Premiere Pro CC no longer compatible with New Mac Pro running 10.9.3

[Reed Brown]

I did some more digging, and found that it’s possible it may have something to do with possible bad V-RAM on the graphics card. I’m taking the computer in the Genius store tomorrow and will ask ’em to check it, and maybe see if they can put back OS 10.9.3. Will let you know what outcome of all this is…

Meantime, anyone else having this issue with the new MacPro, please chime in here!

Thanks.

Reed Brown
INNOVATION EDIT

[Ken Jones]

I had a problem with the “flashing lines on export” issue, but 10.9.4 fixed it. I did just recently have a project that would not open. The fix was to open a previous auto-save.

[Alex Cameron]

Hey Guys

Reed I believe that guys at AMD, Apple and Adobe have all come out saying it shouldn’t be anything to do with bad VRAM and that it was a software issue rather than hardware. However, I don’t want to rule it out completely and will be very interested to learn if taking it in solves your issues. Please keep us posted.

This does however highlight my major problem with the fact that there does to seem to be a definitive answer here from any of the parties involved. None of them have really come out and accepted that there is an issue and offered any reassurance that it will be fixed or even when. That is the most frustrating part as it just feels like this is a phantom problem that maybe I am imagining or something and finding a solution to the problem looks about as unlikely as me becoming PM!

I’d really love Apple, AMD and Adobe to come together here and give us all one place to keep up to date with information regarding this issue and to quash any rumours of fixes that aren’t working etc.

Incidentally, 10.9.5 was released over the weekend and I wonder if anyone has tried this yet and what the outcome is? Any one who has please do jump in!

[Townley Paton]

Reed and others,
We have the same terrible issues in our edit facility. Adobe PP CC with new Mac Pro 2.7 12 core, AMD D500 and OS 10.9.4. Crashes from every hour to every few minutes. We have used every trick we can think of, all outlined by Reed above. Well done and thanks to you Reed. We are currently trapped in a nearly impossible deadline with (12) 3 minute videos for a new sports oriented camera maker… and a completely horrible routine of crashing and restarting constantly. We will be lucky to keep the client. Today after reading your blog, I’m switching back to the iMacs to avoid most of the issues but we do see the same issues in the iMacs, just not as much.

When we first bought the Mac Pro several months ago we did have many identical crashes. We were able to get a software engineer on the phone at Adobe who told me to turn off all of the advanced GPU options as previously mentioned and switch the preview rendering format to Quicktime. I had no problems until I started a new project with the latest updates from Apple and Adobe CC. It is amazing to me that Adobe continues to charge us for software that does not work. I was told in June that they were working on this issue and to hang in there! I wonder if they really compute the damage they are doing to their professional clientele. If we go back to FCP X we will never return.

We (3 editors) switched to Adobe from FCP because of the magnetic timeline and file management in X. We kept FCP 7 going for older clients and moved to Premier. $15,000 later in new gear and software plus hundreds of hours of training we are all at the end of our rope. This is completely Adobe’s responsibility. We also feel suckered into the cloud and now deeply regret the decision of moving there from PP6, although the crashing was happening then as well.

I know there are many out there thinking “I told you so.” I would get on my knees and beg if it made a difference. We’ve been at this for three weeks on this one project. Instead of enjoying 7x performance we have received a negative return on edit performance. Simply dismal.

[Reed Brown]

I’ve gone back to OS 10.9.3 and am just starting to put the computer through it’s PP CC editing paces today…will keep you posted if this improves the situation… Hope this works!

Reed Brown
INNOVATION EDIT

[Ken Jones]

I had the “flashing lines on export” problems with 10.9.3, but that was fixed with 10.9.4, and so far 10.9.5 seems to be working without any problem.

[Reed Brown]

First day of editing back on 10.3.9 and (drum roll please)…. the crashing still persists (cymbal crash now). PP CC seemed to play better for an hour or so, then the crashes started occurring. And for the first time, I also started seeing those pesky line break-ups, in addition to the normal freeze and crash events. I am truly beside myself – as is my client. We are stuck on PP CC for this job, but if this problem isn’t fixed and soon, I will go to FCP X or Avid as soon as possible (or continue using FCP 7 until it’s last dying breath on my old MacPro).

(By the way, my system checked out perfectly at Genius Bar — no bad graphics card VRAM or computer cooling issues — as suspected.)

Ken, what are your system specs? Most importantly, which AMD FirePro series do you use? Did the crash issue go away upon moving from 10.9.4 to 10.9.5? There has to be some difference(s) between your MacPro running smoothly with PP CC and those of us having problems.

As it seems Adobe/ Apple/ AMD are not perusing this tech problem it will be helpful for all of us to use our detective skills to figure out a solution. Obviously, some editors with PP CC on new Mac Pro are NOT having this issue. Why why why? Detective hats on please!

[Ken Jones]

The only major problems I had was the flashing lines on export. The workaround was to only do software rendering which was SLOW. I never really had any crashing problems to speak of. They occasionally happen, but I have Premiere set up to auto-save every five minutes so I usually do not lose too much work.

You have probably already thought about all of these, but…

Is Premiere the only thing that is crashing, or is the whole computer crashing?

Is a faulty media drive to blame? Do you have any problems if you use a different media drive? Do you have bad RAM?

Maybe you have a corrupted project file? Does Premiere only crash on this project? Does it crash if you start a brand new project? Does it crash on any other projects?

Are you using any plug ins? I have heard a lot of people are having problems with plug-ins crashing Premiere. This has been the single biggest culprit I have seen in other posts. They will say their problems go away if they remove the third party plug ins from their timeline. A big crashing problem in FCP7 and earlier was having a still photo in the sequence that was too large.

Have you tried a complete re-install of Premiere? Of course, a complete re-install of any video program has never, ever worked for me in the last 20 years (seriously!) but everyone always asks that, right?

It appears that my system specs are the same as yours:

[Townley Paton]

What appears to work…
After writing my dismal post this morning I made all the changes spoken of by Reed above plus one additional change and our system with hundreds of edits is still going strong into the night as we go for a deadline on Monday.

Premier Pro CC 2014, Mac Pro 2.7 12core, OS10.9.4

Throw out PPCC prefs. Open Sequence settings, turn off Max bit render, max render quality and also composite in linear color.

Make the Editing Mode CUSTOM, select frame size, I use 1920X1080, square pixels, 30p etc but make sure you select QUICKTIME for the Preview File format, then ANIMATION as the codec. This is the difference.

Open a new empty sequence with these settings, copy and paste into the new sequence what was driving you to consider jumping professions.

As part of the crash prep I had also kept all of my main, temp, preview and working files on a separate thunder port drive. Just the PPCC project file on the edit machine. Auto save to another drive.

I then edited without always rendering the sequence in the interest of time but no crashes for the last ten hours.

Good luck out there.

[Brian Cooney]

Yeah.. it thought the July CC update was fixing things. but now I’m back to frequent crashes and really sputtery playback and performance even at 1/4 rez view. This 12core Mac pro 2014.. we have several… just dogs out on anything adobe. Seems to be getting worse. My 2013 quad core iMac smokes these machines in regard to adobe. not sure what the answer is. I’ve been back and forth several times with Adobe. Ive got everything on software mode.. but it seems like with 6GB of video ram.. I should be accessing this machine to its mac capacity. After Effects renders take several minutes to even begin. It’s really frustrating… well I’m on vacation next week.. so I will fogeddabouwdit for a while.. 🙂

Head of Post Production, Coca-Cola Studios Atlanta, GA. Telly Award Winning Editor and Motion Gfx Artist.