[Ryan Damm]

The source footage we’re working with is Cineform (FS1 preset) — Cineform has been awful, but it was a choice we made to accommodate a hybrid Mac/PC workflow (itself a huge, cost-driven mistake). Re: Cineform, we should’ve just gone with DNxHD.

For what it’s worth, I think the frame came from earlier in the same clip (could’ve been later — the footage is very monotonous). It looks weirdly low-res, like it’s a partially-decoded wavelet file or something.

The only other stuff in our stack — we’re using a Red Giant plugin for color correction, and encoding with the x264 Pro plugin through AME. The sequence itself is a really vanilla Premiere sequence.

And yeah, I hear you about ‘consistently broken’ is better than ‘randomly broken.’ Workflow quirks and patches can be ugly, but at least they’re static and solving known problems. The reality with AME (and compressor before it, honestly) is we have to watch every frame of every video during QA, and we have to keep enough slack in the schedule for multiple re-render passes when we find errors. These random breaks in AME seem to just increase the number and variety of problems we’re catching in QA — six months ago it was just gray frames, now it’s random frames and inexplicable render slowdowns or failures. (Renders that slow to a crawl as soon as I go to bed is another pet peeve.)

If I could change anything about the Adobe Creative Cloud, it would be the silent/required updates and patches. I simply can’t afford a random patch or update to break our workflow, the way it’s done on several occasions. It makes the software prosumer, not pro. If anyone from Adobe reads this thread, I would love a ‘freeze’ option for my installation, so I’m not dealing with Adobe-related issues in the month leading up to a huge deadline.

If anyone else is listening, I’d love to hear suggestions for a truly stable software solution. I’m looking into Nuke, but unfortunately I don’t think that’s the whole answer (as we’ll still have to edit and encode somewhere — and I don’t think Nuke has a solution for that). Perhaps it’s just as simple as: NLEs and commercial encoding software are broken, full stop.

Sigh. (This is why I like camera-side stuff.)

[Ryan Damm]

For what it’s worth, I’m seeing the same problem on a PC with CUDA. Random frame encoded from a different spot in the sequence (not sure if it’s the same clip or not — I’m mashing together a lot of identical-looking clips). I haven’t tested if it’s GPU related, as it was easier to duplicate the previous frame in the sequence and repeat it. A lame solution, but I’m under deadline and can’t be debugging someone else’s software.

On my PC system, it’s persistent, too: re-render the same sequence, and the same bad frame appears in the same spot (even if the project file was versioned). That’s why the fix works, FWIW.

Personally, I’m ready for another suite besides Adobe; things have been buggy and unreliable for a while, and they break in creative ways. My coworker talks me down from the ledge by reminding me how ugly FCP 7 was, too. I’d give my eye teeth for reliable video software.