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The Mac CS6 "Serious Error" thread

Enthusiast ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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It looks like there are 4-6 disjointed threads about some big problems Mac users are finding with CS6 (and 6.0.1)  To give us a better place to figure out solutions and for others to find with a search, maybe we can post a discussion here.

The Adobe engineers are participating and receiving crash logs, and hopefully a pattern can develop.

I'm on a MacPro 4,1, Lion 10.7.4, CS6.0.1, 32GB RAM, GTX 285 with the latest nVidia and CUDA drivers.  I am seeing 2 primary issues:

Lots of Serious Error crashes.  This happens without any noticeable pattern - sometimes with the title tool, trim monitor, or simply just scrubbing the timeline.  It seems to happen more frequently with Dynamic Links in the timeline.  Also, I believe it is happening more often (or maybe exclusively)  with the MPE GPU option enabled.  I think in Software Only mode, it may not be present, although further testing required.

Also, I am having an issue where Pr will display black only in the source and program monitors, unless I click around the timeline and will get flashes of images.  This is remedied by changing over to Software Only for the MPE.  It seems to be worse if Safari is running.

Wil - an Adobe engineer - has taken a look at my crash logs and seems to think something is funky with the graphcs drivers in both cases, but crash logs from other users seem to not agree. 

CS6 on the mac - for  me and a few others - is incredibly flaky.  If you are having issues, can you post and explain what you are seeing and what your hardware/driver config is.  Any patterns we can find will help the engineers troubleshoot and get this taken care of. 

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Participant ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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My system is a Mac Pro 5,1, Lion 10.7.4, 32GB RAM, Quadro 4000 with the latest nvidia and CUDA drivers.  My project is entirely comprised of dynamic links with After Effects for the video and Audition for the Audio.  I converted all the video clips to AE C6 and imported them fresh. Havent done so with the audio, as it's a more complicated surgery.

My problems are four:

1) Premiere Pro CS6 is painfully slow. I installed the Quadro soon after CS6 came out to take advantage of the expanded CUDA functions. That plus PP was crawling with the ATI Radeon card that shipped with my computer. Doing anything, even nudging a clip dowm the timeline resulted in a spinning beachball. The CUDA card had a negligible effect (it might be slightly faster than the ATI but it's also less stable). Some beachballs never went away and I had to force quit. I tried clearing caches, reinstalling, doing PRAM resets, repairing permissions (even inside the terminal), opening in safe mode and all the other things people suggest. It got slightly better with the last update patch from Adobe, but only slightly. I stilll have to hold onto a clip and wait for the beachball to stop spinning to move it.

2) Premiere Pro CS6 crashes. It got to the point where I was getting "serious error" messages without doing anything. Wil is looking at my crash report.

3) Premiere Pro CS6 can't render clips that rendered without issue in PP5.5. I get compiling errors midway through. These may be related to a Video Copilot plugin effect called Twitch. I'm testing this.

4) Premiere Pro CS6 and Dynamic Link constantly lose track of my clips. The media is incredibly slow to load with lots of italicized "pendings" that last longer than five minutes. Some clips never load. Others claim to be loaded but show "Media Offline" in the project panel and timeline. I relink these one by one, which is a slow process (still can't figure out how to relink all files at once the way Final Cut and Aperture do). Sometimes relinking works and other times it knocks other things that were linked offline. Things that were rendered earlier with "Render Entire Workspce" are rarely if ever rendered the next time I open the project. Sometimes a compiling error (see (3) above) will knock all the clips offline, resulting in a sea of red tiles. This and the crashing are the worst.

All of my problems seem related to Dynamic Link. None occurred in CS5.5. I'm guessing the Dynamic Link engine was reinvented somehow in CS6 that's ill-considered, buggy, and possibly unstable.  For instance, did DL always render linked clips in CS6 in the background via the After Effects render engine?  Why does it restrict that engine to a single core when rendering via Premier Pro but use all the cores when rendering in After Effects? It must be hard to get consistency across the suite but I was hoping CS6 would clean some of this up, like that page down would advance a frame the way it does in AE or that AE would do it with the right arrow like PP. Or that the spacebar would convert the arrow to a dragging hand in PP like it does in AE.  The pieces of the suite aren't as coordinated as they could be, and Dynamic Link, on my system at least, is a disaster.

