The Mac CS6 "Serious Error" thread

[needles27]

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. 

[ballsofficiallybroken]

I was having this same issue and I was able to stop mine from crashing by un-installing my CUDA driver and replacing it with an earlier version, here is their driver archive if you want to try that:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html

I think I used the 11/2012 version.  The problem disappeared after that.  A CUDA dialogue box opens on startup saying that an update is required but I just ignore it since I prefer functional software.

Don't hold your breath for Adobe to fix this issue, this is one of two absurd glitches that I've come up against and after hours of research I discovered that they simply ignore certain glitches.  As an aside I also discovered that their customer service is a joke.  A really unfunny joke.

Good luck!

[deepansh1989]

thanks for your suggestions, i really appreciate it.

I am actually a novice as far as Mac or premiere s concerned, so pardon my ignorance if i ask this question: How do I un-install my CUDA driver and replace it with the earlier version?

And as for the other glitch you were alluding to, if you are talking about the "sorry, a serious error has occured.." thing, i have been dealing with that too. ( A lot, in fact).

thanks again for your prompt reply,

Deepansh

[gregb98056542]

Here are some unofficial instructions on removing the CUDA drivers on Mac.

[deepansh1989]

Where can i find the instructions, Greg?

thanks,

Deepansh

[gregb98056542]

Oops, the link didn't come through.  http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26750&sid=6c30f667e8292b095fdbb457bec467b0

[deepansh1989]

ok, thanks Greg.

And once i remove my current version, which version of CUDA should i replace it with (the one that allows me to work on premiere without crashing, hopefully..)?

Deepansh

[jwffvm]

I hesitate to make this post, but I think it is time someone stepped up.  I'm sure some of you may be incensed, but I hope others may get a grip on reason.  I've been observing the comments and problems posted here and I hope someone other than myself has noticed the remarkably few people who have problems with CS6.

I have been editing for 40 or so years, started editing HD on a Mac in 2000 and switched from FCP 7, to Adobe in January, and have edited a half dozen 1 hr programs in PPr.  Sure there have been a few issues, but not nearly as many as I had with FCP7 before making the move.  For the most part I find the Production Suite a great tool and a well needed and refreshing move into professional editing.

I edit in my studio on a 12core Mac and Kona 3 card and on location, on a relatively new MacBook Pro.  I'm in Alaska at the moment and just finished editing a one hour fishing lodge promo with "0", count em..."0" crashes.  On my studio machine so far other than learning curve problems of my own doing have sufferred far fewer crashes than with any version of FCP.  I only edit HD and have cut well over 200 hours of HD programming in the last few years using a variety of formats mixing HDV, Canon DSLR, DVCPROHD 1080/60i, 30p, 24p, and a ton of GoPro footage in for the most part 1080/30P.  Oh yes and Nanoflash formats as well.  Not only did final cut take forever to convert all these formats it crashed frequently..

About the only time I've encountered issues in CS6 is when I used about 50 stills that we're huge sizes in the same show.  Even then I was able to export the offending stills sequences and reintroduce them to my project.

My message here is for you-all to consider how few there are with serious problems and  forget all this vitriolic whining and spend that time problem solving your issues.  Continual slamming of an excellent production suite wastes your time that could be much better spent in the edit suite.  Or you could just quietly make a switch to wherever. 

Jim Watt, Bennett-Watt HD Productions, Inc.

[Kurrykid-jzpfVq]

Well Jim, I suspect that if you were having the problem, you might have a few words to say as well. But you're not so good for you. But others are having problems and it is an issue that needs to be addressed. How are we supposed to stop are "whining and spend time problem solving" when it's not something we can't fix. We are not the software engineers. I have a very nice computer that works great with everything else. In fact, I had never even seen that kind of error on a Mac until this problem.

So Jim, we are all extrememly happy that you are crusing right along with your operations but please try to understand that if your system had to be rebooted everytime you starting working in PPro, you'd be a little frustrated as well.

[Strillogy]

Jim,

I can appreciate where you are coming from, but I expect software like this to function properly.  I've been editing with FCP from 2004  until early last year.  I can count the amount of major crashes I had on one hand..and none of those were kernel panics. I also have 2 other sub contractors using the same software with similar hardware and they all have very similar stories so I  feel this is hardly an isolated incident.

