no effect - down to 2 and the
machine produces error messages at logon and you can't get into the screen
properties again without a crash! Had to use a system restore point to get
out of that fix.



I get the impression Moviemaker2 is locking up several second before
transitions where there is a slight stutter in the movie playback before the
transition is rendered - but not always. The sound still runs on but you
cannot regain control of Moviemaker.



It's worrying that two machines straight out of the box and brought
completely up to date with Windows Update both exhibit exactly the same
behaviour.



Is anyone else experiencing this? Any help gratefully welcomed )

 

[PapaJohn]

What kind of source files are you using? And are they on a network drive, or
on the computer's local drives?

 

[Graeme Davidson]

What kind of source files are you using? And are they on a network drive, or
on the computer's local drives?

Hi PapaJohn,

Thanks for replying - much appreciated. The source files are captured in MM2
directly from a Digital Video Camera via firewire. Both machines are
entirely stand-alone and are not networked (network wouldn't have the
bandwidth to cope with video editing) so the files are indeed local on the
hard drive.

The graphics hardware on the PCs is the Intel 82845 on-board chipset. I
can't help wondering if there is an issue with on-board chipsets using UMA
architectures as this means the graphics system is using conventional RAM
shared with the CPU which is inherently slower and doesn't allow for any
parallel processing of CPU and graphics data. It would be very useful to
know is anyone is having problems with the 82845 chipset.

I recently noticed a more detailed System Requirements spec at
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/moviemaker/downloads/moviemaker2.asp
which states that a machine with at least 64 megabytes of non-UMA VRAM is
recommended but not necessary. Given that our machines don't have any VRAM
at all because they share the CPUs memory, I wonder if that could be the
problem. A separate graphics card may be the answer... again if anyone else
has been in this situation and fixed it with separate graphics card, that
would be very useful to know!

Cheers!

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

There's a link to the Intel Application Accelerator on the Setup... Hardware
page of my www.papajohn.org site. Although it may not pertain to you, the
link seems to take you to some other Intel-related support info.

The forums at SimplyDV.com have many people who are very knowlegeable about
hardware issues. Posting there might help. There's a link on my Online...
Forums page.

Maybe install MM1 in parallel with MM2 and see if the same issues exist.


PapaJohn

 

[Graeme Davidson]

There's a link to the Intel Application Accelerator on the Setup... Hardware
page of my www.papajohn.org site. Although it may not pertain to you, the
link seems to take you to some other Intel-related support info.

The forums at SimplyDV.com have many people who are very knowlegeable about
hardware issues. Posting there might help. There's a link on my Online...
Forums page.

Maybe install MM1 in parallel with MM2 and see if the same issues exist.

Thanks PapaJohn,

I'll give the accelerator a try (provided the machine does have a 82801xx
chipset), failing that I'll try the SimplyDV forums. Thanks for the links!