Premiere Pro CC "Unable to Produce Frame"

I ran into this problem too while working with Proxies in 2015.3.  I was taking A7sii 4K footage and creating 1080p Pro Res proxies, and I got this error using a iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) with AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4GB.  In fact this error was preceded by another one - "A low-level exception occurred in: QuickTime (Exporter:9)". 

I seem to have fixed the problem by going to the Media Encoder preferences and choosing (OpenCL) instead of (Metal) as the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration option (Under 'Video Rendering' in 'General)'.  So far so good.  I hope this holds because I'm excited about proxies but the process has been much less than smooth so far.  Especially compared to FCPX. Pease Adobe, don't make me have to use FCPX!

I had this too - seemed to fix it on mine by turning off maximum render quality on the output.

I've been getting this a lot lately as well.  Seems to only happen when AME is trying to encode and I'm doing something in PP.  If I leave the machine alone, the same files encode just fine.

I've ran into this issue on several different projects and different machine configurations. Premiere CC 15.1 and 15.2 both seem to do a much better job handling multiple layers and scaling than 15.3. Tested on a system with and older GTX 580 and another system with a newer quadro card both with updated drivers. Same results. 15.3 gives the "Unable to produce frame" error but 15.1 and 15.2 work fine. Has the way GPU memory utilization changed in 15.3? It seems like a major step backwards in this regard.

This started happening to us after installing 2015.3.  Render would crap out and throw the "unable to produce frame" errors.  What FIXED it was uninstalling 2015.3 premiere.  Installing Premiere 2015.1 then updating to 2015.2.   THENNN run the update for 2015.3 but go into advanced setting and tell it to keep old version.  Also keep the preferences.  So far this has worked but I'll let you know if it's crap again.

Let me know if it helps you.

BC

Hi mrlukecampbell,

"Export Error - Error compiling movie. Accelerated Renderer Error Unable to produce frame."

Reading these errors, it sounds like your GPU is running out of VRAM for the task(s) that you are trying to perform. From the info you gave, you are scaling footage as you are encoding it. This taxes your particular GPU too much, so it could not finish the encoding process.

Normally, encoding does not engage the GPU unless you are doing things like scaling, using GPU accelerated effects (including Lumetri color effects), etc. You are scaling at the very least, so your GPU is engaged during the encoding process. My guess is that it is underpowered or not functioning correctly. We'd need to know your full system info.

I have a few recommendations:

• File > Project Settings > General
  • Change the renderer to "Software Only" (if you use Media Encoder, change it there too)
  • The drawback of "Software Only" that the export is much, much longer than it would with a sturdier GPU
• Take advantage of the smart rendering process as much as possible, especially if you have a somewhat underpowered GPU.
  • Currently, you are not taking much advantage of that by encoding directly to H.264.
  • You might try mastering to DNxHD, Cineform, or ProRes instead
  • Create H.264 files from the master
  • Drawback: this is more a process you need to consider in the beginning of a project, not now.
• Install a GPU with more VRAM.
  • If I were under the gun, and on a deadline, I'd run down to your local computer hardware and get a 4GB or more VRAM GPU.

Thanks,
Kevin

My first thought is to turn off GPU rendering.  Your scaling might be pushing your card past it's limits.