P: Morph Cut causing Premiere Pro to crash every time. Help!

[Neco25032080tlzs]

I have been using the Morph Cut effect in my edits in Premiere Pro for years, with no real problems.

Since I installed Premiere Pro 2024 (24.1), every time I bring a morph cut to a sequence, the program crashes. I've tried multiple different ways, like creating a completely new sequence and pasting the shots there and then using morph cut, and nothing works.

I've decided to roll back to Premiere 2023 for now. I even tried using the latest Beta version, and it still crashes.

Does anyone have a solution?

[mrseanbradley]

It has brought on the rainbow spinning ball of death about a dozen times on both a 2013 fully-loaded Macbook Pro and a 2014 fully-loaded iMac. I have to force quit. I get the cute message saying, "Premiere will attempt to save your file." Premiere then vanishes before I'm able to click, "YES, DUH, PLEASE DO THAT." And I'm constantly losing work.

I get occasional crashes when copying and pasting clips within a timeline on both systems as well (this goes back several versions of Premiere).

Premiere remains the buggiest of the big 3 NLEs. It's a big bummer.

Anyone else dealing with this? Any thoughts?

[ECOECO]

I've yet to see this magical feature work ... it says 'analyzing in background' but never makes it any further than that before crashing the app

[Brenalim]

Experiencing crashing issue here too. I tried to speak with someone from adobe chat, only to be ignored for over 20 min. very disappointing.

[SMendenhall]

Same here. I can't even reopen the file to delete the morph cut effect. My project is stuck.....

[SMendenhall]

To save my project, I opened it in AE then saved it out as a new PP project. What a pain.

[Henrihere]

it's a bit late to reply to this, but anyways I was having trouble with morph cut as well when I was trying it for the first time, it would crash my premiere and every time I tried to delete it by selecting it after re-opening the project it would crash again anyway. everytime.

so the way I worked around this was I selected one of the cut clips and separated it from the previous cut clip and the transition would automatically delete it self that way without needing me to select the transition and therefore causing the crash. If it's anything I learnt from this, is to not use morph cut. at least not for the time being.

[smithek]

Morph cut not working for me either...

However, I was able to do a play-through with the effect ("Analyzing in Background" actually did work), but subsequently trying to adjust the length of the transition (either via timeline or in the effect controls) brings spinning ball and a force quit.  The magic transition is not useable at this point.

[FocusPulling.com]

Henrivo1 wrote:

it's a bit late to reply to this, but anyways I was having trouble with morph cut as well when I was trying it for the first time, it would crash my premiere and every time I tried to delete it by selecting it after re-opening the project it would crash again anyway. everytime.

so the way I worked around this was I selected one of the cut clips and separated it from the previous cut clip and the transition would automatically delete it self that way without needing me to select the transition and therefore causing the crash. If it's anything I learnt from this, is to not use morph cut. at least not for the time being.

This happened to me too, and the alternate approach is to drop another video transition onto the placed Morph Cut which makes the problem go away.

[see-bees]

I had this issue today. It was working fine on my computer but I brought my hard drive to a different computer and the project wouldn't open. It would act like it was working on opening before giving me the beach ball of death. I came back home and it was still not working. I spent quite a bit of time trying different things. I even tried opening it in after effects but it claimed  that the file was corrupt. I thought I'd have to just work of an older autosave file from before the morph cuts so I loaded an autosave file and as a last ditch effort, opened the original project with the morph cut from the already open premiere window and it opened as though nothing was wrong. My case may be the exception but if you're having issues opening the project due to morph cuts, it may be worth a try.

[drfleming]

Really disappointing that this Morph Cut crashing issue still isn't fixed...even after PPro CC 2015 updates. Just had my first chance to try it out. I applied the transition to a talking head 4 times. It crashed 3 out of the 4 times. The one time it actually did work (BTW-thanks for the consistency Adobe!), I didn't like the length of the transition so I changed it and of course it crashed.

[Reg Santo Tomas]

It would be very helpful if people can list a step by step scenario of how they are running into this crash from a new project.

[FocusPulling.com]

Reg Santo Tomas wrote:

It would be very helpful if people can list a step by step scenario of how they are running into this crash from a new project.

1. I add it.

2. Crash.

[Reg Santo Tomas]

Is there something about your media or your settings that may give us a clue?

We aren't seeing an immediate crash simply by adding the morph cut effect in a new project as indicated in your steps.

The goal here is to allow us to reproduce the issue in-house so that we may investigate where the problem lies.

[drfleming]

I'm using HD 1080p footage. I'm not in front of my system right now, but from memory it's on Win 7, HPZ860 w/NVIDIA Quadro 5000, 96GB RAM. I'm editing in PPro 2015.1 (the late November update).

My workflow is exactly as the other user described: I add the Morph Cut as a transition, wait about 10-15 seconds for it to analyze in the background and then PPro crashes. I've never gotten an "analyze failed" or any message like that - just a crash.

As for my content, I realize that I'm not feeding the effect the most desirable footage. My first jump cut was a two-shot, so presumably it had to analyze two faces. I added the Morph Cut to this footage 4 times, as I said above. 3 of those times, it did what I described above. Wait...Crash. Then, one time it actually didn't crash, but I was unhappy with the length of the transition. So, I changed the length to 10 frames. That caused it to crash.

