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Video Rendering and Playback settings and Issues
Hello Creative Cow community,
I’m AE on a feature film. We’re using a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021, M1 Max, 64GB RAM) as our main editing workstation: It is connected to a GSpeed drive array with our media, we keep the project files on an T7 SSD, with the cache on the desktop. All the media in the project has been transcoded to ProRes with 422HQ or Proxy presets. We’ve recently been having several problems:
- Errors coming up and crashing the program: “Error retrieving frame xxxx at time xx:xx:xx:xx from file /x/x/x, substituting frame xxxx”. In other responses to this issue on teh Adobe forums, users recommend changing the renderer setting in the project settings panel, however the option is greyed out and unchangeable on the M1 native version of the Premiere Pro app. Other playback issues also include sudden green screen and other similar visual glitches in the program monitor.
- Glitches and other visual glitches in exports: This is perhaps most concerning, as the film currently is at 2 hours and 38 minutes; watching the entire film to check for single frame glitches every time we export is something that would both be exhausting and take significant time away from other important tasks. Our last export was in h.264 at 5 VBR 1 pass (done so we have a small file-size for Vimeo upload)
- Our secondary workstation is a Mac Mini (2020, M1, 16GB RAM). It’s connected to a QNAP TR-004 drive which mirrors the main GSpeed archive for the media, and the project file (sent from the main MacBook Pro workstation) and cache is on the Mac Mini local memory. When a media file is replaced using the “replace footage” tool, it works properly on the main workstation, but when opening the project on the Mac Mini, the file remains linked to the old footage despite “reveal in project” showing the file is the new footage. Reveal in Finder links to the old footage. This is a problem as we have started to replace the offline footage with online, and the pathing seems to break when moving the project file between the workstations.
If anyone has been able to solve these issues I’d really appreciate some direction. Being unable to change the video renderer has eliminated the usual troubleshooting steps which I would have taken for the frame retrieval issue, and I’m not sure where to start regarding the Replace Footage pathing issue. For the exports we’ll try higher bit rates and 2 passes instead of one. Moving to Premiere Pro 2022 is something we decided against since it may introduce new problems, and stability is key at the moment.
Thanks in advance!
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2 Replies
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Hey Raydrick,
I would be interested to know what your original source footage are?
And, is all the footage running at the same frame-rate?
Adding that it sounds like you are moving between ProRes 422HQ and Proxy files in the same time-line. Which might be part of the problem, although my luxury has always been to work on the source footage, rather than proxies, so I don’t have any experience with that.In general, as painful as it is, you’ll always need to watch the final rendered file for QC and catching glitches – that is just the nature of the beast when delivering.
If the glitches always appear in the same place, it could be a rogue key-frame in the effect panel?
If just for viewing, you could consider doing full version out. Import into project, and render out the parts of the time-line where the glitches appears. Re-insert those, and the render the whole file out again – depending on codec and quality of footage, this should be acceptable for a viewing copy.
If your current version of PPro is not working, do consider upgrading, and use a copy of project to test it out on. Depending on what version you are using, you can always roll-back and use the original project.
Hope this helps.
There are smarter people around here, who might be able to offer additional asistancce.Atb
Mads -
Good morning Raydrick!
I’ve experienced similar issues on a recent M1 Studio too. Not the pathing issues, can’t help there other than to do what Mads said and consider upgrading to the latest. Guess you’d want to test that out.
But the renderer being greyed out, I “think” is an M1 thing. To toggle to Software Only you have to put Premiere into Rosetta 2 emulation, which is supposed to get Premiere to act like it would on an Intel machine. And from there, your results may vary, but at least you can then test out that option. Command+I the app and check the Rosetta 2 box.
As for the glitchy footage, I’ve been chasing down something similar. About a year ago all forums seem to suggest that Premiere had problems with h264. Mostly export related. And that the solution at the time was to go to the Beta version (which we’re well past now) and/or put it into emulation mode. So if you’re on an older version, you may indeed find some benefit from going to the latest.
But what I’ve been experiencing “seems” to relate to playback and export (within Premiere only) of AVCHD 60p (59.97) footage. Still testing, so this is only my latest working theory. But my current doable workaround as been to transcode the footage to ProRes HQ 30p (29.97) to match our timeline.
I feel your pain. Has definitely taken off some of the luster of the M1, especially given how powerfully fast it seems otherwise. Oh, and FWIW, I’m hearing that Davinci Resolve plays very nicely with these machines. No experience, but maybe another option to consider to get the film out on-time.
Joby.
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