iView 3.1.3 crashing on import - help!

[andris]

I've posted this to the iView forum as well, but I thought I'd post over here to see if anyone has run into this:

I'm having some real difficulty building a new iView catalog of a drive full of master files (tiffs and psds, for the most part). This is really holding up some improvements to our studio's workflow I'm trying to make.

I started the catalog importing at the end of the day yesterday, and it ran all night. In the morning, I found iView non responsive using 50% of the CPU and about 350,000 K of memory. I had to kill the process.

When I restart iView, I get the message 'There was a problem importing Image file: <filename> Saving this file again with the creator application may fix this problem. '

The filename causing the problem is a large tiff, 7168px x 10752px @ 300 dpi. It has no layers and no alpha channels. Size on disk is 220.5MB.

The drive contains 86.1 GB of media and 7,517 files. It's a 300 GB drive in a USB drive bay/external enclosure. (Not a network drive).

I'm running iView 3.1.3 build 42E6.

I have the catalog set to 480px, medium quality thumbnails; don't use built-in previews; don't create full screen previews; don't use alpha channel; use embedded preview (if available) for raw files; and skip images with size greater than 100MB (which makes me wonder why iView was even processing this file in the first place).

My system is Windows XP Home, SP2, Intel Core2 1.86 GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM.

I copied the offending file out of the directory and to a new location. iView completely hangs even when I start a new catalog and try to import the single problem file.

Anyone seen this before? This doesn't seem like an excessive amount of media to catalog.

Thanks!

Andris

[peterkrogh]

Andris,
Open the file and try resaving new version(s) with a few variations. 
such as a new TIFF, or try sizing to under 10,000 pixels, or different save options.

When I have run into this in the past, simply resaving the file as a newly created TIFF solved the problem.

BTW, it may be quicktime, rather than iView, that is choking.  Is it updated?
Peter

[andris]

iView support is looking into this for me.  Amazingly, I was unaware of iView's dependence on Quicktime until I started troubleshooting this problem.  I did update my Quicktime to the newest version, but it didn't solve the issue.  It does appear to be Quicktime related, though.  Quicktime Picture Viewer opens the large tiff with no problem, but Quicktime _Player_ crashes when I try to open it.

At your recommendation, I resized the long dimension down to 7000px and at that size Quicktime Player and iView both handle the image just fine.  The image is portrait orientation (7168 x 10752, not 10752 x 7168).  I wonder if no one has seen this problem before because many large tiffs are probably in landscape orientation...stitched panoramas and the like.

Another related/unrelated issue here seems to be iView not honoring the 'skip files with size greater than' preference.  Just to be sure, I scaled this down to 50MB, quit and restarted iView (I'd read that some prefs, like 'don't use alpha channel' only take effect on restart).  iView still crashes on the original 10752px image, and still successfully imports the 7000px version....even though both are well over 50MB! Strange.

Andris

[peterkrogh]

Andris,
Did you try to resave without resizing and try to reimport?
Peter

[andris]

I tried opening it in Photoshop and resaving without resizing, but I still get the crash.    I tried downsizing to 9999 px, thinking maybe that a 5 digit pixel dimension wasn't supported...but I still get the crash.  Then I tried downsizing to 8194 (2^13+2) thinking maybe it was a binary size thing...but I actually don't get the crash at 8194.  The 'problem dimension' lies somewhere between 9000px (which works) and 10000px (which doesn't).

I have several other files of this size on the drive that I'm trying to archive, so I'm really hoping to track this issue down.  Manually weeding them out every time iView crashes on import could take a long time.

Andris

[andris]

Just wanted to provide an update on my yet unresolved problem.  iView support was attentive, and as helpful as they could be.  They helped me track the problem down to an issue with QuickTime.  I am able to open the file in the QuickTime image viewer, but not in the QuickTime player.  This leads them to think that the iView crash is due to QuickTime crashing when iView tries to use it to render the image.  Incidentally the 10,000px file opens just fine in Photoshop, has no alpha channels, and no layers.

Also strange is that I tried setting the 'ignore files larger than' setting in iView to something much smaller than the size of this image...and it seems to ignore the setting completely.

I sent iView my problem file which they told me they were able to import into iView 3.1.3 on both a mac and an XP machine.  I was skeptical of this since I'd tried on three separate machines in our studio to no avail, but I took the file home and to my surprise, I was able to import into iView on my home laptop (XP) and my girlfriends laptop (mac).

Apple support has been extremely unhelpful...they keep transferring me to the iPod department since QuickTime is distributed with iTunes.  Then they just walk me through the standard script (update QuickTime, disable DirectDraw, etc).  I keep telling them I don't have an iPod, and that I have already tried the standard solutions...but they don't seem to listen.

I don't really know where to go from here...my studio machines all run iView 3.1.3, and  QuickTime 7.2.  Two have nVidia video cards, one has an ATI.  Two are from Velocity Micro, one is an HP laptop.  All three crash when importing the file to iView and when opening it in QuickTime player.  As far as I can tell, the only thing they have in common is that they use the same antivirus software.

Maybe this will be helpful to someone if they ever run into the same issue.  Anyone have a contact at Apple who might be able to take a look at the file for me?

Thanks,

Andris

[roberte]

Hi Andris,

My guess is it is to do with the conflict between the latest versions of Quicktime, Windows, and your video cards. Since you're on XP try uninstalling Quicktime 7 and installing an older version:

www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=quicktime

Kevin Biers blog has posted other workarounds for Nvidia cards with Expression Media:

http://k7vi.spaces.live.com

-- Robert.