Maybe there are just a few bad combinations of hardware with CS6 that causes these issues, I'm not sure.  I do know that two of my newest computers crash constantly editing R3D, H264, and PRORES files. I can recreate it over and over again.  I'd be happy to set up a camera to record 20 minutes of editing to show how many times the computer locks up completely.

I absolutely love the rest of the production suite (After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator), but Premiere has been a complete nightmare for me. When I invest time and money in software and a workflow, I expect it to work.  Those of us with these major issues have every right to voice our concerns and ask for some support.

[tclark513]

jwffvm wrote:

I hesitate to make this post, but I think it is time someone stepped up.  I'm sure some of you may be incensed, but I hope others may get a grip on reason.  I've been observing the comments and problems posted here and I hope someone other than myself has noticed the remarkably few people who have problems with CS6.

I have been editing for 40 or so years, started editing HD on a Mac in 2000 and switched from FCP 7, to Adobe in January, and have edited a half dozen 1 hr programs in PPr.  Sure there have been a few issues, but not nearly as many as I had with FCP7 before making the move.  For the most part I find the Production Suite a great tool and a well needed and refreshing move into professional editing.

I edit in my studio on a 12core Mac and Kona 3 card and on location, on a relatively new MacBook Pro.  I'm in Alaska at the moment and just finished editing a one hour fishing lodge promo with "0", count em..."0" crashes.  On my studio machine so far other than learning curve problems of my own doing have sufferred far fewer crashes than with any version of FCP.  I only edit HD and have cut well over 200 hours of HD programming in the last few years using a variety of formats mixing HDV, Canon DSLR, DVCPROHD 1080/60i, 30p, 24p, and a ton of GoPro footage in for the most part 1080/30P.  Oh yes and Nanoflash formats as well.  Not only did final cut take forever to convert all these formats it crashed frequently..

About the only time I've encountered issues in CS6 is when I used about 50 stills that we're huge sizes in the same show.  Even then I was able to export the offending stills sequences and reintroduce them to my project.

My message here is for you-all to consider how few there are with serious problems and  forget all this vitriolic whining and spend that time problem solving your issues.  Continual slamming of an excellent production suite wastes your time that could be much better spent in the edit suite.  Or you could just quietly make a switch to wherever. 

Jim Watt, Bennett-Watt HD Productions, Inc.

Maybe you should take a closer look at the post count and views of this thread!  Obviously it's more then a "few" people with problems.  Since you are having such great luck maybe you should help others with information about your setup instead of slamming them!

[genefama]

Jim,

Thanks for the post.  Early in the thread some of us asked whether there were any Mac users who were not having problems and might want to weigh in. After 20 pages, you're the first. I'm glad there's at least one. But so far, the only population with "remarkably fewer" numbers than users with problems seems to be users without problems.  I know happy campers don't rush to post here, but it's interesting how few Apple users post on the site in general. 

It's possible, as you suggest, that we're a marginal group--not because we're whiners, mind you, but because we use Apple computers. A few of the problems we've discussed here have been acknowledged by Adobe, so we know we're not crackpots.  Maybe Apple and Adobe are growing apart.

OSX gets stupider with every update. In the end I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe quit supporting Apple users. Apple bans Flash from its devices and sells competing products that don't fit into their product line. Then they dumb down their video editor and lose customers to Adobe. Then, bang, everything goes buggy between Adobe and OSX. Adobe, meanwhile, forms a strategic alliance with HP.

This isn't a conspiracy theory because there isn't a conspiracy--just a conflict of interest. You know, the way a Mercedes dealer won't put BMW brochures in the showroom or a Fidelity broker won't make it easy to buy Vanguard funds?  It's just a fact of life in business.

If I were Adobe I know I'd take a hard look at ditching CS for Apple--especially when so few people seem to run their stuff on Macs and so few of those that do seem to do so successfully.  But I'm glad you're in that group.

[ExactImage]

jwffvm wrote:

My message here is for you-all to consider how few there are with serious problems and  forget all this vitriolic whining and spend that time problem solving your issues.  Continual slamming of an excellent production suite wastes your time that could be much better spent in the edit suite.  Or you could just quietly make a switch to wherever.

