Problems with exporting my video. "Error code 39"

[tuxyx]

This is a little bit of both a bug report and discussion, but I put it under bug report because that's the closest it's going to get about this topic.

The known issue of NVIDIA and Premiere Pro not working together and crashing has been causing me more issues than just crashing. I first ran into error code 39, then it started giving me other errors that I don't exactly remember what they said, though it exported 1 video 3 times when I clicked export once, and all of the videos were corrupt files. I also ran into this problem last night while trying to export the same video, waiting around 10 minutes for the 100% to go away and give me the notification that it had been exported, but I got tired of waiting, tried canceling, and Premiere crashed.

Does anyone have any possible solutions to this?

[Richard29097906hhq1]

Guys. Its been more than one month and nobody from Adobe didnt even care to respond. I found a way. Switching to Davinci. I have enough of Adobe. This is the way! Peace

[Mafost]

Just cleared the media cache on Premiere Pro and then tied exporting ProRes instead of h624, no luck. This error says:

"Error Compiling Movie

I/O Error

Exporter returned bad result.

Writing with exporter: Apple ProRes MXF OP1a

Selector 17

Error Code 14."

This was after the Error Code 39 trying to export as h264.

[Mafost]

After clearing the cache, and selecting a new drive to save to, I now successfully exported without error to h.264.

[Thomas29528760m05k]

Thanks for the advice: Clearing the media cache and switching to software encoding works. Having said that, H.264 seems a lousy codec for VR video. Is there anyone out there who can give me the best settings for exporting VR video? I have a 35min video and I need a reasonable file size (right now, I have 17 GB with mp4 format and H.264 codec, but the res is lousy, compared to the original GoPro raw footage)

[MyerPj]

Good going @Mafost .

YouTube will take ProRes files, and I've heard the end file that people see turns out better than when using h.264. 

I uploaded one a few months ago for an old client, in ProRes, and it looks pretty good. I used some 3/4" footage from c1984 - transfered to ProRes and upscaled and tweaked by Topaz Video AI. And then some stock footage.

https://youtu.be/JfVjLcl0gXE

ProRes is considered to be 'visually lossless' and it's really easy on the editing system. So, you get good performance, while editing.

Try the export again in ProRes, if you have time. This time on the Format, select "QuickTime" rather than the MXF OP1a version you used. Then on the Preset, select either Apple ProRes 422 LT (or Proxy - for a smaller file size)

[jwynters_writer]

Hey. Please forgive me for I'm still learning Premiere Pro. You said you cleared the cache, and then it worked. What exactly do you mean by that and how do you do it?

[MyerPj]

h.264 is good for phones and memory sticks and YT does fine with them, but ProRes is a much better editing format and it is considered 

'visually lossless' so you get better quality from it also at the expense of bigger file sizes. I use ProRes LT or even Proxy finding the quality good for me and the file sizes are not a massive.

h.264 compresses really well, thus it is used on phones, drones, etc. But they tax the computer much more than ProRes and they are a lossy format. 

[William2958847204do]

Not sure if anyone is still having this issue, but I found that I was getting the error only when exporting with "Match Source-Adaptive High Bitrate" selected. I was able to successfully export my project by just selecting "High Quality 1080p HD." Hope this helps if anyone's still having trouble!

[Travel YouTuber]

So I've been getting this message as well with a recent video that I've been trying to export. I have it as an HEVC (H.265) however, so h.264 isn't the problem. What I have discovered is that my hard drive is near full capacity with only 116 GB available (before exporting the over 1 hour long 5K video) and I just didn't realize that my hard drive was that full before. I'm no expert, but I read one time that in order for premiere pro to export a video successfully, it needs double the space on the drive that it's exporting to then what the finished video would be. My finished video is going to be slightly over 60 GB... I only have 116 GB of space available... there it is.

When Premiere Pro exports a video it needs space on the hard drive that it's exporting the video onto... or so I've read in the past. I haven't had this problem in a while... I've used Premiere Pro for 3 straight years on a nearly daily basis, but I do recall running into this issue before thinking something more serious was going on when in all reality, I just needed to clear up space on my hard drive, or write the video to an external hard drive so that there is enough space for Premiere Pro to work with.

So... With that said... I'm using an external hard drive with 2.6 TB of free space. That should do the trick. 3% done at the moment, so I'll have to check 7 hours from now as this project is massive in size. By the way, you guys should try exporting in H.265 rather than H.264. Videos get exported a lot quicker that way. I've done it successfully at H.265 for a few months on multiple videos at this point at 5k 60fps so I really don't feel like that's the issue.

