This issue is caused by using Adobe Media Encoder (AME) with the Mercury

Playback Engine (MPE).

If you don't have one of the MPE supported video cards (there's a list in

the lower right corner of

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance.html) than you shouldn't

have this issue with AME, since the workaround is switching off support for

MPE and without one of those cards this issue doesn't exist (not this issue

anyways...)

If you do have one of those cards and you don't have Premiere (cause the

Web version of suite doesn't have it) then I doubt AME would be using MPE

anyways - the list of video cards that enable MPE comes from

cuda_supported_cards.txt file and that file is found only under the

Premiere install directory - so again you shouldn't have this issue.  If a

non-premiere install of AME somehow still manages to use MPE you could find

that file and remove that card from the list to disable it, presumably.

But I'd call support to do that.

I would upgrade and test it out immediately after installing the new

version - do exactly what you want it to do with the file from last May to

see if the bugs are worked out of the process; if not call support - if

they can't fix it ask for the upgrade fee back.

I also do not have the MPE and have seen in CS5 and CS5.5

With DV I have not seen the issue.  But with HDV and HD, I have given up and just output from Ppro and it works perfect every time.

We're all in the same boat. Export freezes. Closed out PP5.5. Trying AME. We'll see. Leaving Wed. to present film at conference on Thursday. Do or die.

Well, I thought I would be upgrading to CS5.5 Web by today. Adobe website says 30% discount on upgrades, but an astute salesperson on their end told me that, no, the 30% doesn't apply to CS5 to CS5.5, just CS4 versions and under. So there won't be a chance for me to try endcoding the f4v to flv that gave me so much trouble in May to see if it does or doesn't work in CS5.5 AME.

I find it interesting that Louis is trying a trial of Vegas. I don't encode enough to make it worth my while to buy a whole new product. I was wondering if anyone has used any of the on-line encoding services. I found several. One called Zencoder that has several price ranges depending on the quantity of endcoding you want to do. I could encode for 5 cents a minute so a one hour job would be reasonably priced. If a production house does a lot of encoding its way too expensive, but maybe this would be the answer for the casual user?

Well guys it does work on some peoples systems, with the right hardward and most current drivers and updates. For me I was trying to render 4+ hours of videos for blu-ray. The estimated render time was around twice that (8 hrs with around 40 clips queued) with my current system. Before I had the drivers that were out of date only by a couple months, AME would stop doing anything after encoding 10-20 mins worth of sequences. The only fault indication was no progression on the render graph, and processing in my performance tab of windows task manager would drop from 80% to 1% idle. The very instant I updated my EVGA GTX 570 drivers to the current ones on the site (not the ones that came on the disk) AME never had a problem ever again.

I'd say post your hardware and driver versions/windows versions and updates. If anything I can at least make recommendations for troubleshooting after that.

So you're just rendering out a wave? wouldn't you want to set that up in audition?

I know Travis, I know everybody can't run out and just buy a new PC, and certainly everybody can't build their own, but with you having a complex dynamic link and large project like this, I'd estimate the problem could have something to do with you being on the low end for your ram. Now is a good time to upgrade your ram if you can because the prices are so low, and it will be an easy way to tell if that's the problem with your rig. I priced 16gigs recently for my wifes PC and it was like under $150 bucks. For what it's worth, I'm running an i7 970 with 24gigs of ram and an nvidia EVGA gtx 570. A couple months ago when I jumped on this thread I didn't even have a raid, just two 7200 drives (OS and source media), now i do, but that wasn't the original problem.

Bottom line, I'm betting it's has to do with the ram or your video card. I've seen the gtx 570s for $250 range on ebay, definitely worth the coin for the cuda processing if you're working with large files.

Louis, what version/build of the latest driver do you have for your card?

I see Gigabytes newest driver is older than that, so I'd assume that's the correct driver. Unless you're not using the Gigabyte driver, and that you should be using that instead of an Nvidia driver from another source? I mean it would be worth a try to switch.

