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. 

[needles27]

Maybe a smiley face would have shown that I was joking. 

I want to quit editing.

[Guest]

needles27 wrote:

I want to quit editing.

agreed......

[EditorPete]

I have noticed the audio muting issue on my MBP (early '08) OS 10.7.4 as well. Only after installing CS6 did this occur. See my earlier post for more info on my procedure. Anyway, I only have the audio issue once in a while lately and my quick fix is just logging out of Lion, then relogging in and it works everytime. Much easier than doing a full reboot or trying to run the "script" as some people are doing.

[ExactImage]

Oh, FFS!  It just happened AGAIN!   Audio is muted for the MacPro on the line out for everything EXCEPT Premiere Pro this time!  

Following a reboot, the first and ONLY program I ran was Premiere Pro.  It crashed almost immediately and did not display the usual 'Initializing xyz' modules.   The audio speaker icon on the top bar changed to the muted icon.    I forced quit Premiere Pro and rebooted.  Now Premiere Pro has audio output and everything else is muted.

Does Premiere Pro insert something in to the audio chain that cold cause corruption like this?   Perhaps some one from Adobe could comment.   I will be filing a bug report right now .....!

[Jim Curtis]

genefama wrote:

The routine I posted earlier to fix the muted audio still works for me 8 times out of 10. Last time, however, the mute symbol in the menu bar stayed gray even after the audio returned.

I don't know if this will help with the folks that are having audio problems, but theres a utility in Digital Rebellion's Pro Maintenance Tools System Toolkit that will flush the Audio Component and Unit Caches.  Highly recommended suite of apps for Mac users.  I use the Preference Manager a LOT, since the prefs on Pr get corrupted at the drop of a hat.

[genefama]

Thanks Jim, but "Tools Systems Toolkit" is the kind of product naming that makes me want to run in the other direction.

Problems like the audio-kill are a lot like viruses. They bleed acid. They're even impervious to full systems re-installs or backdating to "Bobcat 9.2." Permission and preference patches are unlikely to work. I'm not ready to jack my entire system trying to solve something that turns out to be some setting somewhere that Adobe missed in its beta testing.  Are you?

[AudyErel]

No words from Adobe until this day..??

The problem must be a serious big deal, maybe related to the new Mercury engine.. But, why it attacked the audio system & iTunes (maybe Quicktime related)?

I hope they'll find the culprit soon and enlighten us here.

Or at least say a word. Hello?

[jasonvp]

Jason Van Patten wrote:

What I haven't tried yet is to disable hardware MPE.  That'll be my next test, but I don't have high hopes...

As I somewhat expected: disabling hardware MPE made no difference whatsoever.  I was able to easily reproduce the laggy Program Monitor issue with it on and off.

For what it's worth, my source material is:

2 AVCHD inputs (one forward camera, one rear camera)

1 WAV file for sound

The video from the rear camera is PiP'd on top of the front camera, flipped horizontally, and cropped from the bottom.  The audio from both AVCHD inputs is unlinked and deleted; the audio is from the WAV file.

(If any of that matters...)

jas

[Jim Curtis]

3) ... I get compiling errors midway through. These may be related to a Video Copilot plugin effect called Twitch. I'm testing this.

Just to add to the knowledge base, VCP has acknowledged to me that there are problems with Twitch and AeCS6.  So, it would stand to reason that it's not smooth sailing with PrCS6 either.  They're working on an update.

[jasonvp]

My main issue thus far has been the lagged timeline/program monitor during playback or scrubbing.  I made a 2.5 minute clip of the issues I was seeing, but there's no audio with it.  I was going to do a voice-over with it, but I kept tripping over myself that I gave up.

Note at around 24 seconds or so: I hit the HOME key to reset the timeline, and the program monitor stays where it was.  I can even scrub a bit forward and it takes the monitor a tick or two to catch up.  Hit the HOME key again, and the monitor stays where it was.

Interestingly: when I grabbed the Mac CPU monitor and dragged it over top of the Premiere Pro window, the program monitor reset itself.  Playback and scrubbing seem to go OK for a bit until I jump ahead in the timeline (1:18 in the Youtube video).  I hit the PLAY key and it rights itself and starts playing properly.  Scrubbing seems to work well.

1:46 in the video: I hit the HOME key again, and the program monitor once again stays put.  Hitting the PLAY button resets it, but the video doesn't actually play in the monitor for a second or two, then is very choppy catching up.

Rig:

Modified Mac Pro with 2 X5690 Xeons

48G of RAM, 16 of which are in a RAM drive for scratch space

SSD for OS and apps only

1TB mirrored volume (7200RPM drives) for media

GTX570 card with nVidia's (not Apple's) latest drivers

jas

[Guest]

There seems to be no reason that causes the problem for me what so ever. There is nothing specific that I click on or do, moving the mouse after a little break has been the latest culprit. I have been having the problem for about a month now and it is so bad now that I cannot even open my projects for more than about 15 seconds or so without getting the "serious error". I am on CS5.5 though..so its not just a CS6 problem.

iMac 10.7.4

2.5 GHz Intel Core i5

4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB

Let me know if there is any other info I could include to help.

