The Mac CS6 "Serious Error" thread

Report · Jun 03, 2012

It looks like there are 4-6 disjointed threads about some big problems Mac users are finding with CS6 (and 6.0.1) To give us a better place to figure out solutions and for others to find with a search, maybe we can post a discussion here.

The Adobe engineers are participating and receiving crash logs, and hopefully a pattern can develop.

I'm on a MacPro 4,1, Lion 10.7.4, CS6.0.1, 32GB RAM, GTX 285 with the latest nVidia and CUDA drivers. I am seeing 2 primary issues:

Lots of Serious Error crashes. This happens without any noticeable pattern - sometimes with the title tool, trim monitor, or simply just scrubbing the timeline. It seems to happen more frequently with Dynamic Links in the timeline. Also, I believe it is happening more often (or maybe exclusively) with the MPE GPU option enabled. I think in Software Only mode, it may not be present, although further testing required.

Also, I am having an issue where Pr will display black only in the source and program monitors, unless I click around the timeline and will get flashes of images. This is remedied by changing over to Software Only for the MPE. It seems to be worse if Safari is running.

Wil - an Adobe engineer - has taken a look at my crash logs and seems to think something is funky with the graphcs drivers in both cases, but crash logs from other users seem to not agree.

CS6 on the mac - for me and a few others - is incredibly flaky. If you are having issues, can you post and explain what you are seeing and what your hardware/driver config is. Any patterns we can find will help the engineers troubleshoot and get this taken care of.

Report · Jul 11, 2012

FYI, I found a direct fix for my "serious error." I was encountering the problem when dragging a merged clip from the project pane to a new DSLR 1080 30p sequence. Apparently, I had an in and out point set on the merged clip. All I had to do was clear the in and out, and no error message.

Because it was so easy to work around, I'm thinking maybe my "serious error" was diferent from the rest of you. For that matter, maybe that's why most of the people posting on this thread have no hardware/software configurations in common — because your error messages are caused by different bugs. Is it possible "serious error" is just a generic message related to many different problems?

I'll certainly come back here if I run into another "serious error" while experimenting with Premiere CS6.

Report · Jul 11, 2012

I was getting the serious error almost right after start up. I gave up after that. Too busy cutting in FCP7 to go back and try to figure it out again. It could be a simple non-compatible action or function for me as well, but I'll have to return to it later.

It does appear that everyone's issues are different bugs/problems.

I agree with Jim, if not for the serious error, the "lack of a real external monitoring solution, and scrubbing the CTI is very unresponsive and frame droppy." is definitely annoying, when FCP7 has all of that without a problem for me. My FCP doesn't crash all the time either, unlike jvon42. I wish I could upgrade to CS6, but my machine is just barely too old. In the end I might have to wait to give Pr a proper chance until I upgrade the machine.
When I find some time, I'll try it again... good luck y'all

Report · Jul 11, 2012

There's the same Radeon HD / GT120 combination again. jvon, can you try unplugging the monitor(s) from one card and only using the other, or switching monitor plugs? See what that does? Although, I've never seen the TrackItem error before.

Report · Jul 11, 2012

There's the same Radeon HD / GT120 combination again. jvon, can you try unplugging the monitor(s) from one card and only using the other, or switching monitor plugs? See what that does?

Unfortunately, that didn't change anything. I had two monitors connected to the Radeon HD, as it's the faster video card, so I switched both to the GT120 and was able to duplicate the same error.

Report · Jul 15, 2012

It seems to be getting worse for me. I'm on a deadline and I had premiere cs6 crash 6 times within 2.5 hours today..on a simple :30 spot (all ProRes files). The computer locks up in a full Kernel Panic.

My system:

Macbook Pro i7 2.2 GHZ (17") 8gb RAM

AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB

1x 256 SSD, 1x 500gb HDD

That makes about 15 times total over the past 5 days. I'm running cs6 on my MacPro and iMac and so far the iMac has crashed once with cs6 and the MacPro hasn't had any issues.

I hope Adobe releases a fix soon, this is getting incredibly frustrating.

Report · Jul 16, 2012

It is certainly getting worse for me on this project too. 17 crashes in one day and 4 of them have caused the audio mute that NOTHING sems to resolve other than a full restore from a Time Machine backup.

I've tried the killall coreaudiod....

I've tried the stop / start service....

I've tried the midi audio settings....

I've tried rebooting and running scripts....

A full restore from a Time Machine backup is theonly thing that fixes it for me. An that takes 2Hrs 5 mins from the most minimalized Time Machine I could created on this system. So that's 4x2Hrs lost productivity..... not to mention all the ther crashes that didn't cause the audio problem.

Can you have SOME feedback from Adobe on this PLEASE ?

Report · Jul 16, 2012

Has anyone updated the recent update? At least I think it is a recent one, just checked this morning to see if there was one......"CSXS Infrastructure 3.0.2 update."

Don't know anything about it, wondering if this can help any of us?

Report · Jul 16, 2012

My audio stopped working yesterday. First time for me. Deleting the audio devices preferences in my User Library brought it back.

