Premiere and Media Encoder CS5.5 Freeze On Output

[Jon Barrie]

There could be corrupted conform files in the project and it snags on it.

Here’s what I do if (happens very rarely) this happens. Go to Preferences… Media… Clear Cache.

Quit Premiere Pro

Wait a minute as the deleting (clearing of cache) happens after quiting.

Relaunch PPro.

Let any of the conforming and indexing, etc of the media finish (you can see a yellow bar in the very bottom right when it is doing it).

Export.

Let us know how it goes.

– JB

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
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[Chris Loughlin]

I’ve also had exactly the same problem as James with my recently installed CS5.5 – and have spent 2 days trying to work out what was wrong. Turns out a simple clearing of the cache was all it needed. I’ve had this before, so I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. It’s odd that the cache seems to cause quite a few stray problems. Anyway – thanks for the reminder Jon and for saving me more wasted hours!

[Andreas Urra]

Hi, we use MacOS 10.6.8 and since we installed CS5.5 the Media Encoder freezes all the time. Cache got cleared several times and all local cache files were hunted down and eliminated. Did not help. The strange thing is, that AME does not behave predictably. The same encoding job, that repeatedly freezes AME can well run through after a re-boot of the system. It slows us down tremendously. Does anyone have further information on this?

Regards,
Andreas

[Jon Barrie]

Try repairing disk permissions.

If that doesn’t sort it. Run an uninstall and use te cleaner tool from adobe site to remove all files and reinstall.

Hopefully the disk permission repair does the trick.

– JB

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter

[Andreas Urra]

Hi Jon,

thanks for the help. Unfortunately, repairing disk permissions did not help. It also has difficulties, i.e. will not repair all disks and not all errors it spots.

Regarding re-installing: We have installed it on three different Macs, all having this problem. The CS5 that was on there before had been uninstalled with the cleaner tool.

First results: Mercury hardware acceleration could be the problem

When we reopened the underlying projects and changed the MPE setting from hardware acceleration to software only (project settings), it seems to encode stable.
We have NVIDIA Quadro FX4000 for Mac and Quadro 4000 for Mac boards installed. Problems show on both configurations.

Maybe there is a bug with the NVIDIA cards, their drivers or Adobe’s way of adressing them?

However, I do not see how I could nail it down for a qualified bug report to Adobe. Any ideas how this could be communicated to them?

Regards,
Andreas

[Andreas Urra]

A quick update:

We rendered out a bunch of more videos without GPU acceleration. No freezing. Before, to a high degree of certainty, this number of videos would not have rendered through smoothly. This really points to the problem being with the CUDA interop.

[Josh Roeda]

Andreas, How did you disable GPU Acceleration? I’m having your same issue.

Sorry I’m new to PPcs5.5. Trying to switch from FCP. Very annoying that the first experience I have with Adobe Premiere Pro is a bum one. Crash after crash.

[Andreas Urra]

Hi Josh, it is a project setting. If you are new to Premiere, there are:

1. Premiere settings (global)
2. Project settings
3. Sequence settings (multiple per project)

So, under Project > Project Settings > General > Video Rendering and Playback you can chose “Mercury Playback Engine Software only”

Then you have to save before encoding to get the setting into the Media Encoder.

Important: The Media Encoder does not have such a switch/setting. It takes it from the Premiere project. Therefore, saving before export is important.

I would recommend having the option on for editing and then switching it of (and save) just before export.

Regards,
Andreas

[Steve Broucke]

I have adobe premiere CS5 with the same problem. I get it when I use the audio effect “EQ”. When I put the EQ effect off or if I simply don’t use it then my exporting problem ended and encoder doesn’t freeze anymore. I hope it can help other people.