Error compiling movie. GPU Render Error. Unable to process frame.
I know there has been discussion on this before, I've researched the threads, but they are all a bit older and no one seems to have any update on this. I've suffered through this problem for over a year and, even though we have a Creative Cloud for Teams support contract, they have, thus far, not been able to help, even after elevating it. At this point I'm ready to give Resolve a try. So, here is where this stands thus far:
I want to assure those who are being told that their hardware is not up to par that, in most cases, this is simply not true. I have a dual processor xeon HP Z840 workstation with 128GB of DDR4 Ram. The system drive is HPs own Zturbo PCI SSD. It also has 3 other SSD drives in it that act as Adobe cache, render, etc. It is a new clean install of Windows 10 with the proper HP EUFI BIOS settings. It has an Nvidia Quadro M5000 card in it, which has 8GB of VRAM. I've uninstalled 3rd party plugins. I've created a new project and done some basic color grading and stabilizing to it. No other versions of Premiere have been installed on this workstation because:
Adobe told us this was a hardware issue. So we sent the new workstation back to HP and had them check it out. They swapped the graphics card and the motherboard for what reason I'm not sure. The computer came back and I had the same issues. HP then sent a technician out with another new graphics card and new power supply, which they swapped. Same issue. We then did a factory reset on the EUFI BIOS, pulled the internal RAID card, and installed a bunch of benchmarking software and other software to burn in the graphics card. We could not break it. Even running at high temp for 3 days, the computer didn't miss a beat or a calculation. So, we then do ANOTHER complete reinstall of Windows onto the formatted system SSD. We know there is nothing wrong with the workstation. We reinstall Creative Cloud and I get going on a new project. Last Friday I had a deadline and everything is going great...until i go to render and I start getting this error no matter what I try. The video was 7 minutes.
The footage is from a Panasonic GH4. Magic Bullet plugins Cosmo II and Denoiser III were in use in the original project but have been removed from the system and are not in use with this new project that Adobe had me create to show them how I could break it rather quickly; So Adobe can no longer blame that. I get this error no matter what I do. I've even had errors (which I can't tell you what the exact error was because Adobe recently tried the age-old technique of deleting the Adobe Common folder which removes the error log from Media Encoder) when using software only. The output codec doesn't matter and the errors happen at random spots. It can happen on a clip with warp stabilizer and, if you remove warp stabilizer, it will happen on Lumetri on the next clip. Then, if you render again, it will pass the previous offending clips and fail towards the end of the project.
I've now spent several hours over the course of several days on the phone with Adobe support as they chase their tail around my system via screen-share. Each tech tries the exact same thing over and over and says I won't have the problem again, then, within 30 minutes, I am able to make it happen again, so I call back, they look up the note, I explain to them all the steps that have already failed to solve the issue. This gets repeated over and over again, and each time I ask for this problem to be elevated and when I finally got it elevated I was told that I would receive a call back within 2 hours. Six hours later someone finally called me back, got into my system, and quickly reproduced the issue himself. I'm now waiting for him to research and figure out what the next step is, but I'm not confident. He seems to think it is a problem with warp stabalizier just because that is what he saw fail. However, as I told him several times, it doesn't always happen with warp stabalizer; sometimes it is Lumetri and sometimes it is something else.
Finally, when discussing work-flow, at one point one technician I was on the phone with said that Lumetri will fail if your footage has too much motion in it. I said, "What?" He repeated that, if footage has too much motion in it or is not of high quality, then Lumetri will fail at grading it. He said this as if my work didn't just win an Emmy or as if Premiere gagged on poorly shot footage. I told him that such a statement as a matter of corporate policy made Premiere sound like a toy, like the PXL-2000 I had when I was a kid.
So, all-in-all a pretty pathetic experience with Premiere for a computer that cost nearly $10,000. Many smart people have looked at it, tried to break it, fired rockets at it, poured water on it, and no one has been able to make it fail...except Adobe Premiere. Which tells me that this is an Adobe issue. Will update with any new news.
