Disconnecting secondary monitors to improve Adobe Media Encoder - Premiere?

[Pinecroft]

I have a question about "disconnecting" secondary monitors to prevent Adobe Media Encoder from freezing when rendering Adobe Premiere projects.

I had both an Adobe Tech who remotely adjusted my computer settings, and an Adobe tech responding to my email tell me to disconnect my secondary monitor.

I posed this question in a return email, but have not received a reply.

I use two extra monitors, one as an extension of the primary screen and a third (an HDTV) as a program monitor.

My question is, what does Adobe mean when it says "disconnect?

A. Turn off monitor power? (Or never turn the monitor on when starting Premiere.)

B. Disconnect the monitor power cord?

C. Disconnect the cables between the computer and the extra monitors?

Other ways to disconnect could be to uncheck the extra monitors in the display section of Premiere's settings when starting a render.

I've been experiencing a problem often mentioned in these forums, Adobe Media Encoder stopping mid-render on queued videos.  All preferences have been reset for both programs and cache's have been deleted and rebuilt.  I've been able to render the projects I needed immediately using "Export" to the AME but would like to understand the fix Adobe suggested before attempting more long AME renders in queue mode.

[R Neil Haugen]

Fascinating, as that's the first time I've heard a suggestion to shut down external/multiple monitors for export issues.

And ... actually ... Me stopping mid-render isn't something that comes up here, I can't even think of the last time it did. Might be more common on the Media Encoder forum, but doesn't pop up here much.

As I'm one of a goodly percentage of users that are daily working more than one monitor (I'm currently using three) and have no such issue, I'm ... puzzled at the suggestion.

And even more interested if it changed the behavior you're having. I think simply turning the monitor off should be enough.

Neil

[rodneyb56060189]

=============

I use two extra monitors, one as an extension of the primary screen and a third (an HDTV) as a program monitor.

===========

wow.  what you got ? desktop with discreet video card that has dvi outputs and display port outputs and hdmi outputs ??

Or, a laptop with a some sort of output for 'extended' monitor (2nd ) and hdmi to HDTV ??

[Pinecroft]

I'm using an nVidia GeForce  GTX 1050Ti display card.  It has outlets for: Display Port, DVI and HDMI.   Connected to a desktop.  Bought it within the last year and now there are more powerful cards for even less money. Things change fast.

[Pinecroft]

Neil,

Thanks for the input.  Glad you're not having the problem. I think you're right.  Not turning on the monitor should be enough.  Hope Adobe can confirm this.  Really slows things down to find a queue stopped in mid-render.

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm checking with some other folk to see if somebody has any idea ...

Neil

[MisterAdvent]

Interesting. Of all the issues, I've never had that one either, and I use four monitors, one (an HDTV) as the Transport monitor on a Titan-X.  I've never had an AME crash. Are you sure your nVidia drivers up to date?

[Pinecroft]

Yep, drivers are up to date, as the Adobe tech who took over my computer remotely found. I got an email from him today, apologizing for taking so long to get back, and telling me to unplug the extra monitors.  Still don't know the underlying reason.  But I plan to do that before creating and rendering another queue.

[rodneyb56060189]

obviously things are much more advanced since I've done anything with hardware .. but it used to be that in the device manager or windows 10 you would basically uninstall monitors ( especially plug N play ) and THEN unplug them. So you don't have 3-4 monitors displayed in device manager when you really only have ONE.

????

Also, you would ( in device manager ) make sure that the monitor or monitors you have LISTED are the correct listings. I recently put an eizo monitor in THE PIG ( replacing an HP primary ) and it was listed as " generic something or other "... It wasn't until I re-installed the drivers for that monitor that windows saw it as the right Eizo monitor.

weird stuff happens with hardware. I'm glad it's so easy now.. just turn stuff off, or unplug... DONE !

yippee !

[Pinecroft]

Rodney, good thoughts there. I also think if just unplugging doesn't work,

I can go into the Adobe Premiere display settings and uncheck the boxes

that tell Adobe to find and use the monitors. That should work for

Premiere. Although the whole point of using a queue is that AME makes a

clone of the Premiere project and renders that. Not sure if that affects

the overall output of the Premiere produced and AME rendered project.

On Tue, May 7, 2019 at 2:27 PM rodneyb56060189 <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[MyerPj]

...and just to make sure of what you are doing, when you say 'render' you mean 'export'?