In my experience, Kernel Panics have been caused after installing a driver. Disk Warrior stops them.

If DW doesn't do it for you, reinstall your drivers. You have drivers for each PCI card you have installed - RAID, graphics, audio, etc. Then run DW again.

However, you don't need to install graphics drivers in 10.7. They're built into the OS.

You're probably risking more problems by installing nVidia drivers. This is a guess on my part, because I didn't install any nVidia drivers, and I'm not plagued by Serious Errors as some of you are. I've only had two or three with CS6, and my routine afterwards was to run DW, Repair Permissions, and delete all my caches and preview files. I reinstalled Pr once, but that may have been overkill.

There's a thread on the Adobe site about Serious Errors in another app. They suggest that rolling back to 10.7.3 is a possible fix, due to a video driver issue.

Google "adobe serious error." You'll see that it plagues many of their apps, and it appears to be a general error that tells you nothing about what you can do to fix it.

And I don't think this recent update does anything to address the Serious Errors.

Report · Jul 16, 2012

Jim Curtis wrote:
My audio stopped working yesterday. First time for me. Deleting the audio devices preferences in my User Library brought it back.

Jim, can you be more specific about the files you deleted? All I have in Library-->Audio are some more empty folders. No files.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

ExactImage wrote:
Jim Curtis wrote:
My audio stopped working yesterday. First time for me. Deleting the audio devices preferences in my User Library brought it back.
Jim, can you be more specific about the files you deleted? All I have in Library-->Audio are some more empty folders. No files.

Sorry for the delay in responding. Very busy.

The files to delete are:

com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist

com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist

In root>Library>Preferences>Audio. They might also exist in User>Library>Preferences>Audio.

You can also try deleting "com.apple.audio.AudioMIDISetup.plist" and "com.apple.audio.AggregateDevices.plist" You can use EasyFind to locate any of these files. If you delete AudioMIDISetup, you will lose any MIDI device maps you've created, so if that applies to you, be aware of that.

I have a new theory for Serious Error. I've gotten several in the past couple of days. After getting them, I delete my Previews and Adobe Caches, and that seems to stop them (for a while). Thinking back on how one person was getting them after starting a new project, this may not work for everybody. YMMV.

BTW, I read a post on another forum that Adobe is aware of this issue, and is working on a fix. I inferred from the post that "a fix" may require an OS update. Interesting.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

Thanks Jim. I did find the files in the main library and deleted them to get my audio back..... but couldn't find them originaly in the user prefs - which is what had me confused. thanks for the tip though - it saved me several hours already.

I've been running for several days now WITHOUT an error, simply be turning CUDA off. Then today, I wantedto do some testing and turned CUDA back on. BANG. Repeatable every time scrubbing the CTI over these clips with CUDA on, but works perfectly (no errors) without CUDA. Just to make sure I went back and forth 6 times.

Guess who had CUDA disabled for everything except exporting now!

Report · Jul 16, 2012

EditorPete wrote:
Has anyone updated the recent update? At least I think it is a recent one, just checked this morning to see if there was one......"CSXS Infrastructure 3.0.2 update."
Don't know anything about it, wondering if this can help any of us?

It's been out for a little while - did not help as far as I can tell.

Report · Jul 17, 2012

Well I'm trying to finalize another edit today and in the past 35 minutes I've had 4 full Kernel Panics (this screen: http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/TS3742/TS3742_01_KP-001-en.jpg).

It happens randomly when scrubbing video, triming clips, moving audio, etc, etc. This is driving me nuts! I have to finish this edit, but having to restart and lose my work every 5 minutes is not helping.

Report · Jul 18, 2012

Just another note......After having audio muting issues, as discussed in this forum, I uninstalled CS6 a while ago on my Macbook Pro. Audio issues seemed to have subsided. I recently reinstalled CS6 just for the heck of it and started recieving audio muting problems again, but no serious crashes. I uninstalled CS6 and for a while now have been still having audio issues. So, I read Jim Curtis note about this:

You're probably risking more problems by installing nVidia drivers. This is a guess on my part, because I didn't install any nVidia drivers, and I'm not plagued by Serious Errors as some of you are.

Then I deleted my nVidea Cuda Preference Pane in System Preferences, reinstalled CS5.5 and have been running audio problem free for some time. I know this thread is getting very long and frustrating, I too want to use PrP CS6 in a professional manner, but do not have the confidence yet to have clients sitting behind me while I explain why there are so many issues with a new piece of software, as my deadlines creep up. None of us can be hadcuffed by the tools we use on a daily basis. PrP CS6 is like driving my first car .....fingers crossed and hope I make it to my next destination, every time I hop behind the steering wheel.

Report · Jul 18, 2012

My guess is that the next update we see will be for Mountain Lion compatibility and no mention of these issues.

Report · Jul 18, 2012

EditorPete wrote:
I know this thread is getting very long and frustrating, I too want to use PrP CS6 in a professional manner, but do not have the confidence yet to have clients sitting behind me while I explain why there are so many issues with a new piece of software, as my deadlines creep up. None of us can be hadcuffed by the tools we use on a daily basis. PrP CS6 is like driving my first car .....fingers crossed and hope I make it to my next destination, every time I hop behind the steering wheel.

