[Ryan Poduska]

AJ, I just spent a couple of days on tech support (and numerous technicians) with Adobe concerning this same issue I was having. It turns out that the cause of the problem is the Intel Iris graphics card. Even though Adobe has it listed on their supported system requirements, they said that you need a bigger graphics card to render your project that has ANY effects placed on it. So the two options you have is to either bypass the graphics card or upgrade the graphics card to a supported NVIDIA card. To bypass the graphics card for rendering, go to File > Project Settings > General and change the “Video Rendering and Playback” to “Mercury Playback Engine SOFTWARE ONLY” setting. This bypasses the graphics card and everything renders just fine regardless of what effects are used in the project.