[Pinecroft]

The problem I'm addressing happens when I'm in Adobe Media Encoder and use the "queue" function to stack up a number of projects to render one after the other.  When I use the other way to render, "export," I generally don't have a problem.  I'm talking about the "queue" and "export" buttons at the bottom of the AME screen.  When you queue, the program makes a clone of the Premiere project to render and you can go back to working in Premiere while that happens.  When you export, Premiere is tied up and  you can't use it until the render is done.  I'm trying to get the queue version of rendering to work so I can stack up the projects to render overnight.

[MisterAdvent]

There's definitely something wrong because it should not matter what monitors are connected. I can't believe an Adobe tech would say to do that, unless he's trying to diagnose.

BTW the Queue and Export buttons are on the bottom of the Premier Export screen, not AME.(A very similar screen shows up if you edit export settings for an item in the queue.)

So let me if I have this straight.

1. You select a sequence in Premier

2. You go File |Export, then choose "Queue."

3. AME opens and lists your first project to render.

4. You select another sequence in Premier

5. You go File | Export and also choose Queue.'

6. Then the system hangs. So what hangs? Does the export window hang and crash Premier, or does the export window close normally and AME itself becomes unresponsive?

Does it do that every time?  I would suspect a corrupt media file within the timeline.

What happens if you open AME separately and then drop a few clips directly into it to render to something else?  Leave all the monitors connected and try it with Premier closed.

[Pinecroft]

To respond about what's happening,

I select the "Export - Media" menu option in Premiere

When AME opens I select the encoding settings I want.

If I choose the "Export" option at the bottom of the screen, my project will usually encode without problems.

If I choose the "Queue" option at the bottom of the screen and then start the queue process, the program will usually encode without problems.

When I've chosen the queue option and added more than one project, that is, adding two or more projects to the Queue, AME stops working partway through the second project in queue.  The AME program is still operational. I can click and restart a queue from the beginning or start at new queue or I can close AME. But I cannot restart the queue that did not complete to finish it.  So if it's been encoding for 3 hours, I lose that encoding and have to start again.

I've completed my current project using the "Export" option to encode my final files.  When I complete the next project I'm working on, I'll attempt to queue several projects in AME and attempt to encode them with my extra monitors unplugged from their power sources, as directed by the Adobe tech.

[MisterAdvent]

OK so just to clarify, you can export from  Premier just fine and it hands off the export to AME. You can then close Premier and let AME work. Nothing really crashes it's just the 2nd project in the queue that hangs, then you have to quit AME.

It will be interesting to see what happens with monitors unplugged, because I don't see how that will affect anything.

Is it the same timeline that crashes, or a different one when it's #2 in the queue?

[Pinecroft]

Most recently, same timeline, different encoding settings.   But I've had the problem before with other timelines in other projects.

[ivansull]

A couple questions & things to try:

• Open Preferences in AME and check the following:
  • In General settings, turn off "Import Sequences Natively" and queue your sequences to AME again and see if you hit the encoding freeze.
  • In Memory settings, make sure the "Installed RAM" shown here matches the actual memory installed on your system.  Also, how much is allocated to Adobe apps vs other applications?  Try upping the amt. of memory for Adobe apps to see if that helps.
• Does the freeze happen at the same point when rendering the sequence?  If so, make a dupe of the sequence and try removing effects and/or clips in that section of the sequence, then queue to AME again to see if the freeze occurs.
• What's the export format and preset of the job that is freezing?  Does the freeze happen randomly or is it specific to certain settings?
• Does the freeze coincide with your system going to sleep?  Try turning off sleep mode and see if the encoding freeze still occurs
• Are you running the very latest version of Premiere?  Make sure you've updated to 13.1.2 to get all recent bug fixes.
• Check the encoding and error logs for any additional info about what happened when encoding that sequence (File > Show Log, File > Show Errors).

[Pinecroft]

Thanks for responding.  I'm encoding a 77 minute project via a direct export from Premiere at the moment. When Premiere is available again, I'll check some things and report.  In the meantime, the installed RAM matches what appears in the Adobe program at 24 gigs. I have 12 gigs assigned to Adobe. When the Adobe tech took over my computer remotely, he set the Adobe reserved RAM to 8 gigs.  Not sure why, but after doing some online research, I figured splitting the RAM and giving adobe at least 12 Gigs shouldn't be a problem.  The queue stops at random points. And at times it works with the same project and settings.  More to follow.

