Premiere 22 crashes after MXF OP1a export with loudness normalization enabled

[Guy Steels]

We have an export preset that exports to MXF OP1a with 8 stereo audio channels.

If we export from within Premiere 22 without loudness normalization, everything works fine. If we enable the "Loudness Normalization" effect and export, Premiere crashes as soon as the export is finished. The export itself worked as the exported file is saved in the expected location.

We use the "EBU R128" loudness standard and enable loudness processing on 1 stereo channel (9-10 in our specific case). When the export finishes and the progress window closes, the greyed out panel menus in Premiere don't become active and stay greyed out. In the status bar in the bottom right we see the message "Generating Peak File for Sequence xxxxx" (cfr screenshot). Clicking on one off the panels in Premiere makes it crash.

If we use the the same preset but let Media Encoder itself do the export (by hitting the "Send to Media Encoder" button in the export window) everything works fine.

• An identical config worked fine in Premiere 12.x, 14.x and 15.x.
• Both 22.4 and 22.5 versions have this issue.
• Premiere runs on a fully patched Windows 10 21H2 system.
• I have tested it on several hardware configurations:
  • HP ZBook 15 G4 laptop with a NVIDIA Quadro M2200
  • HP Zbook Fury G8 laptop with a NVIDIA RTX A5000
  • HP Z6 G4 desktop with a NVIDIA Quadro P4000

Can this be fixed please? 🙂

[Ishan Y]

Hey Guy Steels,

Sorry about the issue. Could you let us know what camera the footage is sourced from? Does the crash occur when you use a specific export setting, or does it happen no matter what export settings you use? Also, have you tried resetting your preferences and media cache? 

Thanks,

Ishan

[Guy Steels]

Hello Ishan,

Thank you for the feedback.

The MXF footage is sourced from a Panasonic AJ-PX5000 camera. AVC-Intra 100 full HD with 4 AES mono audio channels. The MXF export consists of 8 stereo audio channels. The loudness normalization is processed on channels 9-10.

We have 2 export profiles, 1 with and 1 without the loudness normalization effect. All other settings of the profiles are identical. The profile without loudness normalization effect never crashes Premiere.

We did reset the cache and preferences.

We are a bit late with our reply as we noticed that on some machines the crashes did not occur everytime anymore. We only notice a delay of a few seconds between the export progress popup that closes and the blue popup in the bottom right corner that acknowledges that the export is finished. So it seems Premiere still "struggles" with something but most of the time it does not crash anymore.

We haven't been able to figure out what changed, if there is a combination of actions that causes it to crash or not, ...

[Guy Steels]

Hello Ishan,
I think I have found a pattern. In our projects the preference "Automatic audio waveform generation" is enabled. If we disable it, our export with loudness normalization does not crash anymore. This might also explain why Premiere displays "Generating Peak File for Sequence ...." in the status bar when Premiere start to hang after an export. Cfr the screenshot I attached in my original post. Can you check?

[Ishan Y]

Thanks for sharing the details. Would it be possible for you to share a link to your source file through a personal message? You can use any file hosting service of your choice to do so.