Premiere Pro CC and the New Mac Pro (2014)

[eschillay]

I'm expecting delivery soon of a new Mac Pro, nicely loaded, which I purchased mainly because of all the work I do with video. Yet, I read in a review that Adobe Premiere Pro isn't optimized to take advantage of the new Mac Pro, won't run faster, and I'm better off using Apple's Final Cut.

1. Is this true?; and

2. If so, will Premiere Pro be updated any time soon to run best on a 2014 Mac Pro?

My new Mac Pro will have the following configuration:

•	3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache

•	32GB (4x8GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC

•	1TB PCIe-based flash storage

•	Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

[DavidBrumbley]

Changed permisions on my render files folder and all enclosing items in that folder and it's seemed to reduce the scrubbing freeze on my machine.

It doesn't make sense, but I've been reduced to trying anything to get this machine to work

Mac Pro (Late 2013) D700 10.10.2  Premiere Pro CC 2014.2

[rebeccapm123]

Sad that we have to resort to trying ANYTHING to get our MACs to play well with Premiere.

[marcf7226877]

I am in the same boat here. Just bought a new MacPro and have CC2014 installed in it. Was hoping that I would be one of those who wouldn't have any issues with the two not talking to each other but, alas, Premiere crashes at least 3 times a day.  I wish I could say that I was doing the same thing each time it happens but that would be way too easy. I am extremely frustrated with having to re-start either the software or the computer over and over again. Why won't this just work?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Marc,

Premiere crashes at least 3 times a day.  I wish I could say that I was doing the same thing each time it happens but that would be way too easy.

Here are some things to try for you (and others on this thread)

• Make sure your permissions are set properly: Premiere Pro CC, CC 2014, or 2014.1 freezing on startup or crashing while working (Mac OS X 10.9, an...
• Delete media cache, then delete system trash
• Reduce memory in Preferences > Memory set to Adobe, allocate more to other applications. Optimize memory for rendering > Set to "Memory."
• Trash previews in Documents folder
• Set Sequence > Sequence Settings preview codec to QuickTime > ProRes 422 not I-Frame MPEG (Set Editing Mode to Custom)
• Trash preferences
• Run Disk Utility, repair Disk Permissions

Hope one of those things helps you out.

Thanks,

Kevin

[libsimpso]

Hi Kevin,

This is the first mention of customizing the video preview settings that I have seen reference to (perhaps I overlooked it buried in this thread). I have asked that question specifically as a separate community post, and am glad to see an answer here.

I have customized my video preview settings to Apple ProRes 422 as you suggest. Do you also recommend disabling "composite in linear color (requires GPU acceleration or max render quality)?

Punker, I'm glad you are having a positive experience. I find that it can be fast to edit some times, and other times not at all. Crashing becomes increasingly more frequent as a project becomes more complex. Playback is my biggest struggle. Even at 1/2 and less resolution, video playback stutters whether 1080 or 4K. I am hoping the change in preview settings alleviates that. Dynamic linking with AE has been pretty unreliable. I will use linking to send clips to AE, but will create new compositions and render out the final product rather than relying on the dynamic link itself. Every time I try to export a project with a dynamic linked composition, I end up with media-offline in the final product.

I have attempted the items on Kevin's list, other than the customized sequence settings/video previews, which I will try today.

Thanks for the support Kevin, and the positive encouragement, Punker! I have been reluctantly dabbling in FCP X. But am glad to regain some hope for Adobe. with a new idea to try.

[Punker]

I suppose I have been lucky, then. No trouble with Dynamic Linking although

I don't use it much (the editing I do is on a very basic level). Mostly

just send a clip to AE for stabilization when Warp Stabilizer can't get the

job done right in Premiere.

I too had never seen the suggestion about changing Memory settings which

I've now changed. All the other suggestions still resulted in frequent

crashes. Hopefully this solves the problem!

[DellPatrick]

Adobe should really develop an easy to use diagnostic tool for Premiere. am having crashes on a brand new Macbook Pro with dual gfx cards but only on one specific project that was created on my Mac Pro. Very frustrating.

[Punker]

While I can't say when an update might happen, I can tell you that, despite the infuriating crashes, Premiere runs lightning fast on the new Mac Pro for me. Just cmd+s like crazy.

[toneproductions]

Hi Punker‌ that's great! Can you give us a run down of your system? MP specs? HDD/RAID setup etc?