[ivansull]

Also, is Premiere running when the freeze happens in AME?  If so, there's a checkbox in Premiere's prefs under "Playback" that pauses AME's queue when playback happens in Premiere, try turning that off and see if the encoding freeze goes away.

[Pinecroft]

ivansull,

Here are the answers to your questions:

• The "freeze" happens randomly. It's occurred with all sorts of different presets and settings.
• I am using Adobe Premiere 13.1.2.
• The box that pauses AME's queue during playback in Adobe Premiere was already checked when I looked, which means it's been checked throughout these problems.
• When I look for errors in the log, after listing the presets, etc, the end of the log entry says:
• "Encoding failed."
• And then:
• "The Operation was interrupted by the user."
• Does this mean the program didn't see the problem that stopped the encoding as a error, and thinks the encoding failed because the user stopped the queue?  Every time the queue "freezes" and I stop it (sometimes after an hour or more of no activity, a window tells me the queue is not completed and asks me if I want to  stop the encoding process.
• Since my last forum entry, I encoded two files from my current project using the "encode" option in AME without problem. "import sequences natively" was checked in AME.  I had 16 gb of RAM allocated to adobe applications and 8 gb allocated to other programs.  I had my two secondary monitors unplugged.
• Today, I unchecked the box for "import sequences natively" and queued the same Adobe Premiere sequence to encode as a MPEG-2 Blu-Ray file and as an H.264 1080p high quality HD file. I used the same RAM allocations.  I closed Adobe Premiere during the encoding.
• The MPEG-2 Blu-Ray file encoded without a problem.  I thought maybe the problem was solved and left my office for an errand as the second project in queue started encoding.
• The H.264 file encoding stopped 15 minutes into the encode. I was away and discovered this several hours later. Again, the log said the encoding failed when I clicked on the no-longer encoding queue and chose the "stop queue" command (the red square at the top right of the AME window.
• So, I can encode from Adobe Premiere using export if I don't use AME to queue.  Using the queue is still unreliable.  Often the program will stop during the first program in queue. Sometimes it will complete the first queued project.  But in recent memory, I have not seen AME complete the second  project queued without having the encoding interrupted and stopped.
• Do you have any other questions or things to try? 

[Pinecroft · Accepted solution]

Since my last post, I was contacted via phone by an Adobe tech.  He did some additional tests and we encoded a timeline to different formats. Some encodes worked, some stopped before completing.  I confirmed with him that I should disconnect the DVI and HDMI cables that run from my computer's graphics card (GEFORCE GTX 1050Ti) to my secondary monitors during the encoding process.  This puts less of a load on the display card -- and makes it easier for the card to participate in encoding a file without errors.

My tech told me that Adobe had identified an issue with Adobe Media Encoder stopping in the midst of encoding when more than one program was in the cache.  He said they hoped to have the issue resolved within a month.

However, he also said he had discovered my computer CPU was, at times,  running at over 100%, which could lead to overheating and the kind of problem that would cause AME to stop in mid encode.  So he encouraged me to have my computer hardware checked.  He said if I stuck with encoding in AME from Premiere one project at a time, and not stacking projects in cache mode, I had the best chance of completing encodes without a problem.

This is as good a resolution as I could expect for now.  I'm addressing my hardware issue.  Hope this is helpful for others.

[MisterAdvent]

That's interesting.  If your CPU is running at 100%, what's the GPU doing?  Is the CUDA acceleration turned on in AME?

I'm using a much older video card (Titan-X) and not seeing any of these problems, even with 4 monitors connected.

[Pinecroft]

CUDA acceleration is turned on.  Adobe rep suggested there could be a problem with the connection of the CPU to the board.  Which I take to mean that if the cooling fins that surround CPU are not functioning efficiently because of a loose or broken connection, overheating occurs.  In the meantime, I've had a motherboard issue that's shut down my system, so I'm out of commission until I get this fixed or buy a new rig.

[Pinecroft]

FYI, motherboard prob fixed. I'm encoding without problem by using "export" selection in AME rather than "cache."

[MyerPj]

Thanks.

It makes it easier if we all use 'adobe speak' ie: the terms Adobe uses in this case for Premiere Pro. All your uses of 'render' in the above post actually mean 'export'. Rendering is used on the timeline, most typically if you have effects or multiple tracks, etc and you can render that bit to help it preview faster.

You can export your timeline directly (Export/Export) or via ME (Export/Queue).