Warp Stabilizer on multiple clips, or/while trying to save the project = PP locks up

[Jonathan83746]

I've been a CC subscriber for years, working heavily on the photo side the past few years, with only occasional video projects nowadays, and I am baffled at how PP is supposed to be a stable program for working professionals.

With a brand new M3 Max MacBook Pro, PP has locked up after trying to use warp stabilizer on a dozen clips (4K from Canon mirrorless).  It's simply choking and doing nothing, with no frames being analyzed and none of the timers going down.  Is the app not smart enough to analyze one clip after another and get it done? 

Worse, I try to save the project, and the save dialog box just sits there. I can press cancel, and go back to editing, but the dialog box stays up on screen because the UI is borked.  I try to close out of PP and it asks then if I want to save, and I say yes, and then those dialog boxes are stuck on screen, without any saving happening. 

This is SO basic.  I'm not even complaining about the memory leak I had to deal with last week before this where PP and AME would just eat up 100gb of RAM and crash. I managed to get that part of the project done, and am literally just trying to consolidate some b-roll clips to export, and PP can't do it. 

[Ann Bens]

This is not a bug, but how WS operates.

Best is to use WS just on a few clips instead of a bulk.

WS uses all your CPU resources when trying to stabilize in bulk, hence the lockup.

[Jonathan83746]

Thanks Ann.

The fact that I can so easily lock up and basically crash PP is crazy to me. Basically, there is no "traffic director" in the app to manage what effects, etc tell the CPU to do is a recipe for disaster, which is exactly how and why I can bork the software.

[R Neil Haugen]

Realistically, the computational load of Warp is well above even the load of  the "Neat" video noise remover plugin. It's massive.

And you're trying to apply it to a large bunch of clips ... at once. And surprised things bog down.

Well ... if they were short, several second clips, it might work this way. In my experience, if you're talking clips a minute to ten minutes each, a dozen clips, it's going to     g      o            s     o         s           l          o       w       l     y        .       .      .   

[Jonathan83746]

Thanks for the reply, Neil. I am curious how WS works, because for one of the clips, the original analysis through stabilization wasn't possible (and gave a warning to say so), and then when I changed the settings, the motion it thought was as close to stabilized as possible was scaling the image to ~20% and rotating it 90 degrees. It's almost as if the camera was bumped even though the frame looked and stayed pretty still, but WS tried to infer trajectory/motion that never happened.

Anyway, back to the topic: I don't expect WS to magically go fast(er). I would be happy if the behavior is that the total time to complete WS on multiple clips is the sum of time it takes for each individual clip, plus a second or two for each new clip to get started. (E.g., with greater / multi-threaded processing power, I will presume that the algorithm processing one clip can use up the CPU efficiently, and especially because of other memory considerations, don't necessarily expect it to work on multiple 4K clips at once).

What I get instead, though, is that multiple clips apparently fight for CPU time and attention, and none of them progress at all; meanwhile, PP completely freaks out, and can't even save the project file (see screenshot attachment in the orginal post). This seems broken/bugged to me. 

[R Neil Haugen]

I can't answer as to the specifics of how it's coded. Only, from experience, how it works in practice.

There are a number of controls in the Warp effect in the ECP, and Ann is probably much better at explaining all those than I am. But ... you do have a major say in how it works, and if you do a lot of Warp, you should learn those as practically, solidly as possible.

Warp may not play well with multiple instances of itself ... in my personal experience, applying it to a bunch of clips simutaneously never went well. So I apply it only at great need, and separate out the section of a clip that actually needs it to be used.

And then apply it, and after it finishes analysis, I do an immediate render & replace to 'full'

 DI quality, typcally for my work ProRes422. I can "restore unrendered" if I need to change later, but this way ... working that project, and exporting from it, are always stable and solid.

[Jonathan83746]

That's good insight and a really cool peek at your workflow! I'll keep that in mind for my next project.

In the meanwhile, I'm flagging a bug for Adobe developers: agnostic from the fact that Warp Stabilizer is the cause/pathway, the red flag and issue that I'm raising is the case that a user can consistently and repeatedly make Premiere lock up / freeze up, to the point that a Force Quit (on Mac) is necessary.  This should not be the case, in my opinion.  If this was merely a performance issue, then PP would gracefully keep chugging away, albeit very slowly, as you flag Neil.  

