BorisFX Sapphire Bug With Premiere Pro Results in "Low Level Exception" errors

Report · Mar 15, 2018

I had the same errors encoding the same project on two different computers. Nothing I did fixed the issue so I sent a copy of my project directly to BorisFX for them to troubleshoot and this was the result:

Email from BorisFX:

I was able to render out the clip fine using my computer. I had to install AE_ADBE FC Pro 2.1 plugins. I also had to remove the Final.mp4 clip at the beginning of the project since I was missing that media.

What I did notice during the render was that my memory usage was pretty high. My system memory was going up to 14GB out of 16 GB and GPU usage was 2.5 GPU out of 8GB.

What Sapphire does is that it uses the GPU to speed up render while it still have enough GPU memory and if it runs out then it will switches over to CPU. This memory is shared between Sapphire, Premiere, your PC, and any other filters you’re using. In your case I believe that all your GPU memory is used up which is indicated by your logs. This causes Sapphire to switch over to CPU memory. However if you’re running out of your system memory as well then you’ll experience slowdown.

A few things you can do is upgrade your GPU. I know that graphics card can be costly so another route you can also try is by upgrading your system memory. As I recalled you’re running with 8GB. If you upgrade it to 16GB then it might help with the rendering. Another option would be to just pre-comp or render out the various sections of your project so it would speed up with the whole rendering process in your final project.

Thanks,

Log file:

Sun Dec 24 17:39:32 2017: SBuild/sapphire-ae/final-em64t/core/execute-kernels.cu:34: launching kernel: out of memory

Sun Dec 24 17:39:32 2017: SBuild\sapphire-ae\final-em64t\primitives\mem-manager.cxx:924: CUDA error: out of memory

Sun Dec 24 17:39:32 2017: S_Glow failed execution plan on 1920 x 1080 clip with 8 bit depth (temps 1920x1080)

My video card has 2048 MB of ram, and system currently has 8 GB. When sapphire runs low on GPU memory it results in "S_Glow" low level exception errors. So minimum requirements for sapphire is 16 gb ram, and what, 4+ gb video memory? I don't mind having slow downs, but the issue is we are running into errors that cause corruption and a failing project; Rather than the end user being forced to pay thousands of dollars for upgrades and pre-composing everything, it would be much more efficient and better for BorisFX and their users if they tweaked Sapphire to work properly, and fixed these bugs.

Thanks.

Ty

Report · Mar 15, 2018

You're asking them to "fix" a high-end plug-in by slowing it down to work with old/low-capability gear. That's not probably not going to happen. One of the problems that comes with using the pro-end software is it needs somewhat close to pro-end gear.

Neil

Report · Mar 24, 2018

The only work around I found was the following: pre-compose, create copy of the original sequence or just drag and drop the sequence onto an empty timeline; this results in a nested sequence of the original; chop it up into manageable sizes (may not be absolutely necessary); encode using pro-end cineform: yuv 10-bpc, at a quality of 3. This is what used but rgba 12-bcp + alpha may work also at a higher quality setting. This resulted in a high quality precomp with zero errors, which I successfully re-encoded later as h265 and h264

Report · Mar 24, 2018

Slick job getting that figured out & done ... and thanks for posting back!

Neil

Report · May 30, 2020

I have a high-performance PC, and I'm still getting this error. Does anybody know if there are Premiere Pro render settings that might fix this issue? Thanks 🙂

Report · Jul 03, 2020

I am also getting this issue on a high performance PC! Sure, I could use software rendering to fix the problem but then the entire software becomes clunky, slow, and much harder to use.