I couldn't stand Final Cut Pro X and switched to CS5.5.  It was a move I was very happy with for a long time, but CS6 has me seriously considering going back to FCP.

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Engaged ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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All of my problems seem related to Dynamic Link. None occurred in CS5.5

but CS6 has me seriously considering going back to FCP.

Wouldn't it be easier to go back to CS5.5 until CS6 is fixed?

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Participant ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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tclark,  Maybe. I tried it briefly and some of the errors seemed to have transferred over.  I have enough effects work to do that I can focus on After Effects for the time being. So far AE CS6 is much less temperamental than PP CS6.

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Enthusiast ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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Genefama and Jason - I may have asked before, but do you see all of these problems happening when you turn off GPU acceleration and go into software only mode?  That could help rule out some issues with the nVidia drivers or the graphics card. 

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Advisor ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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What you all seem to have in common is lots of RAM.  So, have you checked your RAM to make sure you don't have a bad stick? 

That could cause all kinds of havoc.  I had a stick go bad in a G4, and it about drove me crazy until I finally ran a RAM test.

You all have Macs, too.  Have you run Disk Warrior?  I've had problems with Pr CS5.5 that were apparently related to bad directories, because running DW fixed them, too.

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Participant ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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Needles and Jim,

Good suggestions.  I'll test them first thing tomorrow.  The software-only didn't help last I tried it, but it could be a possible culprit. I'll test it too.

g

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Advocate ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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Jim -

Jim Curtis wrote:

What you all seem to have in common is lots of RAM.  So, have you checked your RAM to make sure you don't have a bad stick? 

That could cause all kinds of havoc.  I had a stick go bad in a G4, and it about drove me crazy until I finally ran a RAM test.

You all have Macs, too.  Have you run Disk Warrior?  I've had problems with Pr CS5.5 that were apparently related to bad directories, because running DW fixed them, too.

The challenge I see here is: I didn't experience any of these issues with Premiere Pro CS5.5, on the same, exact rig.  I'm fairly convinced the issue isn't memory-related or FS perms related; because issues aren't showing up in any of the other software I run.

What I haven't tried yet is to disable hardware MPE.  That'll be my next test, but I don't have high hopes...

jas

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Enthusiast ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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I agree - RAM problems would be awfully coincidental, since it seems like we weren't having this issue with 5.5.  But thank you for trying to pitch in with a solution. 

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Advisor ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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I was thinking that perhaps CS6 was using memory space that CS5.5 wasn't.  I'm a watcher of Activity Monitor, and Menu Meters.  I've only used all my RAM when using Ae, doing long RAM-Previews.  It was a shot in the dark, to be honest.

You never know.  Troubleshooting is often a routine of eliminating what the problem isn't. 

I also have 32G RAM, and I'm on a Mac Pro 3,1, running 10.6.8, and I'm not having the issues you guys are.  JVP didn't list an OS, but two of you are on 10.7.4.  Coincidence?

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Advocate ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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Jim Curtis wrote:

I also have 32G RAM, and I'm on a Mac Pro 3,1, running 10.6.8, and I'm not having the issues you guys are.  JVP didn't list an OS, but two of you are on 10.7.4.  Coincidence?

It's 10.7.4 as well.  I think my issue has more to do with this thread.

jas

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Advisor ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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I don't work with AVCHD.  There's a known issue with AVCHD spanned clips.  

You could try using ProRes, DNxHD or some other intraframe codec, and see if you can eliminate your source footage or a particular codec as the issue.

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Advocate ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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Jim Curtis wrote:

I don't work with AVCHD.  There's a known issue with AVCHD spanned clips.

I assume the phrase "spanned clips" means source footage that's actually more than one file?  Because my 20+ minute track videos would definitely fall into that bucket.

You could try using ProRes, DNxHD or some other intraframe codec, and see if you can eliminate your source footage or a particular codec as the issue.

Yep, I could do that.  Seems a bit wasteful (from a time and disk space perspective) to do so, but you're right...  It'd be better if the problem could be fixed.

jas

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Enthusiast ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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I upgraded to 10.7.4 and the latest nVidia drivers at the same time - so I don't know if one, both or neither are the issue here. But, it does seem to be a common factor for the people having all sorts of problems.