Here's what's freakishly weird: Just for grins, I had another jump cut that was a medium shot of a group of 9 people. I thought - NO WAY this thing is going to handle this shot. Believe it or not, it had no problem with that jump cut!

But, in any case, certainly you must admit that the kinds of results that I got (and all the other users above), equate to an effect that is buggy at best and useless at worst. As I said, this is my first experience with the effect. I had not used it prior to today. So, on my box, it didn't "become" buggy...It was buggy from the beginning.

Lastly, I'll say that locking up the program in a crash is definitely the most ungraceful way to exit PPro, especially in front of a client. If I would just get an "analyze failed" message or something similar, I may not complain so loudly. In that case, I could save face with the client by just saying, "Well, my edit suite can't perform the Morph Cut because my footage isn't ideal." But, with a crash (let alone several crashes in a row), you just look stupid.

[Reg Santo Tomas]

Thanks for the feedback drfleming.

The crash scenario described is helpful. The fact that you indicate that this occurred prior to the latest update also helps us identify where to look for a fix.

To address your follow-up statement; it isn't the design or intent to crash when an operation fails.  I hope that is obvious but I will delineate it here in case it isn't.

These type of feedback allows us to make the product better by identifying issues and/or getting clarity for a reproducible case.

[jstrawn]

It looks like you're on a mac. Does the OS (and/or PrPro) give you a crash report after it happens? If so, can you attach the contents of that report to your next reply so we can check to see if there is helpful in it? Otherwise, when we have no steps to report it with and no crashlog it's really difficult to know where to even begin to look for a possible problem in the application. Also helpful would be a process sample, which can be generated from mac's activity monitor.

[drfleming]

Well, to be clear, I believe I'm fully updated on the versions (again, I'm not in front of it at the moment). I remember doing a healthy-sized update just last week. And the crashes happened today.

[drfleming]

Sorry, no, I said I was on Win 7.

[jstrawn]

Oh I see. My error. It was the original poster (back in June) who was on mac. He hasn't posted back in a while and may have been seeing a different bug anyway. There is a way to pull crash logs off of windows too if PrPro doesn't give you one, but the information is a lot less portable and a lot harder to sort through. Is there some similar performance metrics you could see in Task manager though that may give us an idea of if (and where) the CPU or GPU is getting overloaded?

Also what happens if you switch your rendering mode from CUDA (or OpenCL) to Software Only? Does the problem still occur?

[drfleming]

Hello jstawn and others: Well, a new wrinkle. Now, Morph Cut apparently just won't work. I'm working in a project with green screen footage. The shot couldn't be simpler. Talking head on a green screen - no hands in the shot or anything (I will try to paste in a screen shot):

As I said, now PPro is doing nothing...at all. Just a perpetual "Analyzing in background" message. No crashing as before, no analyze failed message. Just nothing.

I have tried changing the rendering mode from CUDA to Software Only...both the same result. Task manager is more or less flat lined. It just isn't working!

Dave

[jstrawn]

Does this mean that the crashing problem you encountered is now gone? Are there any extra steps you are doing before seeing the perpetual analyzing banner or are you just applying the effect? Have you tried deleting your media cache files? You can find the location under prefs > media... deleting them is more thorough than hitting the clean bug in med media prefs mapping, but it will delete all media cache files not just the ones for that project so beware.

[D_Delaney]

I have a similar but different problem.  Premiere works, the morph cut can be added and rendered.  But when I go to export, it wont get passed the morph cut.  I get an "error compiling movie" message as well as three "Error Events" that say "A low-level exception has occurred in: Morph Cut (AEVideoFilter).  It will crash Premiere after a few attempts.  It also crashes Media Encoder when outputting through that.  Im using 1080p ProRes LT codec footage and exporting to a 720p ProRes LT codec (all in 23.976). I have a Macbook Book pro Retina 2012, fully loaded and using an external hard drive to boot.  I have deleted all the media cache files and render files. I have also done a cold restart to the computer. Any other help would be appreciated.

[PawSydney]

I have a morph crash test.

morph cut crashes with CUDA. sequence setting to max bit depth and max render also think composite color was ticked  cashes and closes  after render, during render shows  7 AEvideofilter errors in red post-it ..

I had saved before render so can replicate crash test

with software only and all above sequence settings unchecked renders fine with no errors. not tried exporting   CUDA is the issue have sent crash reports   hope there is a fix as CUDA speeds up lots of other processes

   Sad Face indeed

[jstrawn]

Thank you for sending in your crash logs. The case of morph cut crashing with CUDA rendering is not a ubiquitous problem, so the logs and any other specific steps you can provide with a bug report will be needed to determine why it may be crashing in your system.

[FocusPulling.com]

jstrawn wrote:

Thank you for sending in your crash logs. The case of morph cut crashing with CUDA rendering is not a ubiquitous problem, so the logs and any other specific steps you can provide with a bug report will be needed to determine why it may be crashing in your system.

Strongly disagree that it is "not a ubiquitous problem." Morph Cut persistently crashes and the Interwebs are drenched with confirming reports.  The latest 2015.2 failed to address the problem.  It is simply not an available feature valid for advertisement until it is actually fixed.  Adobe has been aware of the bug for quite a while by now.