Premiere Pro and Media Encoder crash while rendering H.264

[ItsHinchy]

Very recently, a problem's popped up where Premiere Pro and Media Encoder (CC) will crash while rendering H.264.

It's only while rendering H.264 - other formats seem to work fine.

And I don't mean that it returns an error, I mean it hard crashes with a Windows "Adobe Premiere Pro CC has stopped working" popup.

It doesn't crash at a consistent time during the render, even on the same project. Occasionally, it won't crash at all, but this is usually not the case.

I've tried disabling CUDA and my overclock to no avail. Please help!

[nicholas_brill]

I was having the same issue exporting a 45 second video with the latest version of Premiere Pro CC 2015 running on a new iMac w/ OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 and a Nvidia graphics card. No video plug-ins installed.

Tried many of the steps above: cleaning cache, exporting via Adobe Media Encoder, etc without any luck (although at one point, by some miracle, I was able to export the project successfully, though the export failed after I tested the export a second time.)

I finally phoned Adobe support and was connected with someone almost immediately.

I shared my screen with the support agent, and after about 45 minutes of adjusting a number of settings, we successfully exported the project without any freezes.

A lot of what we changed was a little over my head, but basically he somehow determined that some effect I had used was not cooperating with my graphics card.

He saved my project as a new project and then made sure my sequence settings used Quicktime + Apple Pro Res 422 under Video Previews.

Next he re-rendered the project from in to out. This took about 5 minutes. (45 sec project, 1080p, mostly MTS files, one .MP4 file, and a .mov file that had been rendered out from AE).

He then went to File/Preferences/Memory and changed "Optimize rendering" from "Performance" to "Memory."

Finally, he exported the project using the Apple Pro Res 422 codec.

I apologize that this answer is a bit vague, but I think it's safe to say that this is a graphics card issue that can be resolved. Call Adobe support!

[Jian3672]

Apple Pro Res 422 codec isn't listed on my PPCC2015

[nicholas_brill]

I believe you may be able to download the codec from Apple, though I'm not entirely sure.

After my original post on 11 September, I actually began to encounter the errors again in the same project. While the constant freezing is incredibly annoying, I figured the following work around:

1. Any clips or media that are on your timeline but are outside of your in/out points should be moved over to a new sequence. In other words, remove anything from your timeline that won't be included in the final export. Just duplicate your sequence then remove the excess media from the original.

2. Render out everything left on your timeline.

3. Save your project and close/quit Premiere.

4. Open Premiere. Re-open your project if Premiere does not do this for you automatically.

5. Export your media as you usually would.

This solution may not work for everyone, but basically I've found that rendering everything and restarting Premiere before going to export does the trick.

[Tim Pfeiffer]

I was having the same issue. Every time I tried to export, Premiere would crash. I spent five hours trying all things others have suggested. Nothing was working.

Great News!

I called Adobe tech support and got a tech on the phone right away! Amazing! He said to go to the Project Settings and change  Video Rendering and Playback to "Software Render", Click ok, you'll get a message about deleting previews, click Yes to delete preview files. BAM! Ta Da! Fixed it it 5 seconds! Hope that helps someone else.

[Tim Mieney]

I'm not sure if everyone has found this issue to be resolved, but I wanted to let you all know that the above fixes did not work for me, however I finally figured out a solution that did.

My timeline would render through just fine, but would crash while exporting to H.264 (I did not try other file types) and every time it crashed it was at 46% (or 92% if I did single pass VBR).

I realized the problem was a JPEG I was using at the end of the video. The resolution was too big and it was crashing Premiere. I brought the file into Photoshop and changed it from 600dpi to 300dpi. Re-imported to premiere, exported and presto!

Not sure if this will be the solution anyone was looking for, but figured I'd still share.

Take care,

Tim

[professorcomplicated]

Had same issue with a large PNG, reduced the image size, solved the issue.

Thanks for the tip.

[Michael_Tiemann]

I have had this problem on and off since starting to use PPro Creative Cloud.  I was very hopeful that the latest version (Sept 2016) would solve this problem, but it has not.  My work-around is to render in two steps.  The first step is to render to QuickTime 422, and the second step is to render the QuickTime file as H.264.  Of course this makes it impossible to publish to YouTube in a single step, which is extremely annoying.  And it means I need 5x more space on my render drive for intermediate files than for my final renders, which is also extremely annoying.

[lucasp40979045]

I'm having the same issue. I've tried all (not all actually) the tricks written on this page and nothing...

It's interesting that some who had this problem could solve it with a "weird solution", such as removing or downsizing a JPG or something. I could find on Youtube a guy who disabled his Bluetooth device before start the export process and it worked for him.. I mean... it seems that everyone has to find it's own way to make it work. All this information makes me think that i'll have to pick another SW editor to work =( because it looks like a lottery.

The only thing i did not try was change my power supply.... I have a 500w real.

Here's my settings:

Intel i7 4771 3.50ghz

4 GB RAM

Windows 10 Pro 64 bits

GTX 1050 2 gb

And i'm not going to change my power supply bcause I can barely see any solution coming from it, just like many others...

Well, it's more about a vent instead of a helping ask... but if someone has the another solutions pls tell me.

----------------------------EDIT-----------------------------

I Found out that I can export my video choosing the option AVI (Uncompressed). This generates an extremely huge file. My 14 minutes long video was transformed into a 72GB avi file. For now it doesn't matter. After that I opened the avi on Media Encoder and tried to convert it with H.264. For my surprise it worked better, it reached about 70% of the process, but then again, it crashes the computer. Everything stops.

Could it be a problem with codecs or something? Should I install a package?

----------------------------EDIT2--------------------------

So, Here's the thing.

I Continued trying export from Premiere, without Media Enconre. I'm making some tests with different length videos.  I could get some information from it.

In tiny length videos, the export process goes with no problem I tried many times 30~80 seconds video. With videos above 1 minute it goes bad. Then i repeated with a long video but this time I increased the velocity of my GTX 1050 fans with the MSI Afterburner and also increased the fan of the CPU cooler, the intel processor cooler with SpeedFan both over 100%. Doing that made the export process go further, I got 40%, then it crashed again. Does it has to do with the problem?  I don't think that my GTX 1050 is a bad Card, or even my i7 processor, but why they lead the process go longer then? After changing the speed of the fans I got a 23 C° on my CPU, which is super cold. The normal is between 40~48Cº.

Thanks

[lucasp40979045]

Hey! I finally could solve my problem!!! I've just installed a codec. H.264 | DivX.com

Even with CUDA, with a lot of files on Media folder and many other, i finally could get this done with this codec. I don't know actually what to think... Should I still belive it's a lottery or I'm too naive to miss the packages of codecs that are necessary to do so?

Bye

[cv kalyank]

None of this works for me. I installed H.264/DivX.com. but I can't find it in premiere pro export codecs.

[sean_-_milky_way]

I had the same problem recently. After observing the system behavior, I have solved the problem by changing the Pr's rendering optimized for Memory instead of Performance.

Edit > Preferences > Memory and then on "Optimize rendering for:" select "Memory", instead of "Performance".