How to force a re-render when encountering bugs in Premiere API

[Carl Colijn]

Is there a way for effects & transitions using the After Effects API under Premiere to force a re-render from within a render callback, both for software and GPU renders?

There are lots of situations where I realise the data I get from Premiere is incorrect and/or leads to error returns from the API. The only sensible thing for me to do in such situations is to skip the render and hope for the best (that Premiere will discard the render result since the render context is prob. invalid too).

But now I ran into yet another issue. When users actively drag a slider param while Premiere is actively playing a clip using GPU acceleration, and when I then plug the PrGPUFilterInstance.inTimelineID I get handed over into PrSDKVideoSegmentSuite.GetVideoSegmentsProperties, I get returned an suiteError_IDNotValid. Sigh... Maybe the handed over inTimelineID is dependent on the node's hash which changes when updating params, and Premiere lacks the multithreading safeguards to prevent updating it when active renders are standing out? idk, but the error is real, and I need to know the sequence bounds I get from GetVideoSegmentsProperties to properly render. So I decided to skip the render here as well.

Result: visually dropped frames in that scenario leading to flickering playback, and worst of all: the unrendered frames also ended up in the user's render cache. Nice... Tested it on both Premiere 2018 and 2023, and they both have this bug, so it's a long-standing issue at that too.

So ignoring invalid data just isn't an option here and I thus *need* to tell Premiere to re-render the frame from within a GPU accelerated render call. Or Adobe needs to get it's act straight and prevent these sorts of issues altogether.

[Bruce Bullis · Accepted solution]

The Engineering Manager of our GPU team is working directly with Carl.