I'd maybe try Gigabytes driver and see if it still does it. And if that doesn't work I'd seriously consider trying out another manufacturers card, like an Nvidia branded card or EVGA. I guess another thing worth looking at is what brand of ram you have and what you have it clocked at. This is what I'm running:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104170

and I'm clocked at 1349.8 MHz.

I don't really have it underclocked for any particular reason, I use to have a GT 8800 card, and I think last time I loaded my system I never had the most updated driver and it would make my computer lockup and restart around once a day. I was troubleshooting it by changing system timings and removing software, but never really got it to stop until I bought the EVGA GTX 570. From that day on it never restarted on me and I never even tried to bump back up the timing on the Ram to 1600.

I promise I don't work for EVGA, and I've even seen some GTX cards on ebay and craigslist pretty cheap. Just in my experience the card and driver is going to probably be the culprit on all these problems.

Well Vegas doesn't use cuda processing,..and even rendering out of premiere is solid with the gpu acceleration turned off for you correct?

Yeah at this point I'd be stumped other than switching the brand of card, I didnt know vegas had cuda processing too, that's interesting. I think when I chose to go with Adobe it was also because I thought Encore looked better and had a lot more features.

Louis, I've troubleshot lots of things with computers. If something like this can be solved with a used card and you can sell your current card on ebay for around the same price,..thats going to be a very low risk and low time commitment solution.

Funny, I just have a kind of DajeVu.

When CS2 came out, the MediaEncoder did not work correctly. Several Updates later people were still having trouble with it. Instead of fixing the problem, Adobe released CS3 with a new MediaEncoder with just the same old errors for another hundreds of dollars. People hoped that CS4 would bring an end to that, but alas! The same crappy piece of never-fixed software.

Now CS5 is out and you people are still hoping to get a working application? Havent you learned anything from Adobe?

I am having the same issues with AME constantly crashing, stopping, killing dynamic-link or spitting out cryptic messages and i am not the least surprised about that! That happens if you buy some small software company, rename their work and kick out the original developers for some cheaper outsourced student camp in india.

I am now used to rendering out uncompressed files through AfterFX and then encoding them with some freeware like SUPER.

"But that takes all day!" you say? Well, but at least I am getting out any result at all.

And I am now learning from Adobe. If my clients come to me not satisfied with the quite costly animations i do for them, i just tell them, that i cannot reproduce their feelings about my work and they should perhaps pay me even more and hope that the next job will meet their expectations,

Do you guys still remember the times when Adobe Software was some trustworthy base to build a business upon? Ah, yesss, back then....

Louis_fre wrote:

 

Just to refresh my facts again:

AME works fine in a CS 5 environment.

It freezes randomly in a CS 5.5 environment with no errors, just simply stops working.

 

My system specs:

 

Windows 7,  64 bit, SP1, with the latest updates and drivers

 

16GB RAM

 

CPU: i7-2600K @ 3.4 GHZ, running overclocked @ 4.4 GHZ  with special heatsink

(the symptoms happen without overclocking as well)

 

GPU: Gigabyte made Nvidia GeForce GTX 580

 

1 x 2TB HDD partitioned into 2 x 1 TB

 

2 x 2 TB on RAID1

Greetings;

Running almost identical system with Z68 Pro Motherboard,  accept for EVGA GTX570 card on mine.

I don't believe this is a graphics card issue as you have gigabyte, I have EVGA and we both have the problem.

Was having same issues. CS5 AME works fine, First install of CS55 caused stalled rendering without warning.

I uninstalled and since reinstalled.  Now CS55  AME kinks as soon as it starts from a Premiere sequence export and brings up white box/red border warning O/S doesn't like what AME is trying to do and asking if I want to go to Graphics card driver home page. Click Yes/No AME shuts down.

