how do you render your 4K files?

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Viktor+sloth  wrote hello my dear adobe friends, for years i totally have given up on 4k renders, as it simple just always fails the rendering. 1080p is no problem at all, but bump it up to 4K and it's totally impossible to get out of the system. prior it has not been such a big problem as clients didn't really request it... but now they do! i work with RED files ranging from 4-8K footage in a 4K timeline. Export to a h.264 file in high profile. in full hd: no problems. the computer chews it up and renders super fast. in 4K: the computer slows dramatically down until it's inevitably failing. the error from AME is always about the GPU: Error compiling movie. GPU Render Error Unable to process frame. Writing with exporter: H.264 Writing to file: \\?\D:\Dropbox\film work\loopers\numero russia - march editorial film_2.mp4 Writing file type: H264 Around timecode: 00:00:21:22 - 00:00:22:06 Rendering effect: AE.ADBE FC PRO 2.1 Rendering at offset: 21,880 seconds Component: EffectFilter of type GPUVideoFilter Selector: 9 Error code: -1609629695 So, it's a GPU problem.. but why? i have the GTX 1080 Ti with 12gigs of ram. is this really not enough to render 4k files out? and how do you guys get your 4K files out?

I get this all the time, similarly on a very powerful system, and FilmConvert is always, always, always the primary culprit.  Although Lumetri causes random crashes too, my Error Log proves that FilmConvert has got a serious bug in this area, when hardware acceleration is enabled.

Meantime, Adobe loves passing the blame, when in reality this is a systemic problem of one side never talking to the other.  I have been nagging the New Zealand-based FilmConvert (small) team about this for years, and they haven't budged an inch improving the plug-in (indeed, the version history shows that they haven't made a single change for over two years, which is an eternity in the Adobe Creative Cloud culture).  It might be in the end that some kind of GPU memory leak, or whatever, is something that both sides need to work together on - not one or the other.

And it's a totally unacceptable solution for us to bring our renders to a crawl by permanently throttling down to Software Rendering, making our GPUs essentially worthless.

Try Step 2M below.

Unofficial Premiere Pro Troubleshooting Guide

Have you tried exporting to an internal drive.