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Participant ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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If you have 32GB installed and a bad memory stick, would clicking "About this Mac" show total memory as 24GB instead of 32GB?

By the way, if anyone reading this is running Premiere Pro CS6 on a Mac Pro with no problem, we'd love to hear from you too.

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Enthusiast ,
Jun 03, 2012 Jun 03, 2012

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genefama wrote:

If you have 32GB installed and a bad memory stick, would clicking "About this Mac" show total memory as 24GB instead of 32GB?

No, not necessarily.  You can use this little piece of freeware to check your memory.  If you are really curious, let it run a few times overnight.

http://www.kelleycomputing.net/rember/

Although I don't think RAM issues are causing the "Serious Problem" errors, the beachball problems you have do seem like bad RAM could be a culprit.

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Participant ,
Jun 04, 2012 Jun 04, 2012

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I'm guessing Apple, Adobe, and nVidia would recommend that everyone use the latest version of their own and eachother's software, correct? And if you have a recognized nVidia card you should set it to CUDA and not software only, correct?  Why are we talking about castrating our machines to run a spiffy rew update?

ps: needles, my memory checks out as fully installed, recognized, and problem-free.  Thanks for the idea though, and any others that might come to mind.

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Enthusiast ,
Jun 04, 2012 Jun 04, 2012

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Wil from Adobe told me that they are in the process of testing out a MacPro with the latest nVidia drivers and 10.7.4.  If they can reproduce the problem then they will have a much better chance of chasing down some answers.  Funny that we still haven't heard anyone running 10.7.4 post that they are problem free.  There must be, but if not, then it will definitely shoot to the top of the engineer's troubleshooting list.

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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Arrgghh!!!   OK - so now the last Serious error has also broken my sound - with my audio muted and grayed out too.   Even iTunes won't play and is stuck at 00:00.

This is NOT a hardware problem.  I have a dual boot system and if I boot in to Snow Leopard the audio works fine.  It's broken in this installation of Lion.

I've tried running the script (located elsewhere on this site) that is supposed to restore it - and it does - once in three or four tries.   I've also tried doing all SMC resets etc and nothing works.

Thanks to who wrote this particular bug.  It's about to cost me 24 hours of restoring a full system, hopefully to find it works again but if not I'm going to be pretty peaved as I have a deadline looming.

Does anyone know what got corrupted on the HDD to cause this audio muting?   It can't be hardware otherwise Snow Leopard would be broken too.

The thing that makes it worse is that no one from Adobe is even acknowleding that these problems exist, let alone saying they are working on a fix.  Even knowing they are working on it would help..... but the silence makes me worry that they are going to leave it until CS6.5 comes along.   Come on Adobe - someone - please speak up!   You are about to lose another customer.  You may not care about one, but one turns in to two, then ten, then a hundred, a thousand and so it goes. 

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Guest
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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I agree...I have the same audio issue, along with others   MP 10.7.4  Also tried running the Script with little joy.

So far I am sticking with rebooting, sometimes several times to get it to work. Very frustrating to say the least, but I am not getting Serious error messages, well only 1 so far.

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Participant ,
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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The routine I posted earlier to fix the muted audio still works for me 8 times out of 10. Last time, however, the mute symbol in the menu bar stayed gray even after the audio returned.

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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Well, fortunately I've managed to do a partial restore from Time Machine (just the boot drive) from last night and everything is back to normal - so this is definately a file / lion thing. 

Next time it happens I'm going to try to figure out what changed between 'now' and the last time machine backup.

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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Maybe Mountain Lion will make all of our problems magically disappear....

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Advisor ,
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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needles27 wrote:

Maybe Mountain Lion will make all of our problems magically disappear....

That's HILARIOUS!

I expect a whole new crop of problems, incompatibilities, crashes and lock-ups.  I won't jump until 10.8.4, most likely.

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012

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@needles27 - Ha!  I'm not holding my breath - nor will I be an early adopter finding the 'new' problems before they are well documented either.

It took me 8 months to upgrade to Lion..... I'm not going to be doing ML unless I see lotsof people telling me all the problems are fixed and there are no new ones

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