Media Encoder Crashing my Mac whilst creating proxies

Known Participant

@garysayers are you running the latest version of Premiere Pro? After I upgraded to 2023 I didn't have any further issues. If you haven't already then I'd do a test but starting a fresh project in the latest version and trying make proxies from there. I'm using macs, both intel and silicon no longer have the issue with Premiere Pro 2023

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garysayers

Participant

Yes they are all set to Rec.7o9 colour space.

Legend

did you check the color space of the clips as described in my previous post?

Zaggog

Participant

I'm getting this a lot right now. I'm going to revert back to creating proxies in the camera relinking them in the old fashion way until this is sorted out. Every time Adobe update any apps in CC I get the horrors - what next I'm thinking!

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garysayers

Participant

I'm getting the same issue on FX9 and FX6 footage, Adobe need to fix this, proxies are essential right now. This has compeletely messed up my projects, having half the footage without proxies and really slowed me down. Need to learn how to use Da Vinci!

Known Participant

The latest version of Premiere/AME (v23) doesn't crash when creating proxies from FX6 footage for me, so it would seem the issue has been fixed!

matii_Author

Inspiring

Hey everyone,

The only solution I could find at the time of originally posting this was to create my proxies in Davinci and then 'attach proxies' in Premiere. It is not ideal, but it was the only way I could get through the volume of rushes quickly without having to start new batches every couple of hours that it crashed.

I ran a few tests on individual clips before doing a big batch to make sure they attached correctly and were the same aspect ratio etc.

Hope this helps for now!

R Neil Haugen

Legend

With the changes in the Pr2023 version, which "dropped" this morning ... first day of MAX of course ... the process for proxies CM is improved.

Make sure you create a NEW project in 2023, then in that new project, go to the MediaBrowser.

Navigate to the 2022 project, click it, then "Import" or "Ingest" the contents of that project into the new 2023 project.

You get the cleanest migration AND the 2022 file is untouched, so you can continue with that if there are problems with the 2023 project file.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

I

ilanar13211889

Participant

Did you find a solution to this? I am having the same problem.

Macbook Pro 2017

2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

Memory 16 GB

Graphics Radeon Pro 560 4 GB

Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Running Catalina 10.15.7

I was trying to create a large batch of proxies from a Sony FX6 camera for a documentary project and my computer kept crashing unless I fed it small batches and constantly checked to reset everything once it crashed. Usually leaving large batches of proxies to finish overnight in Media Encoder is no problem.

I saw the comment about setting the color profile to rec 709. I'm not sure if this is related, but I did notice that I needed to override the color profile on most of the clips because they were looking overexposed with a color profile in premiere even though they looked like normal flat raw footage in Quicktime and VLC. This is not something I thought was related, but next time I will make sure to do this step first before creating proxies and see if it makes a difference.

Known Participant

I haven't found any difference in terms of crashing when switching the colour profile, and it seems like no matter what colour profile the clips are set to any of that XAVC-I footage causes AME to crash after 50 or so clips, but if I proxy 30 at a time and quit then restart AME then I can do another 30 without crashing, depending on how long the clips are. Pretty annoying. This issue seems to have only appeared recently, so I'm not sure if it's because of a Media Encoder update or if I just haven't had to deal with so much of this codec before. But the exact same issue happens on Intel iMacs as well as brand new Mac Studio's with M1 Max chips. I know other people with the exact same issue on varying systems, but it's not just FX6 footage, it's also other Sony footage using that same codec.

Legend

one other thing to try... on the occasional recalcitrant clip that changing the color space didn't help, changing the extension from .mxf to .mpg did seem to solve the problem. worth a shot... but at least while testing, but I'd copy the clip before changing the extension... but I'm a belts and suspenders kind of guy.

Known Participant

@matii_ did you find a solution?

I'm have a terrible time trying to proxy FX6 footage that's AVCI 100 in an MXF container, as AME constantly freezes after about 50 clips are proxied (this project has 500 clips) and this problem has occured on every project with this kind of footage.

Running AME v 22.6.1 on MacOS 12.6 and this issue has occured on multiple Mac Studios with M1 Max chips as well as a 2020 iMac, and only with the that footage, even other Sony footage has been fine.

I tried the suggestion of changing the clips to Rec 709 colour space before proxying but it made no difference and continued to crash after converting 50 or so proxies.

If anyone has a work around we are desperate to know as a lot of people use this codec!

Legend

well maybe just do 50 clips at a time? don't mean to be snarky, but it might be a reasonable workaround.

Are you "creating proxies" from within Premiere which sends them to AME? If so, maybe just bring the camera original into AME directly and transcode to your desired format and settings for proxies and then attach them back in Premiere.

And where are you saving the proxies? I always save them to a folder next to the original media as that avoids any issue with duplicate file names... but maybe try saving them to a common folder for the project to see if that makes any difference.

And when you successfully create the 50 or so proxies before AME freezes, are the proxies successfully attached to the camera original within Premiere?

Known Participant

As it's random as to when it freezes then only doing a small amount at a time isn't really a viable option as it still randomly freezes, but when doing a batch amount it usually gets through close to 50 clips depending on the size. And the issue is the amount of time spent on any project with this footage just to proxy is not okay, as it's not just one isolated project where this issue is occuring.

But the proxies connect and work completely fine after AME crashes except for the last two it created. It also crashes Premiere sometimes and if it isn't saved then for some reason it's making me connect each proxy individually and not batch automatically connecting the others as what is usual Premiere behaviour in all other projects.

I haven't tested if transcoding them directly in AME crashes it, but I've never found any settings in AME that allows a direct transcode with Sony clips that have 8-channel audio (which most Sony cams seem to have these days) and then attaches to the clips as proxies in Premiere without any issues (as in when trying to attach the proxy it pops up with an error about the audio channels or something). If you know what settings in AME allow a direct transcode to create compatible proxies with 8-channel audio then please post the details/link to an article as I've tried researching without success.