I have ZERO confidence in Pr with clients in the room. Not just for the Serious Error probability, but also for the fact that audio is out of sync or completely gone 3/4 of the time I hit the spacebar. Pr's saving graces, when I'm working alone (which is most of the time), is that the CUDA accelleration and Dynamic Link with Ae compensate for Pr's general bugginess.

I have a job coming up on location soon, with a hard and unforgiving deadline. No way will I put my trust in Pr. I'll be using FCP7.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

Just installed CS6 on a 2009 Mac Pro running Snow Leopard.

Out of the box, the help system is entirely non-functional. When I click on the help button in the splash screen, or through a menu item, nothing happens.

When attempting to import footage from my Panasonic P2 camera using the Media Browser, the entire program hangs and becomes unresponsive. When I force quit, I get the "serious error" dialog box.

I downloaded the latest Premiere updater but it didn't help.

It's going to be a serious problem for me as an editor if Premiere won't import video off my camera.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

Well DavRW2012, you can see by the size of this thread that this is a big issue that is totally unresolved. Sorry you are having trouble. Thanks for contributing your trials and errors and with each person's experience, maybe we can figure something out.

Nice to hear from Jim that there is the possibility that Adobe is looking into it, but why is there total silence here from the engineers? They were responding a bit at first, but I can't get any of them to PM me back anymore. I also have contact with the program manager for Prelude and asked him to put me in contact with the program manager for Premiere - and nothing came from that.

My experience also is that with GPU CUDA acceleration off I am having less issues...but that negates one of the biggest selling points of Premiere!

Report · Jul 19, 2012

It is a long thread. I tried getting the footage off my camera using Prelude, but it copies the whole arcane folder structure directly from the P2 card -- which I could do just fine in the Finder if I wanted to, but I need something that will also extract my video from the mxf wrapper so I can also use the footage in other software.

As an aside, when I tried Photoshop CS6 that came with Premiere (had been using CS3, which I only purchased because Snow Leopard broke PS 7, which I was pretty happy with...) I found that the Quicktime Export function in Photoshop CS6 has been crippled: previously I could export video in any format Quicktime supported. Now I can only use JPEG 2000 or Animation, which will add another step for me to actually use the video, and which adds an extra encode, which will add artifacts.

Because my help system is totally nonfunctional, I spent some time digging around on Adobe's site to find the manual in PDF format. When I went to the section about exporting Quicktime from Photoshop, the content was out of date! It only discussed CS5 -- which still had the functionality that is now missing!

I therefore see no reason to switch to CS6 since several changes to the interface are also pretty annoying (I don't like the new lasso cursor, there are some changes to the zoom tool, etc.). I expect to continue using Photoshop CS3.

I think I've been straight up robbed by Adobe. I just bought all this useless software.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

I hate to post a new issue every day, but it seems that since the latest update with Premiere cs6 I'm experiencing more problems than ever. I just had a new issue arise on my iMac (the very latest one). I was playing back the timeline and suddenly the video stopped playing, but the audio kept going. My mouse worked, but I couldn't click on anything within premiere or anywhere else on the computer.

I had no way to force quit..so after 5 minutes I was about to shut down with the power button, but the screen shut off suddenly and the computer wouldn't come back on. 20 minutes later the iMac booted and reported a serious error--and guess what the culprit was? Good old premiere cs6. I'm glad I have the cloud month to month option, because I think I'm going to have to move back to FCX or Avid.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

I didn't had problems until I tried to playback a montage with 3 video layers. At each attempt, black screen comes and I need to hard reboot.

Report · Jul 19, 2012

Dramis 666 wrote:
I didn't had problems until I tried to playback a montage with 3 video layers. At each attempt, black screen comes and I need to hard reboot.

What are your hardware/software specs? I have this issue too, and only way to stop it is to switch over to software MPE mode....

Report · Jul 20, 2012

I'm on a macbook pro 2.2 ghz i7 4 gig RAM with lion osx 10.7.4. And yes, I use hardware acceleration. Maybe it's the problem, for mercury playback engine is nvidia technology and my video card is ATI.

Report · Jul 20, 2012

And this morning, my macbook lost sound! My sound indicator is on mute and I can't unmute it at all. So, no sound anywhere exept in Premiere!!! I had this problme when I first installed CS6, I made a system restore using Time machine and uninstalled cs5.5 with Adobe's cleaner. Then, I installed all CS6 softwares and I had no problems until 2 days ago in Premiere. Really annoying... and I guess I can't listen to streaming videos like last time...

Report · Jul 20, 2012

Try deleting the audio preference files in :

Machintosh HD --> Library --> Preferences --> Audio

Then reboot.

Actually, copy those files somewhere else, then delete them and reboot. The system will recreate them. It would be nice to see what the difference is between the old ones and the new ones so we can see whatis going wrong. It hasn't happened to me for a few days so I don't have the corrupt files to look at!

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The Mac CS6 "Serious Error" thread