[Carlos William]

Hey Luke,

Not sure if the issue has been fixed, I haven’t tried to use CUDA in a bit.

If you’re stuck in a death loop make sure you haven’t reactivated ‘automated graphics switching’ from the energy saver preferences. That was really the only part of this string of errors that would causing Premiere to go in nuclear death crashing spirals.

If that doesn’t work and you’re not able to switch to software acceleration I would try:

– Opening a new project, changing to software acceleration and then quitting and trying to open your project again.

– Importing your project into a new project.

– I also believe you can dump your Premiere preferences if you open the program while holding down the shift key.

[Carlos William]

Hi Peter,

I don’t have access to my system at the moment but I’ll try my best to describe exactly what my issue with Cuda has been.

I experienced crashing and funky errors at the get go that were solved by disabling automatic graphics switching and updating Cuda. Here are the issues I still get:

System: Retina Macbook Pro 15 inch, 2.6ghz, OS X 10.8.2, Premiere CS6 6.0.2, Cuda driver 5.0.37. Media on Promise Pegasus thunderbolt raid.

Specific Issue: Frozen or weird image persistence or black screen on Playback, Source and Program windows (with Cuda Mercury Engine switched on in project settings.)

Steps: Freshly started up system, open my project on Premiere. I open Chrome (or Safari) and Mac Mail and casually switch back and forth between the three programs as I cut my project. Within a matter of time the Cuda accelerated project would start acting up. It rarely crashes, it just stops playing back video on the program monitors (audio is fine.) I’ve also seen it freeze up when switching from After Effects.

More Notes: Like I mention in my previous post on this thread, I’ve yet to find someone who says Cuda acceleration works fine on CS6 on their Retina macbook. Hopefully this means it would be simple to replicate the issue on any rMBP running CS6 but please let me know if I can provide any more information.

Thank you and the Adobe team for your help Peter!
Carlos

[Carlos William]

Hey Aaron,

I’ve spent most of my time since my last post on a big edit and I’ve got to tell you I switched to software acceleration exclusively to be able to get any work done. Cuda worked, it didn’t cause any crashes for me after the update. But all kinds of things could make the preview monitor or lag and freeze. I could usually make cuda work for me by restarting and not opening anything else on the computer. As soon as I switched programs to my browser or something I could count on the preview panes to act up.

Switching to OpenCL after experiencing the display issues also no longer solves the issue. Its as if the moment GeForce 650m has to be used for something other than premiere it stops being able dedicate resources to premiere effectively.

I’m too deep in my work to try to solve the issue further but I’m personally happy with the results I’ve been getting with software acceleration. In all my hollering and shouting about Cuda performance on a retina macbook I don’t think I’ve found anyone (besides myself, prematurely on this very board) who says it worked right. I asked Philip Bloom (who I know uses the same CS6/retina combo) if he was able to use Cuda without it being wonky and he said he wasn’t.

I think the answer is that the complete solution doesn’t exist yet and we retina editors should stop looking for one for now.

[Carlos William]

Just following up, this issue was solved by the latest NVIDIA Cuda update. My retina Cuda acceleration works just fine now.

My crashing was first due to having Automatic Graphics Switching enabled (the switch is located in Energy Saver preferences)

The second wave of crashing (and all the visual glitching and weirdness) was due to a driver issue solved with the October 1st release of Cuda drivers 5.0.36 – here is a link: https://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda-mac-driver.html

Cheers everyone!

[Carlos William]

I spoke too soon.

Instant crashing has ceased but content eventually freezes on the preview and source monitor. if it isn’t frozen the panes show black if the content is paused. Undoubtedly unusable. I did trash preferences a few times as well to no avail.

A lot of the experiences on that Adobe thread I mentioned now mirror my situation more closely. I figure that at least some portion of the folks in that thread were having an issue due to the Automatic Graphics Switching issue I had.

It looks like we’re in the same boat, Mike. Would love to find someone on these boards successfully using a retina with Cuda.

[Carlos William]

Hey Mike,

Holy crap! Automated graphics switching! I honestly had not come across that solution. Now I understand exactly why it would just crash as soon it would open near anything with CUDA acceleration ticked on.

I’m guessing everything else I said was just me looking too far into it (as can happen when we try to play forum tech Sherlock!)

I will report if the issues continue but for now that seems to have solved my issue.

(To answer your other questions: I installed premiere before CUDA, attempted to trash preferences and had used h.264, prores LT, AVCHD and even iPhone footage.)

[Carlos William]

I just noticed that a lengthy thread on the Adobe Boards called “The Mac CS6 “Serious Error” thread” seems to mirror our issues. It took me a while to realize most people’s issue on that thread was somehow related to CUDA and crashing and temporarily solved by disabling CUDA.

From what I understand through that thread, the errors (be they display freezing or crashing) happen independent of whatever version of OS X you’re running and are possibly more existent in GeForce cards over Quadros. It took me a while to understand that the thread was even related to my issue so I can totally understand why Adobe would find it extremely difficult to pin down what’s happening.

Some people on the thread claim to have had success deleting preferences but then those same people turned around and said that the errors began to pop up again.

Is anyone on here using GeForce cards and CS6 with stability and success?

[Carlos William]

Thanks for the advice Phil, I just did that (and manually added the 650m as you would unsupported cards.)

Still the same issues as before. I’m getting the feeling my issue has more to do with my Cuda installation somehow. If all retina macbooks did this with aPPro CS6 there would be a much bigger uproar.

Thanks again!

[Carlos William]

Actually you know what, I tried one last ditch thing that did work to reduce file size immensely.

I exported as an XML and re-imported to a new project, project size went from 2 gigs to 5 mb. I realize that all third party plugins/render files are wiped out as a result but it did work.

I had previously tried deleting render files and deleting all plugins from timelines and then importing those timelines into new project through Dynamic Link but that didn’t work. The new projects I created with that method were still very large.

[Carlos William]

Hi Todd,

it’s definitely CS5.5. I did read on the Adobe forum that you guys fixed a similar problem in c5

I’m currently recompressing all the data to a non h264 format to see if that helps. I’ll report back my findings.

My current guess is that this happens to projects where I dynamically link clips that have Magic Bullet Looks on them. The file that’s 4.5 gb is a particularly short piece but one where I dynamically linked a large chunk of footage all at once (to use Denoiser in After Effects specifically.) That clip had Magic Bullet Looks on it before I dynamically linked it. That’s basically the only correlation I can find between file size and what’s actually in the project.