Multiple problems, can anyone help?...

Hello all you crazy filmy people!?I have some problems, this is my first time posting so be patient!

Firstly, my machine is brand new - running Windows Vista Business (64 Bit), it's an Intel Core i7 CPU (920 @ 2.6 GHz) with 4GB RAM.?It's had a fresh reinstall after encountering problems with Premiere CS4 (there are no other programmes installed on the edit suite) and the entire Creative Suite was uninstalled and reinstalled.?My graphics card is an ATI Radeon X1600/X1650 series which is ''working properly''.?The driver is dated 2/25/2009 which seems perfectly reasonable.?Video card is BlackMagic.

Problems!

1) I cannot seem to work with timecode whatsoever - not even after loading an old project from Premiere CS2 that was batch captured properly (within Premiere CS2)........ basically, SOME of the timecode that was there in CS2 has now mysteriously been reset to 0:00:00 (etc)..... this is very frustrating as I have 18 commercials that need to be onlined and now I have no reference (feel my pain, 15'' ads that were shot on over 32 different reels) - this is going to take me an age to do manually as it is such tiny moments that need to be picked out and I am freaking out!!!!

2) I can't render. At all. It plays back fine, 90% of the time, but seriously guys - why is this happening?? I'm not using anything with funny codecs - this is pure clean .avi footage that was digitised within CS4!!!???Highly frustrating, especially when I have to explain to clients why things are jittery!

3) goshdarnit why did they take away the export frame feature! SOO annoying going through this new Media Encoder fandangle and then, after all the effort of setting everything up, the frame is capture and is BLURRY (argh! need I say more!)

4) Ok, so since when did ''un''-enabling audio tracks lead to fuzzy beeps and weirdness when it comes to playing back audio?

5) Last, but worst, I cannot upgrade to 4.01 because I can't even work without it crashing.

PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!

I don't know what to do and I am not getting any support from IT because we know pretty much as much as each other!!

Multiple problems, can anyone help?...

I guess the first step might be to remove the Blackmagic card and the software.?You should not be having all those problems and the first thing would be to try it that way.?Also upgrade your graphics driver to the latest version.?Have you tuned your Vista OS??Did you run the Adobe cleanup script before the reinstall??What is your disk configuration?

Multiple problems, can anyone help?...

I'm not sure what you mean by disk configuration - all the footage is on an internal RAID drive - is this it?

What Bill means is to first try if you still have the same problems without the BlackMagic card and software. This may well be related to some kind of driver incompatibilities, that do not run well with CS4 4.1. I haven't heard about these problems when there was no BlackMagic card involved.

In the second place Bill wants to know how many physical hard disks you have in your system and what raid you are using, 0, 1, 5, 10?

With Business 64 you may benefit from extra memory. ATI has monthly driver updates, usually denoted by y.m (year.month) so the most current version is 9.6

The Raid is 5 - we are waiting for the rest of the memory to arrive as it is a brand new machine, so we are going to have 24 GIG RAM in total.?However this still does not answer my question regarding Timecode - any clues as to what could be causing this loss of data?

Have you tried, as Bill and I suggested, removing the BlackMagic card, drivers and other BM software, creating a new standard DV project, capture from your video camera and edit that? Still have the problems?

You are currently using version 9.2 for your video driver. Update to 9.6. How many drives in your raid5? On the IHCR chip?

The loss of timecode started to happen in CS3 and is not fixed in CS4. I highly doubt that the Blackmagic card has anything to do with it, but try it for testing purposes.

I worked around it in CS3 by importing the clip(s) into either PPro 1.5 or 2.0 and export them out directly from the Project panel. I imported the newly exported clip into PPro CS3 and the original timecode appeared again. By exporting the clips from the Project panel you wont affect the length of the clips. I did this for PAL DV, so if it happened with HDV i could not work around that issue.

To export stills without even using Adobe Media Encoder, install the 4.1 upgrade, not the 4.0.1 upgrade.

That may be, although I never experienced it, but that still leaves the rendering problem, the crashing problem and the fuzzy audio.

Have not been able to remove the decklink card yet, as the day has been full of previews so will only be able to try that tomorrow when things are quieter in the office.?Re. timecode issues - this is a project that I digitised (MJpegA 720x576 PAL) in Premiere CS2 which we have ''upgraded'' to this new machine, the timecode shows in the old suite fine but some of the clips have timecode and some don't when I bring it in to CS4 which is what makes it so strange.?Frustrating because I need timecode refs for telecine and have since made changes to the edits in CS4 for lack of another suite...