My present problem appears to be in the software handshaking between AME and Premiere Pro right when AME starts up with Premiere sequence. 32 bit vs 64 bit , Administrator rights? I don't know and it's beyond my scope. Hopefully Adobe techs can work this out.

Until they do I'll continue with CS5. The GPU acceleration speeds things up and I'd hate to have to turn it off.

I've joined the Improvement program  and during the Xmas break will file a bug report. Somewhere down the road this issue needs fixing.

Regards

JD

P67 Z68 Pro

16 GB Corsair Ram

GTX 570

Windows 7 Home Premium

Adobe Production CS5 CS5.5   

GPZ Productions wrote:

 

I ended up having to encode my sequences with After Effects.  That seemed to work.  I am going to wipe everything and do a new install of the operating system and the programs.  I do not know what precipitated this problem.  I did not have this trouble in the past.

I finally got around to wiping the OS and installing EVERYTHING fresh.  That worked.  I am able to encode with AME sucessfully once again.  I have no idea why it had stopped working.  I did not change any hardware or drivers.

JD, I guess verify you have the most current driver for your EVGA card. Here's a screen cap of mine from mine in the device manager. I guess also you're stating that it happens as soon as AME starts to render a Premiere sequence. I think a lot of other people in this thread were saying it would happen a few minutes into the render, so it could be that yours is a different problem.

GPZ, I think with reinstalling everything, it's the type of thing that can change a lot of variable without you knowing it. When you reinstall an OS and software you can get a lot of different drivers and updates without even knowing it, including from Windows, Nvidia, and Adobe. Also sometimes some 3rd party software and drivers can effect things sometimes. I know I had some Red Giant trial encoders one time that were messing up some things like audio.

I think in this thread we've talked about all the possible hardware and driver issues, but we haven't really talked about our nested dynamic links set ups or output settings.

For me before I updated the GTX 570 driver which (fixed) my same problem, I was rendering sequences from premeire with 2 avchd clips and a few image and title layers, and outputting as the H.264 Blu-ray with a preset where I just set the rate to a dialed down CBR. I would like to note again my problem was happending after after queuing up any number of these from 2-30 in AME, and after rendering around 4-10 timelines worth of videos, it would stop with no indication or error message. So basically if I had 3 or more clips that were 2 minutes each, it might get through all of those and lock up on the 3rd. Or if I had one video first in the queue that was 7 minutes long, it might lock up on it 80% of the way through with just that sequence.

Here's a few screen caps of my drivers, layers, and export settings. Ignore the fact my source media on my screen cap is missing for one layer. That's just cause I moved the project to an archive drive after I was done with it a couple months ago and I didn't bother to map up the file path right to make the screen cap. Also notice my layers are set up with an mpeg and an mts avchd file (two different cameras), I'm guessing that shouldn't matter, but it just shows its probably not a media type issue.

Paul_Duffey wrote:

 

 

 

GPZ, I think with reinstalling everything, it's the type of thing that can change a lot of variable without you knowing it. When you reinstall an OS and software you can get a lot of different drivers and updates without even knowing it, including from Windows, Nvidia, and Adobe. Also sometimes some 3rd party software and drivers can effect things sometimes. I know I had some Red Giant trial encoders one time that were messing up some things like audio.

 

In my case, with CS4.0.2, AME was working just fine.  In the middle of editing a wedding project something happened, if I could pinpoint it I would, and then AME would crash as described here.  All of the drivers were updated when I re-loaded everything but it had worked just fine for six months prior to this re-load.(It is a new build done in May).  I suspect I had either downloaded some software that was desagreeable, but I had uninstalled several recent downloaded programs and the problem remained, or AME glitched when I was trying to render a sequence with a dynamic link to a complicated AE project.  After this attempted, and failed, rendering is when all of the headaches began.

Who's to say that there is not more than one issue that triggers this malfunction.

2 more projects rendered correctly today as well, I am begining to believe that the bios update has ironed out this problem.