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Whenever I switch to other video programs (After Effects, DaVinci Resolve) and then switch back to Premiere, all video playback is disabled and I get black monitors until I quit and restart Premiere. It's as if other programs are "grabbing" the video playing ability and Premiere is unable to take it back. Is anyone else having this issue? It's terrible because it completely ruins the point of Dynamic Link; I can't open AE and work on anything without knowing I'll have to quit and restart my Premiere project to keep working.
I'm on a Mac Pro 2010
GTX 980
OS 10.12.4
CC 2017.1.2
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Are you using an output device such as a AJA IOXT or Blackmagic Ultrastudio?
When you say "black monitors" do you mean your entire monitor is going black or is nothing playing back in your program and preview windows?
Can you detail the steps exactly to the point where your monitors go black and unresponsive?
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No output devices being used. Only viewing on a single monitor. When it goes black, I mean the program and preview monitors go black and refuse to play video. Audio plays fine.
If another program that uses video is open, playback will go black in one of two ways:
1. Immediately after I switch back to Premiere from that program;
2. After a certain amount of time using that program open in the background. Usually 15-20 minutes.
For example, I will edit something, then export it using Media Encoder. When the video finishes encoding and I switch back to Premiere, playback will almost certainly be black every time.
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How do your Premiere - Preferences - Playback settings look?
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Like this...
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Any reason you have Mercury Transmit disabled? If not, can you try enabling it then completely quit Premiere and reopen?
Go ahead and uncheck Disable Video output in background as well.
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I've disabled just the video background option for now and it seems to have solved my issue. I'm not seeing the lag typical of returning to Premiere from another program. I didn't have Mercury Transmit disabled for any particular reason but would rather it be off if I don't need it. Will update if the problem returns.
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Nope, unfortunately this has not worked. I have enabled Mercury Transmit and disabled the background video output option. As soon as I open another video program, Premiere's playback will blink random black frames during playback for a few minutes before going black completely.
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Make sure to leave Disable Video output in background UNCHECKED.
Have you reset your Premiere preference yet by exiting the program, holding option, and relaunching Premiere?
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Hi Jeff, I've reset my preferences many times trying to troubleshoot this, doesn't seem to affect anything.
I have had the "Disable video output" option UNCHECKED as you suggested today.
When I opened up Quicktime to check a video file, then switched back to Premiere and tried to play my timeline, I got these weird horizontal black lines on my playback monitor like this:
Then when I quit Quicktime and switched back to Premiere again, the program monitor crashed completely to black and would not play any video.
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This looks to be a video card related issue. Do you have the proper drivers for your GTX 980 and your version of Sierra?
This thread might be worth looking through nVidia Web Driver users: DO NOT update to Sierra 10.12.5 | MacRumors Forums
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Yes, my drivers are updated, and I haven't upgraded to 10.12.5 yet, I'm still on 10.12.4, so the drivers are OK.
I am exhausted with Adobe telling me it's a graphics card issue and update my drivers. That's all i ever hear from them, but my drivers are always up-to-date, and my hardware setup is exactly the same as most other power users I run into (who don't have a fancy new trashcan Mac). And yet compatibility with Premiere has always been spotty. nVidia updates their drivers regularly for new OS versions. Premiere will come out with an update, and features will break which then inexplicably get blamed on the graphics card.
This has been happening since the last Premiere update, along with a new problem involving incredibly long export times, but I suppose I'll have to create a new thread for that one.
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Hi BenWinter,
I am exhausted with Adobe telling me it's a graphics card issue and update my drivers.
I wouldn't recommend running this setup, actually.
My conclusions are:
If you simply can't afford a new machine.
If you downgrade Premiere Pro or simply install and run another version, do you still get the same problem?
Thanks,
Kevin
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Thanks for the reply Kevin. It's a bit disappointing. Nowhere in the Premiere system requirements does it mention any of this. Apple stills lists 2010 Mac Pro towers as fully capable and supported under 10.12 Sierra. And these problems have been happening for years. At what point did my system become obsolete? It beats lower-configuration Mac Pro trashcans in benchmarks. I hope you understand why it would appear crazy to tell us that we need to throw out and replace expensive machines that are not only fully capable of doing the work, but currently certified by the manufacturer to run the latest operating system with no issue.