But, as Ann notes, the user can cause all the CPU resources to be used up, and then PP locks up.  I'm open to be wrong, but to me, this is inherently a design problem and a software development bug.  

[MyerPj]

I usually warp in AE, and use a DI codec to render out. Warp puts a huge amount of data into a PP project, and I just don't like that. I've suggested the data goes to a sidecar file, but that's simply how I would do it. Plus be selective on what you warp. It was never meant for just throwing a whole clip in and getting a now stable clip, that's really for the shooting side.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello @Jonathan83746,

Thanks for the message.

Is the app not smart enough to analyze one clip after another and get it done? 

You have a feature request for more intelligent processing for Warp Stabilizer, mainly when operating with multiple clips. Thanks for that. I will move this post to the Ideas forum because I appreciate that request.

I try to save the project, and the save dialog box just sits there. I can press cancel, and go back to editing, but the dialog box stays up on screen because the UI is borked.  I try to close out of PP and it asks then if I want to save, and I say yes, and then those dialog boxes are stuck on screen, without any saving happening.

I have not seen that issue yet. Thanks for reporting. The System Settings > Privacy and Security permissions on macOS can sometimes be set incorrectly for installed and connected drives. That is worth a look. Let me know if that helps.

I'm not even complaining about the memory leak I had to deal with last week before this where PP and AME would just eat up 100gb of RAM and crash.

I have heard of others experiencing that issue, but I am not sure why it occurs. I suspect it might be due to updating an existing project to a significant new version. Is that the case with your project? I work around that issue by rebuilding old projects rather than updating them. I also use the Productions workflow, which keeps project files agile and less likely to cause problems like corruption (which, in turn, can cause a memory leak).

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@Jonathan83746 wrote:

I am baffled at how PP is supposed to be a stable program for working professionals.'ve been a CC subscriber for years, working heavily on the photo side the past few years, with only occasional video projects nowadays, and I am baffled at how PP is supposed to be a stable program for working professionals.

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Editors constantly work to optimize a smooth workflow. The key, they say, is to ensure you are working with the proper hardware, using optimized media (an editing codec like ProRes and properly treated Photoshop files), the latest version of the software, and being aware of the workflow's limitations and expectations. I leverage smart rendering to make my workflow even more reliable. Let me know how I can help make your workflow more reliable.

I will upvote your feature request. Sorry for the frustration.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Jonathan83746]

Thanks Kevin for the detailed and thoughtful reply.  The categorization that this is a very whole-hearted feature request for handling Warp Stabilizer (and honestly, any kind of processing) gracefully and efficiently for multiple clips makes sense -- and based on what I've seen for workarounds that have come up over the years, would be appreciated by many.

> I have not seen that issue yet. Thanks for reporting. The System Settings > Privacy and Security permissions on macOS can sometimes be set incorrectly for installed and connected drives. That is worth a look. Let me know if that helps.

Those permissions are set, and the project is able to save normally at all other times, but just borked with those stuck project save dialog boxes (as seen in the screenshot attachment) always coinciding with when PP is also in a state of being stuck supposedly processing WS on multiple clips (but in actuality, no frames are being analyzed or progressing on any of the clips).

> I have heard of others experiencing that issue, but I am not sure why it occurs. I suspect it might be due to updating an existing project to a significant new version. Is that the case with your project?

This is a fresh+recent install of PP on a new computer, with a new project file (corresponding with the same PP version freshly installed), so that isn't the context for my specific memory leak.

> Editors constantly work to optimize a smooth workflow. The key, they say, is to ensure you are working with the proper hardware, using optimized media (an editing codec like ProRes and properly treated Photoshop files), the latest version of the software, and being aware of the workflow's limitations and expectations

The Adobe PP devs shouldn't lose sleep over my particular case of a possibly memory leak,  because I'll take some fault in being quite sloppy with my workflow -- I'm still learning how to work with 4K files and CLog with grading applied, etc, and almost certainly I did not work optimally for those initial files/sequences of my project.

For my b-roll, though, all I simply wanted to do was apply WS to clips in a sequence (no other effects, grading, editing, etc), but unfortunately encountered the issue I described.  So, again, my appreciation for making this productive as a feature request to be considered!