Premiere Pro 9.2 & Graphics card CUDA problems, video goes black! Poof!

[David Roth weiss]

So Tom,

Exactly why did you leave the GeForce GT120 installed in your computer? And, why did you not mention it in any of your rather long explanation? With the second care you’re probably either overheating your Mac or drawing too much current from the power supply. Have you tried taking the 2nd card out?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Pierpaolo Ferlaino]

I discussed an issue like a few post ago… There’s clearly something wrong with CUDA and Yosemite that was never solved. If you google “Premiere Cuda and Yosemite” you find a lot of people complaining.
I know you’re on Mavericks but someone is having this issue on mavericks too…
Did you try uninstalling CUDA and using openCL?

[Tom Laughlin]

Pierpaulo,

So there is a few things I have tried and thiught would help but didn’t:

1. Change graphics from being PNGs to JPGs and TIFFs, still video goes black.
2. Found some precious Nvidia Cuda drivers v6.0.41 and v6.0.51, these cuda driver updates were released around the time Mavericks would’ve been released and Nvidia cards needing this update. Still nothing.
3. I have not yet tried reinstalling the latest cuda driver. The precious card I was using ran using the latest cuda driver installed and I thought card was going out. I took out the Nvidia quadro 4000 and replaced it with a Nvidia GTX-780, and simply left the latest Nvidia driver installed. Should I try and remove and reinstall the Nvidia driver? Back a few years ago, Nvidia drivers were card specific, now Nvidia has a driver for mac based cards, this driver just covers all cards now, so I know for now, the latest cuda driver is installed.
4. Tested cuda with exporting video via media encoder, and exports are fast and exports look good and the media encoder is able to use cuda and exports are fast and all functionality there is ok, it’s Premeire where video goes black intermittently.
5. Since I am on Mavericks, I’m not sure if it a problem with my graphics, so I opened up another projects and spend 10 minutes snapping around the play head in the timeline trying to get video to go black, this project does not have any 3-6k graphics, in the project, so I wonder if this is like a problem with the project not being able to handle (using cuda enabled) the 3-6k still graphic one files. (Fcp7 was notorious for crashing when you used large images, and people had to scale them down or open them in Photoshop and save them in a 1080p size instead of 2-6k, cause fcp7 simply didn’t like them and crashed a lot back then…)
6. I looked at my Mac specs, and as you can see, this macpro is a workhorse, and is robust enough to handle 3-6k editing. I use Rampant Effects, 4K .mov files and they play just fine on the timeline, so 4K video seems to handle ok.

Any other ideas?

Thanks everyone, please more comments or thoughts!

Tom

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Digital Chop House
Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.digitalchophouse.com

[Tom Laughlin]

David, I apologize! I’m new to how thing is all unfolding here with this macpro. Yes, I will try and take the other card out and see if this helps. The reason for the long thread was that I wanted to help everyone get the chase with as much info on my end, just so people can see what I have been trying and seeing. I’ll ensure my posts are shorter next time, sorry! Thanks again!

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Digital Chop House
Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.digitalchophouse.com

[David Roth weiss]

Tom,

Please sir, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about detail and precision, and as you know, I’ve been helping you and others solve these hardware riddles here since caveman days. My only jab at you was that you’re having graphics card issues, but never once mentioned that 2nd card, I just happened to notice it in one of the graphics you posted and was surprised to see it was not on your radar.

For the record, that older card can’t be helping, it’s ancient, and can only hurt you. Your GTX 780 supports three displays, so there is no good reason why you need that old piece of iron onboard.

In addition, why are you stuck on Mavericks? It was Apple’s shortest lived version of the OS ever, and was not beloved by software developers. If you’re in the middle of projects I can understand your reluctance to shift to a new version, but on a Mac it’s easy to build a test boot drive on a FireWire or USB drive. Call me, I’ll walk you through the safe way of doing it if you’re nervous (my number is easy to find).

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Tom Laughlin]

David, always great to get your feedback and input! When you’re back in Utah again, we need to get together. Let Phil Boyack and/or Avid know that we need another event with ProMax and Avid!

Regarding the OS, I am between projects and will be able to switch to Yosemite here in a few weeks, however I’ve heard Yosemite and Premiere Pro aren’t playing NCOs either. From compatibility or stability issues, to bugs and weird things happening, with other editors posting issues, I will probably test this out as you’ve mentioned, doing a boot drive here in a few weeks.

With the graphics card advice, so that’s where I’m weak in the know how. I don’t have a ton of experience with graphics cards as my precious Macpros were the default factory cards so I never had to update cards or put in newer cards. So this graphics card situation has definitely opened me up to a whole new part of post production editing and troubleshooting. I also had no idea about the GT-120 being part of the problem. The main reason I never thought about that is, the gentlemen who built out my macpro 5,1 12-core, he told me that the reason he installed two cards was the help alleviate the workload of each card. So instead of running one card too much, by splitting the workload of the two cards, both cards wouldn’t work as hard and the faster card would work even faster with one monitor hooked up to it, instead of two. So my dual monitors are set up where my main monitor on the left is run by my GTX-780 and my right monitor is being run and hooked up to my right monitor. I just figured that the two cards would share the payload.

From what you’re saying, ditch the GT-120, so I’ll try that. Does that mean to plug in both computer monitors into the 780, and leave the 120 inside the macpro, OR, to take the 120 completely out of the macpro all together?

Thanks for the note. I’ll try this out this evening and let you know how things go. If things are still weird, I’ll hear up and move into Yosemite ASAP. I did read a blog that someone was having issues with Yosemite and the GTX-780, but I didn’t get s chance to read in depth how they were using it and with what app.

Will keep you posted and if your or others have any more things to try, let me know.

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Digital Chop House
Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.digitalchophouse.com

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Tom,

FYI, I’m back to being an indie filmmaker just like you now.

Meanwhile, take that older card out now, do not pass go, etc., etc. While in the days just a few years back, sharing the chores between cards was a good thing, nowadays the cards are so powerful you just don’t need to use two cards unless you really splurge and go with two very powerful cards. But, the days of splitting display chores between two poorly matched cards like yours are long gone.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Rich Rubasch]

Yes, here too. I posted a while back about crashing and alluded to CUDA but my post was deleted.

We are also working with AJA because when we disable our Kona LHi cards we get more stable performance.

We have 2010 and 2012 Mac Pros with almost all GTX 680’s and plenty of regular RAM. Just lots of odd crashing where our monitors go completely black and we have nothing….only a hard restart.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Chris Wright]

can you narrow it down to cpu cores, ram, mercury transmit, sound card, mac permissions?

try these:

1. preferences-optimize rendering for performance

2. Limit Premiere’s RAM allocation to 32Gb

3. limit premiere to utilize only 16 cores for PP

4. Set Preferences : > Audio hardware > Default Input: to None

5. disable mercury transmit

6. mac permission issue
https://blogs.adobe.com/kevinmonahan/2014/09/10/premiere-pro-cc-freezing-on-startup-or-crashing-while-working-mac-os-x-10-9-and-later/

[Chris Borjis]

Have you tried OpenCL instead of CUDA?

I can’t even use multi-cam smoothly even on low res setting with
the current CUDA driver.

I’m on Mavericks.