Horizontal Flicker - on imported h264 mov - 1998x1080px - on several computers

[Aecorn]

We are a professional animation studio, Qvisten​, and we're using Premiere as our main editing software.

The last week we are experiencing some weird flickering when playing back and exporting in premiere. See the top of images attached, the flicker does occur in the whole image, but mostly on the top.

Its almost like a "temporal glitch", where certain lines in the image are being replaced with info from other times in the edit.

The files imported are h264 encoded .mov files. They originate both from Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, and RVIO. They are 1:85, 1998x1080px.

The issue is only present after placing the quicktimes in a timeline in Premiere, not in for example playing the input files back in VLC on the same computer.

There are no Effects or Basic Motion on the clips.

This has so far "spread" to 4 computers, one computer seems to be "immune" from the issue, which would probably encourage further investigation on the difference between these.

We have tried:

1. Cleaning caches and restarting.
2. Setting the Renderer to Software only in General Project settings (and back again).
3. Edit > Preferences > Media > Enable accelerated Intel h264 decoding (turned off and restarted, turned on and restarted).
4. Converting the input-files to proresLT using ffmpeg beforehand seems to solve the issue, but this workaround would mean changing our whole pipeline and a lot of work to implement, and we still haven't identified the issue.
5. Updating graphic drivers on one computer didnt seem to help.
6. A project at 1440x778px seems to be fine, suggesting it might have something to do with frame-buffer-size?
7. There is one computer/user which has "touched" only the affected projectfiles, we are now testing if we can recreate the "bug" by opening project-files on this user's computer.

Any hints on further measures we can take to save our projectfiles would be appreciated.

[yenaphe]

Can you export another flavor of quicktime from Toonboom and RVIO? If so, can you try exporting to Quicktime Animation and see if the problem still occurs?

[Jim_Simon]

The files imported are h264 encoded .mov files.

That's not the best format to be working with.  You should export something like Cineform or DNx from your animation software for continued editing.  Don't ever go down to H.264 until final delivery.

[Aecorn]

As commented on in the post, we tried swapping to proresLT, which solved the "problem".

We only use h264 as a proxy format for the editing process, we do final conform and delivery using EXRs and Nuke Studio.

We are currently rebuilding the projectfiles using XML to see if this helps. Ive written a script to sort video and audio-layers into bins. If the problem reoccurs after rebuilding the projectfiles, we might consider moving to a different proxy-codec.

[Jim_Simon]

We only use h264 as a proxy format

That's a poor choice for proxy.  H.264 is much more difficult to edit than Cineform, DNx or ProRes.

[Aecorn]

We will consider swapping out our proxy-format, but this does not necessarily address the bug in question, just circumvent it.

And it will seriously take time and effort on our pipeline and crew to convert input files and project files. (We are talking a number of quicktimes in the 5 digit-range.) Swapping to prores or similar will also take a bigger toll on our file server and network speeds because of the increased file sizes.

I thought Premiere should work well, regardless of input format. Unlike other editing suites which prefer transcoding to a specific intermediate codec beforehand?

We will try taking the route through XML and back, but need to be vigilant on the effects not carried over in the xml-file. The xml-translation-logfiles should help with this.

[Jim_Simon]

this does not necessarily address the bug in question, just circumvent it.

Sometimes, that's all you get.