I have worked with previous versions of Premiere when I can. But thanks to the Adobe subscription model, I find it absurd that I have to keep paying even if I want to use outdated software. Will you provide technical support for my older machine on an older version running a previous version of OS X? Or will this be the mantra going forward, that I just need to upgrade? If having the latest and greatest hardware is a minimum requirement, that's a far cry from the information that's currently being disseminated.
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benwinter wrote
Apple stills lists 2010 Mac Pro towers as fully capable and supported under 10.12 Sierra.
2010 Mac Pro towers contained AMD GPUs. You've installed third party Nvidia GPUs. Apple is notorious for not playing well with third party hardware. Nvidia doesn't even release OSX drivers, the only way to get updated drivers is relying on enthusiasts to cobble together working patches.
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jeffb94256237 wrote
benwinter wrote
Apple stills lists 2010 Mac Pro towers as fully capable and supported under 10.12 Sierra.
2010 Mac Pro towers contained AMD GPUs. You've installed third party Nvidia GPUs. Apple is notorious for not playing well with third party hardware. Nvidia doesn't even release OSX drivers, the only way to get updated drivers is relying on enthusiasts to cobble together working patches.
That's not true at all. Nvidia releases updated drivers for OS X often within 24 hours of a new OS X update. I've never needed to use a patch or any "enthusiast" solution to use my graphics card, ever.
nVidia released drivers for Mac for its newest cards as recently as this past April:
Nvidia releases beta Pascal GPU drivers for old Mac Pros (and Hackintoshes) | Ars Technica
Why have I only ever had problems with Adobe products, not C4D, not Resolve, not 3DSmax, not Flame, just Adobe?
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From the release notes page:
Supported Products
GeForce 600 Series:
GeForce GTX 680
GeForce 200 Series:
GeForce GTX 285
GeForce 100 Series:
GeForce GT 120
GeForce 8 Series:
GeForce 8800 GT
Quadro Series:
Quadro K5000 for Mac, Quadro 4000 for Mac
Quadro FX Series:
Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5600
The GTX 980 (your card) is not on the list of supported cards. The 980 is a Maxwell architecture card, the driver you linked is for Pascal.
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Hello JeffB,
Thanks for your input. I have found that the GTX 980 is a GPU that tends to get a lot of support calls. I'm not sure if it's because it's a popular GPU or that some people are using the wrong drivers, as you mentioned.
Thanks,
Kevin
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Kevin-Monahan wrote
Hello JeffB,
Thanks for your input. I have found that the GTX 980 is a GPU that tends to get a lot of support calls. I'm not sure if it's because it's a popular GPU or that some people are using the wrong drivers, as you mentioned.
Thanks,
Kevin
Kevin,
It's pretty clear to me that you are getting a lot of support calls about the 980 because it's a popular GPU that Premiere, specifically the Lumetri accelerated effects, does not play well with, for a specific unknown problem with the software that nobody seems interested in fixing.
This error message is often the precursor to a black screen on my machine.
Here is a video from months ago of a different user, on a WINDOWS machine, experiencing the render error when switching away from Premiere to another application—and lo, his preview monitor goes black. Premiere error -1609629695.... Gpu rendering, memory, Lumetri, Luts... who knows! - YouTube
I have been scouring these forums for a long while searching for this issue, and found to my dismay, that there are lots of other users from both Mac and Windows machines having the same issue I'm having, but the threads end without a solution. The common denominator, I've found, are GTX-series cards, and either Lumetri plugin or titles being used in a project.
Error Compiling Movie with GTX 960 and Premiere Pro CC
Error Compiling Movie & AE.ADBE Lumetri Error on newer GTX GPUs
Error Compiling Movie GPU/Lumetri with Premiere 2015.3 and GTX 570
User miker63693834 for example confirms having the same exact black screen issue I'm having, and this was 3 months ago.
I appreciate that Adobe does not list 900-series cards as supported, but the latest cards you do list as supported are the 700 series cards which are over three years old.
I understand the insistence to update to the latest hardware, but has Adobe even tested these newer cards as compatible? There doesn't seem to be any guarantee that a newer GPU will work without issue.
So either I go out and buy a new machine and just cross my fingers that Premiere works, or I at least for now try to pursue some kind of resolution with Adobe that fixes this issue with GTX series cards for me and apparently a lot of other people. I'm hoping we can work towards a resolution here.
