h.264 export bug

[IDBowen]

Hi everyone,

For a solid few months, I've been experiencing a strange glitch in my H.264 exports via Media Encoder (and also from premiere) on my work computer, an iMac Pro. The glitch in question freezes the image and mutes the sound, usually for the last 5 seconds or so of the exported video. I've tried exporting these with other iMacs in my office, with the same version of Media Encoder installed (15.2), and they've all turned out fine.

ProRes and H.265 have been coming out just fine, it seems to be just H.264 on my computer in particular.

I read a previous post where someone suggested to switch off Hardware Encoding in the export settings, and this didn't work for me.

Hope that somebody can find a solution for this!

[Andrew Yoole]

I'm currently experiencing this same issue on all the systems in my main workplace when rendering to the main server.  We have no problems rendering to local drives, only to the server.

Do you experience the issue if you render to a local drive?

[tharpey]

Experiencing this same issue on multiple (but not all) computers in our workplace. If we export anything h.264 (especially videos 30sec or shorter), the first clip often glitches and freezes, but every time - the final 5-6 seconds freeze frames and the audio cuts off. Our only work-around has been to add a 5-10 second gap after the video on our put point, but that's not acceptable when delivering content for platforms like broadcast and social ads with strict time restrictions.

Our only other workaround has been to XML the timeline to a reliable editor, like Resolve. 

Machines it's happening on:

- M1 Mac Mini running intel software 

- M1 MacBook Pro running M1 software

- iMac Pro running Intel software

[davidarbor]

Moderator note: Moved post from After Effects to Media Encoder forum.

@IDBowen If this is something you can easily reproduce, even if it's just on on machine, you should file a bug on UserVoice: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911308-media-encoder

Other troubleshooting techniques are to try the same thing on a new user account of the same machine. If you don't have the issue there then there's likely a local account issue.

Sometimes trashing your preferences can help, but it's good to start by isolating the issue. However, if this has persisted across updates (assuming you've been updating over the last few months the issue has been occuring) then it seems likely that the issue is localized to your account or machine, rather than being a more widespread bug. It doesn't mean there isn't a bug with exporting, it just means it might be harder to track down if it's related to something more specific about your setup, which is why it's helpful to provide as much detail as possible in your bug report.

You can also try the public beta which is available form the sidebar of the Creative Cloud Desktop App. This will install alongside AME 15.2 and get its own preferences folder, so it's somewhat sandboxed from the "release" version and won't cause any conflicts.

[tharpey]

It happens on multiple machines in our studio. Some M1. Some Intel. 

[davidarbor]

That's a bummer, but it sounds like a larger bug that needs to be reported on UserVoice with as much detail as possible so the dev teams can reproduce it.