[Punker]

I'm running a Late 2013 Mac Pro | OS 10.10.3

3 GHz 8-core Intel Xeon E5

32 GB DDR3 RAM

Dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics cards

Nothing fancy display-wise. A couple of HP 2711's (1080p).

500 GB SSD internal (not sure what brand)

I have a Promise Pegasus 2 R6 RAID 5 attached via Thunderbolt. It's super

quiet and a bonus is that it comes already configured as RAID 5 so you

don't have to initialize and build it yourself. Just pull it out of the box

and plug it in for the most part.

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 3:52 PM, toneproductions <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[toneproductions]

Punker‌ I'm guessing you have your Media on the RAID. Where are you writing your preview files/Cache etc to?

[Punker]

Also to the RAID. I think I read that that's not ideal but it just helps

for archiving once the raid is full, to have everything there in the same

project folder. Though I rarely have preview files since I don't usually

have to render anything- even using AVCHD.

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 4:22 PM, toneproductions <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[toneproductions]

you don't use AE Dynamic link then? What about rendering colour corrected vision for playback? Don't you render previews in the timeline then?

[marcf7226877]

I wish I could say that it was just ONE thing that is crashing my system but it isn't. I have just tried all of Kevin's suggestions (Thank you sir for that) but it still hasn't changed much in my system. Now I am getting crashes by just creating a new sequence. I mean WTH?????

[marcf7226877]

I basically have to trash my preferences DAILY in order for my system to work 75% of the time. And it is still crashing at least 2-3x a day. I am able to work but still not being able to set my prefs the way i want and LEAVE them is BS!

[scottauerbach]

I wish I were that lucky.  Even after 2 hours online with tech support, trashing everything (after I had already done a complete system wipe, all the way down to reinstalling the OS and Creative Cloud), I can't play back video for more than a few seconds without it hiccupping and stuttering.

[Punker]

Switching my memory preferences to "Memory" as opposed to "Performance" and

allocating less RAM to Premiere worked for 2-3 days. No crashes. But it's

started happening all over again. It seems like every time I restart my

computer it resets something. Since it doesn't reset Premiere's memory

preferences, I don't know what to do now.

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:37 AM, marcf7226877 <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[scottauerbach]

The "what to do now" from Adobe Tech Support was:

Wait.

Even though this has been a known issue for at least 9 months, and probably far longer.

Apparently there's a new CC release in a month or so... who knows whether the problem will be solved.  Adobe Support certainly doesn't.

[DellPatrick]

It certainly seems the new MP wasn't built for Adobe

--

Brian Nunes

Worldtree Films, LLC

www.worldtreefilms.com

[scottauerbach]

Update: after posting twice about my IMMENSE problems over the last few months, with no Adobe staff response, I posted about it being the D700 conflicts being a "known issue," according to Tech Support.  THAT got an immediate denial from Adobe staff.  Trying yet another complete down-to-the-OS wipe and reinstall. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Punker,

Switching my memory preferences to "Memory" as opposed to "Performance" and

allocating less RAM to Premiere worked for 2-3 days. No crashes. But it's

started happening all over again. It seems like every time I restart my

computer it resets something. Since it doesn't reset Premiere's memory

preferences, I don't know what to do now.

I've heard that setting Memory Preferences this way was more stable. Thanks for the report. Did you start crashing after your computer was on for a few days or did you restart your computer each day? Would certainly recommend a fresh boot before each editing session as a rule of thumb.

Regards,
Kevin

[Punker]

Ah, ok. Generally during the week I just put it to sleep at the end of the

day and only shut down for the weekend. I think I needed to reboot for some

other reason on the third or fourth day and that's when the crashes started

reoccurring. This time I'll try rebooting every day and see if that makes a

difference.

Thank you

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Kevin-Monahan <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[Kevin-Monahan]

Yes, Punker. It's good to refresh the RAM on daily basis. I do that and seem to have better performance overall.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Ugio]

Hello people,

I had encounter bad behaviour between Adobe Premiere and Mac computers since the Creative Cloud, before that I worked mainly on Avid with a PC workstation and I had zero issues in 5 years.

