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

[Tom Laughlin]

is there a difference?

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

[David Roth weiss]

Tom,

Please, before you start changing things that are messed up in other people’s computers, please open the box and yank that ancient card out of there and see if the damn thing works. That old card is not achieving any positive benefits for you, period, end of story. Your Mac mechanic who left that in should be paying you (and me) for making that stupid decision.

This is my last post on the subject until you tell me that card is dead and buried…

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.

[David Roth weiss]

Chris,

The last version of the OS you should be running under is Mavericks. That was the biggest piece of crud Apple ever released, as should be obvious based upon the very brief time it existed before being replaced El Cap.

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.

[Chris Borjis]

David, unfortunately any OS beyond Mavericks breaks key infrastructure here.

I have a windows server I cannot access (SMB was changed beyond Mavericks) as well as fiber channel cards that will not
function on anything beyond Mavericks. So I’m stuck here for now.

Previous version of premiere prior to CC 2015.02 worked just fine
with CUDA and multi-cam. Unfortunately I cannot roll back premiere
and CUDA is currently in limbo for some of us.

[Chris Borjis]

double post

[Tom Laughlin]

David, the only computer I’m talking about is my own, so I’m not going around and changing other computers, I’m just working on mine. This evening, I’ll be doing some more testing with the gentlemen who built out my Mac. We will remove the graphics card, the GTX-120, and repeating the same editing tests inside Premiere, to see if the editing continues unobstructed, or if the edit starts acting up, when and where it previously did. Several post house managers in Utah I’ve spoken with are keeping their Macs on Mavericks for a bit longer. They are also staying on Premiere 9.0 and 9.1, for a while longer. i’m on 9.2 the latest version, so I don’t think that’s an issue with all this.

Thanks for everyone’s help, andI’ll keep you posted.

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

[Tom Laughlin]

I was able to get this computer problem solved, along with using some of the suggestions, you all mentioned here. So here’s what we found:

With the GTX-120 and the GXT-780 still inside theMac:

1. Even for a 12-core, 3.33GHz, 64GB Ram, Mac Pro, when editing, we found that it sometimes strugged with edting or moving large graphics around, we are talking a logo that a cleint sent over that is 600dpi, with a resolution of about 6K, something like 5800×3400, some insanely high resolution, and as a .png file, that may not have helped out as well. The graphic was clearly causing Premiere to choke, not giving it enough time to cache the file, so every 2-3 minutes into editing, the video playback would be lost. This did not happen with any 4K .mov files, so we isolated the first problem – relating to the graphic.

2. We also noticed that the macPro DID have the most current CUDA driver. But, the MacPro DID NOT have the “NVidia Driver Manager” installed, which actually talks to the CUDA and Mac, and ensure they are working properly. CUDA driver alone, will not help, I needed to install the “NVidia Driver Manager”, which also makes it so your mac can talk directly to the NVidia card, and stabilizing it’s usage and over-all performance. Once installed, a new icon shows up in the System Prefs, as well as on the upper right hand side, and you can open the “NVidia Driver Manager”, and set your Mac to Run on the Nvidia card “properly” – with Premiere Pro. Upon opening the new app, we set the Preferences to “Nvidia Web Driver”, instead of the “OS X Default Graphics Driver”.

3. We also yanked the GTX-120 out of the MacPro, which was drawing power away from the GTX-780. Having two cards running on the same driver, both fighting for usage and power and ampage rights, we immediately also saw that the Mac’s performance editing in Premiere, helped out a ton.

4. Lastly, to ensure the GTX-780 was being used, we not only connecting both monitors to the GTX-780, but we also made sure that we took the huge graphics, and scaled them down in Photoshop to a 1080p sizing, with a 72dpi, more screen friendly and graphically LESS intensive and straining on the MacPro.

With all these fixes, the MacPro has not lost any playback, for about a week, so far, all is well, and the Mac is stable.

Thanks,

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

[Tom Laughlin]

So far so good, week 01, no issues.

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

[David Roth weiss]

Of course not. We’re you expecting problems? Once you finally got that second GPU out that probably solved all your issues.

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.