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Rocketbottle
Inspiring
October 6, 2022

Hardware decoding causes green flickering in ProRes files

  • October 6, 2022
  • 14 replies
  • 5145 views

Yikes!

 

Mac M1 Ultra

macOS Monterey 12.6

AE V23.0.0

 

Color settings:

32-bit 

ACES working space

 

(Title edited by moderator.)

 

Has anybody noticed a green flickering hue with Prores 4444 material?

Preview and rendering have random flickering frames.

I noticed this in my latest project. Did not happen before with other Prores material. Tested both with the client's original and re-encoded versions. Colour management or anything does not seem to affect it, but...

Turning off the hardware decoding option in Settings seems to help:

Settings - Import - Video Footage - deselect hardware accelerated decoding box.

 

Just lost two days' worth of hours.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    14 replies

    Show previous replies
    J
    jpRay
    Participating Frequently
    January 30, 2023

    Same here on a MacBook Pro M1 Max. Prores files with hardware decoding show random magenta / green tinted frames. It's subtle but clearly an issue that makes hardware decoding unusable.

    Thaumar
    Thaumar
    Inspiring
    October 27, 2022

    Yes, unfortunately this is a known problem, I have reported it several times since the first (non beta) apple silicone native version of after effects came out. I'm also running after effects on a M1 ultra, same greenish frames (but not all frames!?).  No change in latest 23 update unfortunately. Also I have te regularly check the settings. Hardware acceleration is on by default, and it sometimes reverts back to this default setting, maybe after an update or after a crash, I don't know. 
    Could be an M1 ultra specific problem, but other apps like Resolve don't seem to have this problem, and I have to assume they use these M1 hardware decoders. 

      B
      Bea249197819l9c
      Participating Frequently
      October 19, 2022

      The problem is I get green flickers no matter what I do when I render it.

      I have tried to render in AE and ADOBE MEDIA ENCODER and it doesn't work, I have tried purging cache and pressed the smooth motion option but nothing gets fixed.

      I don't know how it can be a problem with my CPU or graphic card because my laptop is pretty new (3 months), I am not sure if it might be a render setting that are faulty?

      Or could it be the file format? like video format in AVI when I render I never get the green flickers but when I render in MP4 (60fps or 30fps) the green flickers appear (videos given by clients are in MP4)

      Versions I use : AE CC 2022 and MEDIA ENCODER 2022

      JohnColombo17100380
      Community Manager
      JohnColombo17100380Community Manager
      Community Manager
      October 19, 2022

      Hi @Bea249197819l9c,

      Thanks for making this report, sorry to see you're experiencing this issue.

       

      What are your system's specs (OS version, CPU, GPU, RAM)? .mp4 is usually H.264 video and there is hardware acceleration for decoding and encoding H.264 which might be incompatible with your hardware.

       

      Additionally, do you see these same green flickers in the latest After Effects 2023 that was released this week?

       

      Thanks again for reporting this issue and for any further information you can provide, 

      - John, After Effects Engineering Team 

      A
      Anonymous
      October 6, 2022

      I came across this weird issue in AE 22.6 when working on post with master rushes. There appears to be a random flicker changing hue from magenta to green every now and then. It's very random though.

      Does anyone have the same issue? I heard rumors about some bugs in AE with M1 macs involving ProRes files and some issues with bit depth when rendering ProRes but not sure if this is related?

       

      I attach 2 frames for reference. For the best comparison please download and flick between images as it's very subtle but it's definitely there. 

       

      Opening the projects in the older version works fine and I didn't notice any flicker.

       

      I'm about to test the new beta version and see if the problem persists. 

       

      Any idea how to fix this in latest version of AE?

      It would be great to have this addressed by Adobe team please!

       

      My specs:

      mac OS Monterey 12.6

      MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021)

      Chip AppleM1 Max

      Memory 64GB

       

      JohnColombo17100380
      Community Manager
      JohnColombo17100380Community Manager
      Community Manager
      October 17, 2022

      Hi @21719104,

      Thank you for reporting this issue. I do see the slight hue shift in the images you shared, but we will need a bit more information about your footage and your color settings in the After Effects project to get a sense of what might be going on.

       

      Please post your Color setting from the Project Setting dialog, as well as any color settings from the Output Module you are using to render.

       

      Is this only happening with ProRes exports? As a possible troubleshooting step, try disabling hardware acceleration of ProRes encoding in the Output section of the preferences and see if the color shift still occurs.

       

      Thanks for reporting this issue and for any further information you can provide, 

      - John, After Effects Engineering Team 

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