Premiere 22.2 randomly losing renders all the time.

[RicMes]

So, I have to keep rendering over and over again my two 45 minutes timeline, because Premiere 22.2 (happened with older versions too) just keeps losing or unlinking renders from those timelines. It seems random and sometimes those renders may come back.

Right now, just be muting the caption tracking and unmutting it back again, one of the sequences became completely green again while this did not work for the other sequence.

There seems to be some sort of bug or catalogging error for the render files as this seems completely random but a huge, HUGE flaw in the software, heavily influencing productivity, special in this case where I am working on a big project for TV.

Any help, Adobe?

Thank you for your support.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi RicMes,

Sorry about this. Can we have more details about your system and source media, please? Is this BRAW media? If so, which third-party plug-in are you using?

Thanks,
Kevin

[RicMes]

Hi Kevin.

This is a big project with over 2000 hours of footage total which have been shot for nearly 9 years. I just started working on one of the episodes (which I guess means I must have around 150 hours of footage) and I was not involved in the ingest phase.

There's a lot of different codecs and framerates, from ProRes 422 HQ to Quicktime MPEG-2 @50Mbits, H264, image files (Jpeg, PNG, etc.), mp3, wav and aiffs. Pretty much everything. The main editors have been using Premiere Production but everything became so heavy that they recently decided to break each episode into an individual Premiere Project (since the structure of most episodes have been decided by now).

I was handed a very complex timeline that I'm simplifying as I advance on my editing by deleting or disabling any unneeded clips but there are a lot of stabilizations, motion effects, split screens, some lumetri effects and captions (for most of the two 40 minute timelines).

I am using Premiere Pro 22.2 on a Macbook Pro M1 Max (24 GPU cores / 32GB RAM) with OSX Monterey 12.2.1.

My Project and Previews are on an external Crucial X8 2TB SSD (USB 3.2) and Media was copied from their QNap server into my Lacie d2 Professional 8 TB USB 3.2 (should be sufficient as ProRes 422HQ 1080p are the most demanding files).

So, there is this render issue where they seem to go away randomnly and sometimes while editing and also a memory issue as Premiere usually goes up to 60GB of used memory in Activity Monitor, causing a lot of swap file use and sometimes becomeing rather slow (memory leak?).

Thank you for your support and hope you can help!

Regards.

[Warren Heaton]

What is the Scratch Disk location for Video Previews in the Project Settings?

[RicMes]

I am using a USB-C 3.2 Gen2 Crucial X8 2TB SSD capable of 1080GB/s read speed. Folder is the default project location.

[Peru Bob]

You could be running out of room on the drive where the preview files are located or you could be running low on RAM.

[RicMes]

Definitly not out of space on my drive. As for RAM, I thought 32GB was supposed to be enough for HD Editing but Premiere does seem to struggle with it. Even when I close sequences, the memory being used by Premiere does not lower. Memory leak, maybe?

Anyway, when I have the sequences rendered, the memory deficit in activity monitor changes from yellow back to green and the system becomes more stable, only problem is, renders keep getting lost... 😕

[Kevin-Monahan]

Are you using the default codec for rendering previews or is it ProRes or the like?

Kevin

[RicMes]

I am rendering in ProRes 422 LT.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi,

If you are not dedicated to ProRes LT, I'd try a different codec for rendering effects.

I am also a purveyor of ProRes LT, and use it all the time to render effects, but have also experienced your issue on my own projects over the years. I am also going to go try a new codec that also supports smart rendering yet doesn't have an insane file size as a test. If you did the same, we could compare notes.

In the meantime, I'll check if there is a bug or known issue along these lines. 

Thanks,
Kevin 

[RicMes]

So, after a 20 minutes render, I started watching my rendered sequence. I noticed a mistake on a caption and corrected it by adding a space between two words. The result? Yellow bar back on ALL captions! After undoing, almost all the timeline became green again with the exception of a few small red bars here and there. Tried redoing and shockingly all captions had now a red bar even after undoing again. Closed the sequence, reopened. All captions have the yellow bar back and there are also some reds here there.

Basically sequence renders are broken and completely unreliable. Premiere Pro is wasting precious time on what is an already time-consuming project on a tight schedule.

[scrozier]

Dynamic linked files have been causing major headaches for a few years now. The render files go offline without rhyme or reason it seems. 

Losing render files – Adobe video & audio apps (uservoice.com)

This has been an ongoing problem that should be a high priority bugfix but has been ignored, with the feature request even being closed! 

[Kevin-Monahan]

scrozier,

Sorry, man. For dynamic link files in the Timeline, try the render and replace function.

Thanks,
Kevin

[scrozier]

I guess if that is the only workaround they should add an option to "Render and replace all Dynamic Link Comps" with one keystroke for all timelines, becasue thats what the preview functionality gives you.  

[RicMes]

I think I have a few dynamic linked files from before I picked up the project. As I said, editing started about two years ago, and I wasn't there at the beginning, so project and media organizing has not been the best, including lots of media with different codecs (even mp4s!), framerates, etc.
Still, I have been talking with lots of different editors and everyone confirms that losing renders is indeed a very common thing in Adobe Premiere Pro. This is really awful as with big and complex projects (like mine current is!) having working renders is a must to compensate system performance (and I consider mine a quite capable one).