Mac CS6 “Serious Error” in large projects

Adobe Premiere Pro

Mac CS6 “Serious Error” in large projects

Posted by Ted Cox on October 6, 2014 at 10:10 am

Hi there,

I’m hoping the experts here at the cow will be able to help me.

When I start a new project, everything is fine, but eventually a “serious error” occurs and it’s like the project has the plague. From then on, the “serious errors” just keep coming. Even if I migrate the project to a completely different machine, the serious errors follow. While the serious errors most commonly occur when loading assets, they also randomly pop up while scrubbing the timeline, during playback, exporting media — I’ve even had one come up when I tired to cancel a render.

Because I’ve used multiple machines, I don’t think it’s hardware related. I thought that it might have to do with my specific configuration, since I’m the guy that takes care of all the machines here in our office, but I’ve done two clean re-installs. The most recent, I literally only installed the OS, Adobe, MB Color Suite and Neat Video noise, since that’s all that was required to load the project cleanly. So I don’t think it’s my configuration anymore. (I did see a note here on the cow that there have been serious error incidents related to MB plugins. Can someone give me more info about that?)

To my mind, that leaves the projects themselves. So something in my workflow causes this. I’d like to figure it out so I can avoid this pain in the future. Since there’s literally thousands of posts on this on Adobe’s forum, and more than a couple here, I’m hoping someone has walked this road and can help me with some best practice suggestions for avoiding these crashes.

FWIW, I had this same issue on CS5.5, but attributed it to overuse of dynamic linking, since the crashes largely seemed to occur when loading dynamic linked content. In this most recent project I tried to completely avoid dynamic links, but that hasn’t helped. It was in hopes of a fix that I upgraded to CS6 only to find I’m having the same problem, so I’m unwilling to give any serious consideration to upgrading to CC at the moment. I want what I’ve paid for now to work correctly before I give Adobe more money. 🙂 It seems that many people have gotten it working successfully.

I tried the Adobe forums, but the only advice I received was “don’t run Mavericks with CS6.” However, when I repeated the problem on Lion there was no response.

Here’s the details on my current hardware/install combo:

System:
OSX 10.7.5 (Previously 10.9.4)
Mac Pro Mid-2010 12 Core – 24GB Ram – GTX 680 2GB
Premiere Pro CS6 6.0.5 (updater says latest)

Project:
Mostly H264 .mov files (Canon HDSLR)
A few Prores 442 HQ files (converted from Magic Lantern RAW)

Plugins:
Magic Bullet Color Suite
Neat Video DeNoiser

For clarity, CUDA is not installed, and the system has not been hacked to use Mercury HW acceleration.

Here’s my adobe thread:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1568891

Thanks so much for taking the time to look at this, I’d appreciate any advice you have.

Ted Cox replied 11 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Kevin Monahan
October 6, 2014 at 3:29 pm

What happens if you take MBL or Neat out of the workflow?

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan
Support Product Manager—DVA
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe
Follow Me on Twitter!
Ted Cox
October 6, 2014 at 3:48 pm

Hey Kevin,

Thanks for your reply.

Both MB an Neat were used very late in this particular project, after the errors had already started. We actually didn’t own licenses for either until very recently, so previous projects (that have also suffered from the serious error issues) were done without the software even installed.
Joe Bender
November 3, 2014 at 4:24 pm

Hi Ted,
Did you ever work out why this was happening? I’m having the same problems with a rather large documentary project — as the project has grown (now ca. 180MB), it’s become almost completely unusable, crashing within minutes on the simplest operations (paste or nudge a clip in the timeline, an undo, etc.). I was familiar with this problem in FCP7, and honestly it’s one of the reasons I was excited to switch to Premiere. Opening other projects through the Media Browser in 2014.1 is a workaround while I’m finishing my current assembly edit — I had to export my assembly sequence as a separate project and selectively import the elements I needed through the Media Browser.

Any thoughts on how to set up/manage a large project to avoid this issue? Otherwise it makes Premiere basically unusable for longform documentary, and we’re actually considering transcoding everything and switching to Avid for the next phase of shooting/editing… Aie! Don’t want to go down that road.

Thanks in advance!

Joe
rMBP 2.3GHz i7 16GB GeForce GT 750M 2GB OSX 10.9.5
Ted Cox
November 3, 2014 at 5:29 pm

Hey Joe,

I wish I had a better answer for you. Unfortunately, I’m still in the same boat. There is a very long “Serious Error” thread over on the adobe forums, but honestly, it’s so long at this point Adobe tech support has said they don’t have time to read through it?!? So, I think we’re on our own.

In terms of my project, I had reasonable success with the following work around:

-Do the following as soon as your project launches — do not wait for Adobe to cache all your files
-If you’re using Hardware Mecury playback turn it off. If you’re not using it, turn it on.
-The system will then ask if you want to delete existing previews. Delete them all.
-Rerender everything. (Yeah, I know).

In my experience this would usually buy me another .5-1.5 days of editing without a serious error. My testing indicates it has nothing to do with MPE (since the issue manifests without CUDA even installed), but may have something to do with how corrupted previews.

Ted

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up

Creative Communities of the World Forums