[needles27]

So, it looks like 10.7.4 is a common thread, since we are running different versions of Pr, different machines, different video cards, etc.  I would like to hear from someone (there must be many) that is running Pr with 10.7.4 without issues. 

[Jim Curtis]

Yes, common threads.  10.7.4 and lots of RAM.  If it turns out you get "no problems here" replies, and they're predominantly from people with less RAM, I'd suggest you pull half your RAM, and then see what happens. 

Maybe the way RAM is managed in Lion is suffering as Apple moves more towards a consumer-device OS, and away from RAM-bodacious towers, and letting that implementation fall through the cracks.  I don't know.  Just throwing that out there.

Here's another thing I learned recently:  I was having mysterious Pr CS5.5 problems.  I did all the regular maintenance and troubleshooting, re-installing... the works.  Finally, I tracked my issue down to a drive sled option I had bought from MaxUpgrades to put 6 drives in my MacPro.  I yanked the extra drives, using only the 4 stock SATA bays, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.  You can get serious errors from a bad cable; an unseated PCI card, etc.  That's how I know you have to eliminate your hardware, before you can start blaming errors on software.

[genefama]

I haven't seen any "no problem here" posts from Mac users.

[Run___Gunner]

I just finished 3 long form projects with...

PP CS 6.0.1

Invidia Quadro 4000

CUDA driver 4.2.10

MacPro 5,1

Lion 10.7.4

I edit 5 days a week 8 hours a day and push the system as fast is can go. I'm not a newbie and have built 6 editing suites for production companies. I CANNOT make this thing crash (with one exception). I imported a FCP project via XML, which went smoothly except for the fact that one audio file had a filter that for some reason would crash Premiere if I tried to copy and paste that clip to a new program. Not a big deal at all- in fact, quite understandable.

That said I do not use dynamic linking (yet) and use pretty basic graphics.

I use Canon 5d files, P2, and ProRes.

What really blew my mind and tottaly did not expect was that I could import and drop Apple Motion files right in the timeline. Crazy!

[needles27]

Run & Gunner wrote:

I just finished 3 long form projects with...

PP CS 6.0.1

Invidia Quadro 4000

CUDA driver 4.2.10

MacPro 5,1

Lion 10.7.4

I edit 5 days a week 8 hours a day and push the system as fast is can go. I'm not a newbie and have built 6 editing suites for production companies. I CANNOT make this thing crash (with one exception).

Can I have your machine, please?

[Guest]

I wish I had your experience with CS6..... 

[Crapule_Création]

I restored my system with Time machine and followed these steps and it seems to work fine until now: http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs5-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

[ExactImage]

Brand new system last week (MacBookPro), with NOTHING installed except Production Premium CS6.

4 Kernel panics in the last 20 mins.   I'm REALLY getting tired of this.

Canon MXF (XF100) single viddeo track, dual mono audio (collapsed), litterally 15 seconds long.  Ripple trim the start, ripple trim the end - panic - 4 times.

[Guest]

Just a thought, I first encountered the problem while using 10.7.2. updated to 10.7.4 last week trying to fix the problem. Not sure if that update is changed enough to make a difference..

[RMayhem]

My problem is when scrubbing through the timeline or watching my project back in premier it will jump and stutter and is so bad I cant edit anything. I'm also doing allot of dynamic links to After Effects that don't update for a very long time after I have made a change. When I take of the GPU Acceleration it seems to scrub through and preview the project fine but obviously a lot slower without the acceleration. I found I noticed the problem first after I updated my Mac Software.

MacBook Pro 15" Late 2011

2.2 GHz Intel Core i7

8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4

[Jim Curtis]

OK, I just updated a 10.7.4 partition, loaded up the new AJA Adobe Driver and Kona Control Panel.  I have a couple jobs this week and I think I'll give the whole schmear a shakedown.  I'll let you know what I encounter.

MacPro3,1 32G RAM, 10.7.4, CS6 PP (all updates), ATTO R680 RAID5, mostly working with ProRes, XDCam EX and HD footage.

[ExactImage]

I'm also getting this problem on a Mac Pro with Lion, but so far not with Snow Leopard. 

What I AM seeing is that H264 exports never complete, although the file seems complete, the temp file is still there and the export sits at 100% with 00:00:00:00 left.  *really frustrating* !

The same sequence exports perfectly to DVD (on the Mac) andto H264 on Windows.  Arggh!

[needles27]

Does it make a difference if you are running MPE with hardware on/off?  Are you on 10.7.4?

[Jim Curtis]

Jim Curtis wrote:

OK, I just updated a 10.7.4 partition, loaded up the new AJA Adobe Driver and Kona Control Panel.  I have a couple jobs this week and I think I'll give the whole schmear a shakedown.  I'll let you know what I encounter.

MacPro3,1 32G RAM, 10.7.4, CS6 PP (all updates), ATTO R680 RAID5, mostly working with ProRes, XDCam EX and HD footage.

I worked on a spot yesterday with no issues.  Something just occured to me.  I did not update the Nvidia Quadro 4000 for Mac driver from the 10.6.8 version on my Lion test partition. 

Why don't one or all of you install that temporarily, and see if you get relief?