Premiere / Media encoder Mac crashes. It's getting ridiculous

[schmollywood]

Hi everyone, Even though many of us are all used to the instability of Premiere would eventually stay with Adobe since other options werent really an option. Me too, for many years now. I work as a professional film maker mostly for tv networks since more than 20 years. Working with Premiere on my latest documentary has caused so many issues that I decided to share my experiences with you.

Im running the latest versions of Premiere and Media Encoder as of today May 19th 2019 on my iMac Retina 5K 2017 4,2Ghz 40 GB Ram , Radeon Pro 580 8GB. Latest Mac OS Mojave 10.14.4

During editing Premiere would crash more often as Ive never seen before and in the worst kind of ways.  I work with mixed footage from my Red-W , h.264 from a Sony, some Jpegs ...nothing I havent done before many times. Some Lumetri color correction was applied here and the, but no LUTs and I run exactly O third party plug-ins inside Premiere and Medie Encoder. Also, I run no other software during editing, no virus scanner, nothing.

When crashing Premiere would suddenly give me the spinning beach ball, freeze and THEN crash the whole Mac. Trying to open other apps after the crash or even shutting off the iMac becomes impossible since the Finder also crashes. It basically feels like a giant memory leak issue. So my only option is shutting down the Mac by pressing the power button for several seconds.

Now after relaunching Premiere it would show the splash sceen fine, but when opening the project file Premiere show nothing but white windows and crashes again. Holding the option shift button when relaunching Premiere would fix this problem and my project file would open fine after that, but only until the next random crash. Ive also tried to get help from Adobe. Their help agent told me some obvious maintenance fixes like deleting the media cache and preview files. It seemed to help for a while but shortly after that, the same crashes happened again. 

Somehow I managed to finish the edit. This is when things became even more catastrophic. I then tried to render the project using Media Encoder. The first render (Metal render engine) worked from start to finish, but when watching the result I noticed that the parts with RED footage were corrupted meaning the footage would show strange flashes every few seconds. So I changed the render engine from Metal to OpenCL. Rendering with OpenCL I would not be able to finish rendering the project. Media Encoder would crash EVERY time I tried. To troubleshoot this, Ive once again tried all the usual steps from deleting preview and media cache files, resetting the Preferences for both Premiere and Media Encoder, also I ran maintanance software in order to fix potential issues such as disk permissions. Ive even re-installed Premiere and Media Encoder. NOTHING helped.

Of course opening another support ticket with Adobe is always possible, but to be frank I really had enough. Support would only go through the same same trouble shooting options and in the end the issues remain or return soon after. I am convinced that Premiere (at least on the Mac) is completely messed up. To call the latest update a "stabilty update" seems absolutely cynical to me. So what to do now ? Im seriously considering the switch to Resolve. Adobe charges about 50USD every month for my CC subscription and therefore I get a mess that has become totally unreliable for my projects.

[rodneyb56060189]

No matter what you choose to do you'll have to think it through a bit before you act.

For example, you may have to think about what you've already created and exported to your clients in the past, what happens if you have to re-visit any of those to get some kind of source material from them for a new project. That might mean exporting to intermediary ( pro res in your case) as backup, instead of what you delivered to client ( probably mp4 ).

I imagine it's a giant pain in behind to deal with any of that stuff, but such is life in the fast lane.

If you go back to an earlier version of PPro you might be able to open old projects and export something that you can open in another program ( fcp or resolve or avid etc. ).

You already know that nobody here ( ACP, Staff, VIP, or whatever their badges say ) has ANYTHING to do with adobe guts re: programming and fixing issues that are endemic (systemic ).

The only thing ( thank goodness cause they are all nice people and work hard to help users ) they can do is relate their own experience, review similar issues of the past and maybe even try to replicate the problem .. and give you feedback.

I personally don't do ANYTHING professionally. For TV or nothin. So I don't have to worry about it ( delivery specs and time limits ).

I'm just guessing, but if you do stuff that requires graphics and live stuff ( red ? ) and h264 ( location ? ) then you'll be happy if Adobe stuff actually WORKED for you. It has everything.

If it aint working, think it through because you want to make it a smooth transition to another NLE.  Not just another NLE, but also stuff you get from audition, after effects, photoshop, etc.

Good luck !

[rodneyb56060189]

P.S.

I started using resolve 15 on THE PIG about 7 months ago ( I only have CS6 adobe stuff cause I don't want to have hands in my pocket or edit computer hooked up to internet ). Min require for 15 is 32 gig ram. I have good graphics card ( 6 gig ? ) and use cuda, but I suspect that is rarely used for my fundamental editing stuff. I am not into special effects visually or sound etc. I don't make things explode or catch fire or make smoke, etc.   I am totally simple minded.

Fusion gave me some problems using 4k on a 1080 timeline. Had to optimize footage.

Your 40 gig is not gonna be much better if you go the resolve route.

Test out the free version before you really make decision.

Most of my friends who are professional directors of photography ( there are two of them ) use macs with FCP ( one uses resolve 15 a little bit but only cause he shoots some S log stuff on his own as a semi retired person doing some music videos etc. ).

Sooo, take your time and be patient and figure it out without the angst.