Could be possible that the problems some of us are having with premiere ( crashes and laggy timeline, project files bigger than 1GB... ) are caused by faulty graphic cards? if that's the case, most of us can't stop working and give our computers to Apple to check it out for a couple weeks to say afterwards that everything it's ok ( it happend to me before ). Could Adobe have a talk with Apple to sort things out and see if Apple has to call to review some computers?

By the way, I posted before about the problems I had with Premiere and the new Mac Pro, after that we started to work on a Imac and the editing it's less laggy than in the Mac Pro but it crashes 3 or 4 times per day, also, sometimes premiere creates huge project files, we tried to create a new project and import the timeline but after doing that the new project gets bigger. Would be amazing if the Adobe team could sort this out, I believe some crashes are related to the size of the project file.

But yeah, what I wanted to say it's looks like Adobe says all this problems are hardware related, if that's the case Adobe should warn Apple about the faulty graphic cards or the bad behaviour Adobe software has on Apple computers.

Best regards

[maxwelll73834198]

I've run into a lot of problems using my new Mac Pro because of OpenCL driver issues. This problem is likely the cause of the frustration voiced here with Mercury / OpenCL functionality on a mac.

I have a 2013 Mac Pro running Yosemite; (which I'm selling on eBay as of yesterday) with 1TB Flash Storage; 32GB RAM; dual D700 6GB AMD Firepro GPU's and 3.5GHz 6-core Intel Xeon processor. It seems a lot of my 3D apps want nVidia to do GPU rendering in. The few that I have that can do OpenCL can't, because OS X doesn't have properly working OpenCL drivers.  Premiere Pro is taking 4 hours to create a 1080 HD blu-ray file that is only an hour long video. It does have a lot of effects and color correction, but it appears that only the CPU is really doing the work.

Let me know if anyone thinks this is connected.

Here is a blog posting that sums it up nicely, from a developer who needs OpenCL to work for his Reality plug-in to properly leverage GPU's for rendering:

OS X users unite!

PRET-A-3D MAY 3, 2015 29 COMMENTS

I have a bit of sad news to report.

We have found out that the OpenCL GPU drivers for OS X are broken and are unable to render but the simplest of scenes. With anything barely complex the driver simpy crash. CPU rendering works fine.

This is not a problem of the GPU or even the software expertise of AMD or nVidia. It’s a mater of old drivers shipped with OS X. The same scenes with the same exact hardware render on Windows and even on Linux. Beautifully. This is because, on those other OSes, it’s possible to update the drivers independently. On OS X OpenCL is part of the OS and the drivers can only be updated by Apple. Apparently OpenCL is not at the same level of priority than providing new Emoji and so we are stuck with broken drivers.

We have tried to work with AMD (they are powerless in this) and even talked with some Apple engineers, but nothing happened.

So today I decided to email Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, directly, because we can’t continue like this. Here is the text of my email:

Dear Mr. Cook.

I’m sorry to bother you but we have tried all other channels and nothing worked.

I’m part of a group of developers of a physically-based renderer called LuxRender. LuxRender has been written to use OpenCL to accelerate its enormous amount of computation necessary to generate photo-realistic scenes. You can see some of the images generated by Lux at http://luxrender.net. Lux is an Open Source program.

Apple has defined OpenCL and we have adopted this API instead of the proprietary CUDA in order to be able to work with all kind of hardware on all major platforms. It made sense for an OSS to use an open standard.

The reason why I’m writing to you is that, after waiting for years, we still have broken GPU drivers on OS X. Scenes that render perfectly well on Windows and even on Linux simply abort on OS X. This is happening with both AMD and nVidia GPUs.

The problem is unsolvable from our side. We need updated, fixed drivers for OS X. The problem is so bad hat our main OS X developer has announced, today, that he is giving up OS X. He simply can’t do his job.

I kindly request that you look into this and give us working AMD and nVidia drivers in an upcoming, possibly soon, update of OS X. We are more than willing to work with your engineers, if you need any kind of specific help in identifying the problem.

Thank you for your attention.

Paolo Ciccone

If you are a Mac user I’m asking you to write something like the letter above to Mr.Cook. Or you can simply write in support of my request. The subject line that I used was “The OS X OpenCL drivers are broken.” Mr.Cook can be reached at tcook@apple.com. Please be polite, snyde remarks or rudeness will only damage our cause.

Hopefully Mr.Cook will listen to us and make it possible to incorporate new OpenCL drivers in OS X in an upcoming update.

Thank you for your support.