And now the ol' Columbo "one more thing..." I have noted in one of those threads that at least one user has resolved his issue by "de-overclocking" his graphics card that came overclocked out of the box. I do have access to overclock controls through Boot Camp so I will check if my card came overclocked out of the box and see if removing those settings will fix the issue. But for the sake of my own sanity I have to point at these threads and say "I am not crazy" and I think while I agree with you that not having the newest machine is not ideal, this is clearly not the symptom of an old machine, and at the very least the evidence mostly points to a bug with Premiere and modern GTX cards.
If that is the case, I also saw in another thread that you alerted the engineering team to the problem as far back as October of last year, so my hopes are pretty much all but extinguished that this problem will be resolved, and I"m really not sure where I can go from here.
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Bear with me here benwinter: but you have the wrong GPU drivers installed.
"As Nvidia GTX 9XX series cards require non-Apple drivers to be used in OS X"
You're going to need to install working drivers. This page has them, but be certain to read the site carefully and download the correct ones.
Links to download Nvidia Quadro & Geforce Driver and CUDA Driver for Mac Pro users
"In order to get full GPU acceleration from your Nvidia GTX 9XX GPU (960, 970, 980, 980 Ti or TITAN X) you will need to install both the correct version of the Nvidia Quadro & Geforce Driver and CUDA Driver for Mac."
Here's another guide on how to install a GTX 980: How to Install a Standard PC Nvidia GTX GPU in a Mac Pro: Using an unflashed GTX TITAN X, 980 Ti, 98...
I would be extremely curious to know if installing the correct drivers resolves most of your issues.
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jeffb94256237 wrote
Bear with me here benwinter: but you have the wrong GPU drivers installed.
"As Nvidia GTX 9XX series cards require non-Apple drivers to be used in OS X"
You're going to need to install working drivers. This page has them, but be certain to read the site carefully and download the correct ones.
Links to download Nvidia Quadro & Geforce Driver and CUDA Driver for Mac Pro users
"In order to get full GPU acceleration from your Nvidia GTX 9XX GPU (960, 970, 980, 980 Ti or TITAN X) you will need to install both the correct version of the Nvidia Quadro & Geforce Driver and CUDA Driver for Mac."
Here's another guide on how to install a GTX 980: How to Install a Standard PC Nvidia GTX GPU in a Mac Pro: Using an unflashed GTX TITAN X, 980 Ti, 98...
I would be extremely curious to know if installing the correct drivers resolves most of your issues.
I'm confused how you know I have the wrong version installed without even knowing what version I'm running?
I'm currently on 378.05.05.25f01 which is the latest for 10.12.6, and CUDA 8.0.90, which is also correct for Sierra and up-to-date.
Access to the correct drivers is pretty common knowledge among us Nvidia on older Macs folks. Appreciate the effort though.
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benwinter​, you are using the wrong drivers. The drivers you listed, 378.05.05.25f01, are NOT for the GTX 900 series. There are not currently 3rd party drivers available for 10.12.6 yet, only 10.12.5.
I assure you, if you get the correct drivers installed, you are going to experience far fewer problems.
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Jeff, where are you getting your information? Not only are they the correct drivers, but when I started this thread I was running 10.12.4 with the correct drivers for that version, so this is clearly not a drivers issue.
10.12.6 has been supported by Nvidia as far back as July. Discussion on mac forums has already moved to when 10.13 support is coming..
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I'm not going to comment further on this but if you have installed drivers from the official Nvidia website for a GTX 980 on a Mac (which you said you have), then you have the wrong drivers installed. Nvidia does not offer any official drivers for the GTX 900 series, let alone the GTX 980. You have to install third party drivers that I linked previously.
You can blame Adobe all you want, but until you install the correct drivers, you are going to continue to experience issues. You may have lucked out in the past but right now, not having the correct drivers is the primary cause of your blackouts.
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Thanks Jeff but you've been very badly misinformed.
if you have installed drivers from the official Nvidia website for a GTX 980 on a Mac (which you said you have), then you have the wrong drivers installed. Nvidia does not offer any official drivers for the GTX 900 series, let alone the GTX 980. You have to install third party drivers that I linked previously.
MacVidCards who flashed my card lists my version as the correct version for 10.12.6. Drivers - MacVidCards.com
Again, I ask, where do you get your information saying my driver is not compatible?
There are no third-party drivers. There are only Nvidia drivers. You may be getting confused with Hackintosh users who modify kexts to get them to install on their machines. I do not own a hackintosh so this irrelevant to this.
10.12.6 has been supported by Nvidia as far back as July. Discussion on mac forums has already moved to when 10.13 support is coming..
Again, appreciate your help, but do you even own one of these cards?