Rendering issues when applying any effects

[Emeline5C88]

I can't render speeding up or slowing down tracks nor stabilise my video, keep getting the error message "error compiling movie". The files aren't heavy and are in mp4 formats. I haven't had issues before, but it has happened frequently in the last few days. Despite clearing space on my hard drive by deleting all my past Premiere Pro files, adding more RAM memory in Premiere Pro (6GB out of 8GB), adding partition (more than 100GB), re-creating sequences and new projects, I still get these error messages. Can you help? My hard drive isn't full at all either, and my Adobe version is up-to-date in Adobe Creative Cloud (version 15.2.0 - build 35). Thanks a lot. 

[Peru Bob]

Have a look hre:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/faq-fix-error-compiling-movie-errors-in-prem...

[Phillip Harvey]

mp4 is a container. You can usually find H264 or H265 inside that container, and neither of those are optimized video editing codecs so you can always run into trouble with that as your source media, especially when you start adding effects into the mix. Variable framerate will add to the trouble if they are phone recordings. It's just worth pointing this stuff out because a lot of people think "just an mp4" is not a big deal, when in fact that can be some of the worst things in your timeline. And a small file size does not mean easier to play either. A small file size can = heavily compressed, which can mean more difficult to decompress.  

Clearing Media Cache (including for the current Project) is a good start, as is a general restart of system and Premiere, but after that I'd start looking at either codec-related issues or maybe the renderer.
- Turn off Hardware Accelerated Encoding/Decoding and restart Premiere.

- Turn the Premiere Renderer to Software Only.

- Try exporting to an easier to process video codec like ProRes 422

- Try setting the Sequence Video Previews to ProRes 422 and see if a timeline render will work. If it does, check the Use Previews box on export (and you can also check the Match Sequence Settings checkbox at the top of the export window to export a ProRes 422 master)

- If none of that works you probably want to start addressing the source media itself. See if you can Render & Replace the clip in the timeline either with baked effects or even if it'll transcode the source. Otherwise you may need to transcode the source clip in its entirety and replace it in the project.

The link that Peru posted probably contains a lot of what I just typed here. Once I started typing I just went for it, tho 😐

[Emeline5C88]

Thanks so much for your quick and detailed reply. I think I saw in the meantime before you could even reply something similar in terms as well as one of the Adobe community members mentioning to create a new project with a new sequence and copy/paste things in there. This actually solved my issue. I have plenty of space on the laptop's hard drive and Premiere Pro was up-to-date, so that wasn't the issue. I will keep in mind your comment about mp4s in the future. Still weird, as I have been working more or less all the time with mp4s up to now and hadn't run into this issue before. I guess it can also be one of those Premiere Pro bugs. But yes, I know that file size and file exporting format matter a lot.