Suggestions for GPU related rendering problems

To whom it may concern,

I'm going to write a long post here to describe my situation in as best detail as possible and I'm just going to be open to any suggestions that anyone has for me or any feedback.

I'm a graphic designer and I'm somewhat familiar with the primary Adobe Creative Cloud software such as Photoshop and Illustrator and Adobe Audition and to a lesser extent Premiere Pro CC. I understand that it's a big jump to go from editing images to editing long videos and that it requires much more processing power. For all my graphic design knowledge I'm not an expert on computer parts, but here's my situation.

My computer

Microsoft Surface Book (one year old)

Windows 10

16 GB RAM

SSD 500 GB Hard Drive

Graphic Card Intel HD graphics 520

GPU NVIDIA Geforce (don't know exact model but it has only 1 GB of ram, which I think is a big part of the problem not sure)

I use a microsoft surface port to run 2 external monitors and the surface screen all at once for 3 monitors.

I will include a screen shot of my specs.

I'm also an author of a series of satirical sock puppet plays, recently we video taped a live performance, but the camera was very old and the footage we have is not good. It is both underexposed (the puppets themselves) and overexposed (the backgrounds). I'm going to restore the footage using a number of methods but mostly stacking clips on top of themselves and using blend modes and effects to bring out lost details, remove grain, etc, etc. It's a very tedious process and I also have to create masks for the sock puppets which will not auto-track well, but the point is I'm literally building the footage in layers and putting them over each other and each layer so to speak is actually a collection of clips stacked on top of each other with blend modes. I honestly try my best to perform edits in organized steps in my work flow and once I build one "layer" I export it often with alpha channels and work with the new clip rather than just use nested slips or more layers within the sequence, I do this to prevent my computer as much as possible from having to perform a lot of different effects at once. However, despite my attempts to export and re import clips to save my computer from having to work hard, I keep running into two very annoying issues.

FIRST ISSUE

Often times as I'm editing in a sequence, suddenly the program monitor will go black. If I move the play head around, or wait sometimes it comes back but usually until I exit the software and re-open the file, it will remain black. One small work around I have noticed is that is if I zoom in the view on the program monitor (say from "fit" to "400%") it often returns the image of my sequence into the program monitor at that new zoom setting and when I return to my original zoom setting the black screen is gone and I can continue editing, but very afraid. I should also note that although I do usually keep my rendering in the program monitor to the "full" setting this is because I'm making very subtle adjustments with very fine masks and I need to see detail, however I try and keep my program monitor panel to about a quarter of my screen so that premiere does not have to render it at the full resolution since I have a relatively high resolution monitor (3840x2160) however I just noticed that the resolution listed in my display settings says that is the resolution but the Piriform Speccy program I use to monitor my system says my resolution is lower than that, but that's beside the point, the point is I don't maximize the program monitor.

Upon doing some research I've discovered that many people suggest this is a GPU related issue. As stated I have an Intel 520 graphics card and an NVIDIA GPU with a Gig of RAM. I contacted Nvidia to make sure my driver was up to date since it was hard to find my model number. They told me the GPUs that come inside of microsoft surface books are custom to that particular computer and are not something that they support. In fact, they told me that the only way to update the driver for it was through regular windows updates, not through the NVIDIA site. I feel like this is a weak spot in my system, my processor is decent and I have RAM but I wish my GPU had more RAM but there is almost no way on earth to modify or swap parts on a microsoft surface book so I'm looking for other routes to squeeze what production I can out of this computer.

SECOND ISSUE

From time to time I get various error messages when exporting videos and I try to search forums and do other critical thinking and process of elimination to fix the problems. A couple times it was as simple as I had the wrong type of character in my file name. But I've noticed through much testing that there is a very annoying issue. This issue happens in BOTH Media Encoder and in Premiere Pro CC. When I'm exporting videos, if I click on any window other than the program doing the exporting, even something as simple as switching back from media encoder while it exports to just look at my project in premiere pro (which is the main reason why I queue videos to ME to begin with), the second I switch to another program, there is an 80% chance that my exporting immediately suffers some sort of error and stops. It could be as simple as I open google chrome to search an Adobe Forum and BAM my Media Encoder suddenly fails the export. So I have to leave my station and walk away during all exports. Not that my exports are all that slow since I do have a decent processor, but still its very annoying.

I'm open to any suggestions or feedback and I'm willing to read source material or watch videos to learn more about this subject.

Thanks in advance.

Taylor J. McBride

Creative Director

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