Once again, try checking your available space on the drive that you're wanting to save the finished video on. It's possible that the recent updates have forced Premiere Pro to require more available space on the drive that you're saving the file to... but... I really don't know if that's true or not since I'm not an expert... but I am experienced and I feel really confident that this is the issue that many of you are facing. Others have reported that selecting a different drive has solved the problem for them, and I'd be dumbfounded if that didn't solve the problem for me. If you don't have a seperate drive to save a project on, or if you can't free up some space on your computer, then I suggest to invest in an external hard drive for any situation like this that you come across in the future. Plus, if you're going to be editing a lot of video in the long term, an external hard drive can be very usefull.

[Travel YouTuber]

Update... it worked! The video has successfully uploaded with no error 39 message. Once again... no adjustments were made to the export settings. The solution is to either save the video to a different drive, or free up more space on the drive.

[Lindsey29630428ygj5]

Same.  I have spent HOURS on one video and cannot get it.  The first time it exported and uploaded but there was no sound.  Now it will not even finish exporting.  It shows 100% and then flips to an error.  I have watched all kind of YouTube videos for help.  Why does my video play fine on premier pro after editing, but not export and play?  So frustrating.  Any ideas?

[MyerPj]

Did you try exporting to a different format, like ProRes, of which you can then make h.264 transcodes using something like Shuttle Encoder:

https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

[Brantley29714143e2zm]

I changed the export location and that helped me with this issue. 

[Michael29763593q0qu]

My movie I'm trying to render is about 4 hours long and rendered at 4k. I've rendered it already at lower resolution without error. I'd really like to render it at 4k though. I'm not sure what i can do next. Maybe there is a way to make 4k but lower quality or bitrate or something??? It gave the error code sometime after it already reached 100% Thanks for any help i can get!

-----the text says:-----

Error compiling movie.

export error

error finishing encode.

writing with exporter: H.264

writing to file D:\movie.mp4

writing file type: H264

Around timecode: 04:08:31:16

Component: H.264 of type exporter

selector: 9

error code: 39

[kglad]

is this a premiere pro question?

[George24334722tdfe]

Peace Nathan

I received this error recently. I spent hours troubleshooting and finally found a solution

The issue I had is that my harddrive/storage was full. I deleted some files and the file exported successfully. Right click your harddrive and select properties(windows) and make sure you have enough space for the new exported file to save on the harddrive. I recommend freeing up double the space of the new file.

Let me know if this works for you. Happy Editing

[Michael Grenadier]

actually, it's recommended that you keep at least 10% free space on all drives and a minimum of 20% on your startup drive.  It's really important that you monitor the available space on any drives you are working with.  It's very easy to miss this and although the operating system should automatically warn you when you're running out of disk space, not sure any of them do...    If a drive gets too full, the entire drive can get corrupted and it's possible to lose all the data...  And some apps will add caches and other files behind the scenes and it's not always possible to control this behavior besides checking the available drive space, particularly on your startup drive on a regular basis (like every day!).  

On the Mac, there's an app called Tech Tool Pro that if memory surves me, will allow you to set a minimum free disk space warning...  can be a life saver.   Don't know if there's anything equivalent on windows.  

[tvamsterdam]

For me this error code 39 in Encoder came up when I wanted to replace a large file in a large edit. After reading all reactions in this topic I cleared all media cache files and removed any file with the same name so when I started up Premiere Pro again, it would ask me the proper file. It had another name and that was no problem: problem solved. So in my case it was a question of cleaning out adresses from the caches. 

[Rylan29867350f5bj]

Having the same problem, I'm using a PC, file type I've been using is h.264 however after Clearing the media cache its working fine.

Good luck!

[Latin America30170476jfpu]

Man! You're amazing! I had the same issue long ago and right now. This worked!! Thanks!

[Jack304215478pj6]

Could this be due to low space on the hard drive? I got the error, deleted a few things to free up some space and it worked. It looks like you need at least double the space of the exported file size on your disk for it to fully export. This worked for me.

[holly3076895214u1]

Im getting the same - its now causing me issues within my business - I spent 2 hours with a remote worker yesterday trying to fix a different issue (they couldnt fix it and then I fixed it myself in 2 minutes flat by googling) now Im getting this and its wasting so much of my time . truly fed up

[holly3076895214u1]

Thank you !!!! Just checked my data drive and low and behold it's almost full - 

[gamerlearner]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions for this frustrating problem. In the end, for me, (Win10), it was as simple as not having enough free space left on my drive. As soon as I cleared ~70GB worth of files, it started working. (I was even able to update to the current version). Good luck

[mayjain]

Hi @nathan29382163846n  ,

Sorry for the problem. Was this resolved ? Please share Premiere Pro version details also. It will be good if you can share your media/project files here https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/share.html. We will investigate and report back.

Thanks,
Mayjain