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LindyHop1943
Known Participant
June 25, 2015
Question

Kernel Crash during render with CUDA and Nvidia Quadro 4000 - total frustration!

  • June 25, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 14691 views

I just want to throw the computer and Premiere out of the window. I'm so frustrated that I want to stop doing video work for good! Once a year I have to edit large instructional DVDs for a dance camp. This year I'm having major issues that kill my life and my health. I have spent more than 3 weeks on that issue without any result.

Problem: When I export a section of the Premiere timeline the kernel graphics card driver crashes. About 1 to 10 minutes into exports (direct export, no queued AME) the screen goes black and Windows reports a NVidia driver kernel error. The driver is recovered and Premiere hangs. This only happens on CUDA export not with the software option of Mercury. The error is not related to a certain clip or portion of it. If it crashes on a certain clip and I restart Premiere this clip will be rendered fine the next time. The crashes happen always after a certain but varying time somewhere during the rendering.

Since the source material is 2K I need to scale it for DVD output. Therefore I need the CUDA support for the output quality. Premiere uses the better Lancos scaling algorithm only with CUDA support and when exported directly (not via AME—at least not with CC2014). Without the CUDA support the scaled down pictures looks not sharp enough. DVD already has a low resolution. Unfortunatey Premiere has no option of sharpening the output.

For troubleshooting I have tried:
- Premiere Pro 7, 7.2, 8.0, 8.0.1 and the actual 8.2
- various nVidia drivers from one year ago to the actual one
- different user account
- different render formats (for the project I need to output to MPEG-DVD)
- newly created projects and timelines
- checked the temperature with GPU-Z
- exported to external and internal drives

- source files form external and internal drives

- the latest step was a complete reinstall of the system (Win7, updates, CC) incl. BIOS update


Nothing stopped the kernel crashes when using the CUDA.

I contacted PNY and NVIDIA. I run stress tests and other tests on the card. It shows no problem at all. The graphics driver doesn't crash on any other usage.The card does not show any issues.

I have a ASUS P6T board with i7 920, 12 GB RAM, NVIDIA  PNY Quadro 4000. Win 7 Ultimate SP1, all updates and patches installed. The source material of this year is from a Sony F7 in 2K.

It looks to my very much as if Premiere has a bug that causes the driver to crash. It worked fine until last year's project. The only changes are the constant OS and software updates. No hardware has been changed.

The randomness of the crashes would normally suspect thermal issues, but since the computer doesn't show any thermal issues during other work or stress tests and only with CUDA I rather suspect an issues of the parallel programming within Premiere when addressing the CUDA.

Does anyone have another clue?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    ECBowen
    Inspiring
    June 25, 2015

    I have seen this before when you have media in the timeline that is non standard resolution for video with a different aspect ratio. CC 2014 has been much better at dealing with that but previous versions of Adobe often had issues with the memory management of those buffers. The fix when this occurred was to turn the GPU acceleration off and just run the software MPE mode. However you are stating that is not an option because of the scaling quality. So my recommendation is take that timeline into AE and let the compositor do the software scaling since they are far better at that with CPU processing.

    Eric

    ADK

    LindyHop1943
    Known Participant
    June 25, 2015

    This sounds that even a different graphics hard won't make a difference. So the hyped professional CC became just less professional!

    In my last deperation I'm trying to upgrade to Win 8.1. Maybe the different drivers work better. I created a disc image, so I can go back in case I need to.

    Going to AE might be an option. Is the software scaling really different (meaning better) than the one in Premiere?

    I have about 220 clips of instruction that need to be rendered separateley for DVD/Encore. At the moment I'm using AutoHotKey to automatically go from clip to clip and render it out directly. This allows me to have the computer run over night and then have all clips ready. (I automated most tasks with AutoHotKey and also created a program that creates all titles form a text file). I would need to get everything into After Effect, get the full length SD clip back and then change the timeline setting to SD. Then I would be able to render the single clips per software only. A lot of crappy work because Adobe doesn't fix their bugs and makes their software more stable (every CC release had me experience more issues than all the CS version together).

    ECBowen
    Inspiring
    June 25, 2015

    This is not a bug. This is the Nvidia driver crashing because of what the hardware acceleration is requesting and the memory management ie memory management profiles for GPU acceleration to even function. It could possibly be a bad video card but I doubt it based on the other information provided. You can run 3D Mark and push the video card to the same extent Adobe is pushing it and verify if the video card is an issue. However if 3D mark doesn't show the same problem then the card is not the problem as far as hardware defect. The 970 and 980 GTX cards would have different resource management ie memory management profiles so could potentially fix the issue just because of that. However I have seen this issue before going back to the 600 series GPU's when it's occurred and it always revolved around non standard video resolution media and the buffers required to scale that to the other media.

    Yes AE is far better at scaling via software ie CPU processing since the render engine  ie player is different and built towards compositing. You points on batch encoding though I cant argue with. You can render queue out these as different Comps and jobs in AE. Beyond that I don't have further ideas for you.

    Eric

    ADK

    RoninEdits
    Inspiring
    June 25, 2015

    other possibilities to test, does this happen only with the sony footage or other media? do you have any extra hardware like aja card or third party plugins that premiere uses? can also troubleshoot the timeline to see if its a certain premiere effect or nesting thats causing it.

    can look at this, if this matches your error.

    https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/413110/geforce-drivers/the-nvlddmkm-error-what-is-it-an-fyi-for-those-seeing-th…

    prime95 and memtest86 are also good programs to stress test the computer, to see if there are any hardware problems.

    and another gpu tester  Video memory stress test

    LindyHop1943
    Known Participant
    June 25, 2015

    Thanks for your reply and the tips. The link looks promising. I will work on it next.


    I tried different footage and the problem happened, too. There is no extra hardware and not third party plug-ins. The timeline only has a fade in and out on each clip plus a title and an overlay video at the begining (animated lower third) of each section. As I wrote the error occurs randomly and when I render the same clip again it normally works on the second try, very seldom I needed a third try.

    LindyHop1943
    Known Participant
    June 25, 2015

    I checked the link and tried a test with higher setting of the regsitry keys. It still made no difference. my original settings were already higher than the MS default values. I set them back to their original value.

    I checked the temperature and fans of the cards together with NVIDA and PNY support personal. The card runs fully within the specs and creates no crashes except during rendering from Premiere. I run a memory test of the computer, too. No issues.

    So I guess it leaves me to dump the computer or Premiere.