Well Jim, firstly I'm glad for you that you don't see any of these problems.  I hope you never do.  But the problems are real, not some miss configuration of a system.  Brand new straight out of the box Macs with nothing loaded except CS6 shouldn't be miss-configured - but they still crash.

Macs that are solid on every other program still crash.

It's not just one Mac, its lots of them, Snow Leopard & Lion for sure.

Thinking back, CS5 and CS5.5 used to crash on me when exiting.  Not sure how I should 'fix' a CMD+Q or quit via the menu.  Seems a straight forward operation to me

Just becaue you don't have the problems yourself doesn't mean they aren't real, doesn't mean that lots of people aren't getting frustrated and having multiple crashes ALL day long.

You edit different types of footage (codecs) to me. That could be one of the causes, or it could be a red herring.  But unless some one from Adobe speaks up, we'll never know.

Just for reference, I rearranged my office so I can access both Mac and Windows systems at the same time.  While it doesn't happen as often, the Windows version IS crashing too, although to be fair it's mostly After Effects this time.  Go figure.

I have found that I can minimize my crashes by keeping the audio twirled up unless I'm working on it, and turning CUDA support OFF until it comes time to export.   If I turn CUDA on then within minutes I'm likely to encounter a serious error.    This could mean the problem is not within Adobe's code, but in the CUDA drivers.  But again, unless some one speeks up from Adobe we may never know.

I think what most of us want more than anything else is SOMETHING from ADOBE that tells us they acknowledge the problem and are working on it (with some degree of sincerety).  Right now we feel we're being ignored.

I've tried FCP X is desperation but I can't make it work for me without slowing my down (for several reasons).  

CS6 will be the very last Adobe product I buy unless we can get some acknowledgement of the problem, an idea that they are working on it and a fix BEFORE some bright spark thinks they can take more money off me for CS6.5, because that's ain't gonna happen!

[needles27]

It looks like the engineers decided to or were told to not engage in this discussion.  You can see that they weighed in at the beginning of the thread a few times, and Wil R responded to my crash reports at first, but for a few weeks now won't even respond to my messages anymore.  Another engineer working on another problem told me he has been paying attention to this thread, but when I engaged him on what we can do about it, went silent.  And now hearing that they are considering locking the thread shows that there is something fishy here.  If there wasn't some sort of Adobe internal issue here, why wouldn't an engineer make a brief comment such as "Looking into it." 

I'm not talking conspiracy theory, just that the silence is deafening. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

needles27 wrote:

It looks like the engineers decided to or were told to not engage in this discussion.  You can see that they weighed in at the beginning of the thread a few times, and Wil R responded to my crash reports at first, but for a few weeks now won't even respond to my messages anymore.  Another engineer working on another problem told me he has been paying attention to this thread, but when I engaged him on what we can do about it, went silent.  And now hearing that they are considering locking the thread shows that there is something fishy here.  If there wasn't some sort of Adobe internal issue here, why wouldn't an engineer make a brief comment such as "Looking into it." 

I'm not talking conspiracy theory, just that the silence is deafening. 

No. The silence is not because of what you are thinking (cut out the conspiracy theories folks). I've never been told from on high to not post anywhere in the forums. The reason for the lack of employee participation is because this thread has become completely unfocused. It meanders all over the place, contains multiple topics, with issues that might be pilot error, a bug, hardware incompatiblity, or other issue. It might be more valuable to collect the actual issues, lock this thread, and then break out each one of them in a separate thread.

Shall we do so?

[ExactImage]

Kevin Monahan wrote:

No. The silence is not because of what you are thinking (cut out the conspiracy theories folks). I've never been told from on high to not post anywhere in the forums. The reason for the lack of employee participation is because this thread has become completely unfocused. It meanders all over the place, contains multiple topics, with issues that might be pilot error, a bug, hardware incompatiblity, or other issue. It might be more valuable to collect the actual issues, lock this thread, and then break out each one of them in a separate thread.

Shall we do so?

Will it actually help us get a resolutuon any faster, or perhaps let us know that a resolutuon is actually being worked on?

What do you see as the issues you would separate out?

