Premiere Pro 2018 Can't render H.264, crashes every time

I was having a tremendously difficult time exporting H.264 renders of a 4K project. The render would time out or crash everytime no matter which settings I adjusted.

I can't say this will be the fix for everyone, but while reading about H.264 vs Quicktime, someone mentioned that Quicktime is much better for files with alpha channels and files/tracks with transparency than H.264. I was using a few .png graphic files with transparency. I cleaned them out by flattening the transparency files and all of my H.264 renders have been successful since.

Another thing that helped a great deal was "Sequence > Render In to Out" and in the render settings, ticking the box 'use previews'. As the Render In to Out is rendering, I watched the progress to see where the computer got stuck or took longer than usual to further examine the files on the timeline that it was struggling with. In nearly every instance, it was at a point with transparency or graphics.

if you have dual graphics try to disable the intel graphic card in your device manager and leave it for the other graphic card maybe that fix the issue

Try turning off hardware acceleration if it's on, and try it on if it's off. Updating the video drivers was a good move and usually the second thing I'll try after clearing the caches, which you also did. It's possible it was and still is a video card driver issue, even after the upgrade.

A work around would be to render the Quicktime and feed that back through Media Encoder to convert to h.264. If THAT works then there may be an issue with the way the encoder is interpreting an effect or transition in your sequence.  Another way to troubleshoot this would be to look at the Output Preview as it's encoding. Watch for the moment the crash happens and go to that point in your sequence to see if there's an effect or transition that may contribute to the crash.  I've had some very simple things cause encoding crashes in the past.  It that's the problem, you can try adding a solid in the layer above the problem area and set the opacity of the solid to 0%. It won't show up in the render but will affect the way the software encodes those frames and may be different enough to get you past the problematic section.

Bsod usually means a hardware problem.

I am having the exact same problem with 4 clients waiting for video. Were you able to find a fix I'm at my wits end. I have completely reinstalled windows at this point and run test after test each showing my system is fine.

Hello I have the same problem, did you find any issues?

regards,

Thomas

I can't replicate this ... or any trouble exporting H.264 on my Win10 rig.

Please file a bug on this on their new bug/feature report "UserVoice" system. There's a link for it on the top of the Overview page of this forum.

Neil