Anything that gets us to a fix faster would be helpful in my opinion, but if the idea is to divide and conquer then that's another matter

[Kevin-Monahan]

ExactImage wrote:

Kevin Monahan wrote:

No. The silence is not because of what you are thinking (cut out the conspiracy theories folks). I've never been told from on high to not post anywhere in the forums. The reason for the lack of employee participation is because this thread has become completely unfocused. It meanders all over the place, contains multiple topics, with issues that might be pilot error, a bug, hardware incompatiblity, or other issue. It might be more valuable to collect the actual issues, lock this thread, and then break out each one of them in a separate thread.

Shall we do so?

Will it actually help us get a resolutuon any faster, or perhaps let us know that a resolutuon is actually being worked on?

What do you see as the issues you would separate out?

Anything that gets us to a fix faster would be helpful in my opinion, but if the idea is to divide and conquer then that's another matter

Yes, we would get to a solution faster if we could break down the actual issues into a list. I haven't gone through the entire thread to compile a list of the actual issues, but that would be a good start.

This thread is really hard to read, especially for the people that can actually help you, so let's work together to compile the issues right here.

[genefama]

I haven't heard any conspiracy theories.  I believe you that your boss didn't tell you not to post here, but if he had, that wouldn't be conspiracy.  And the idea that Apple makes things rough on Adobe users has a long pedigree.  We can't watch Flash videos on an iPad and it's not conspiracy—just a difference in design philosophies and business objectives.

[Kevin-Monahan]

genefama wrote:

I haven't heard any conspiracy theories.  I believe you that your boss didn't tell you not to post here, but if he had, that wouldn't be conspiracy.  And the idea that Apple makes things rough on Adobe users has a long pedigree.  We can't watch Flash videos on an iPad and it's not conspiracy—just a difference in design philosophies and business objectives.

Great thanks!

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Yea, I am getting the exact same issues as needles27, the black monitors, the serious errors and the serious error with [/Volumes/BuildDisk/builds/tightykilt/shared/adobe/MediaCore/VideoFrame/Make/Mac/../../Src/VideoFrameFactory.cpp-233], but I am in Mountain Lion on my MacPro4,1 Quad Core 2.26 with 24GB of RAM and a GTX285 with CUDA version 5.0.17. I have had 16 crashes before i decided to try out Final Cut Pro for the project, but with all the media being from a Canon 5D, I need to convert everything or render (and the timeline render in FCP reads 8 hours).

Since I don't have time for that render right now, I am going to try installing my QUADRO FX 4800, and see if that runs any better than the GRX285.

[needles27]

Very excited to see if the different card gives you any better results.  Interesting that you and I have the same setup and were getting the exact same problems - especially with Mountain Lion.  That is the first time I have seen 2 machines having the same exact problems in this crazy thread.

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Yea, when I read your thread I was blown away. I have been having the exact same problem.

Only been up for about 45 minutes on the QUADRO FX 4800, and don't want to jinx myself, but so far I am running fine, without a problem.  I will report again later, but I haven't been this stable at all with the GTX285, but the QUADRO FX 4800 seems rock solid. TO me this means it must be a driver issue of some sort. Either on NVIDIA's end or on Adobes end running with the GTX285.

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Another hour later and still rock solid. For sure it is a problem with the GTX285.

[needles27]

Interesting.  It would be nice to find a solution, but you give up CUDA performance by changing from the 285 to the Quadro cards.  I don't want to throw more money at my system and give up power just to get a stable system.  Please keep us updated on your system.

[Jeremy_Saville]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I've got the Quadro FX 4800 and have been having the EXACT same problem.  This is a MAJOR issue for Adobe and CS6. I've been trying to get a solution to this as my CS6 is crash happy and I'm also losing hours of time rebooting the machine.  Let's hope the team hears us LOUD and CLEAR and takes this very seriously. This is a serious flaw that will prevent many from taking CS6 seriously as professional editors. I myself am finishing up a feature for imminent distribution and am unable to work.  Please, Adobe team, let's fix this ASAP otherwise that Beta badge that everyone is giving FCPX will soon be yours to wear as well.

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Jeremy, which MacPro are you running a 4,1? And you are still getting the serious errors and screen going black with the Quadro FX 4800? What system are you running? Which version of CUDA? I wouldn't call mine rock solid, as it has crashed a few times, but it is pretty stable after removing my GTX 285.