Abobe Media Encoder freezes when rendering my video

[thumperkat]

I tried to render through media encoder and after a long 15 hours of rendering my hour and four minutes long video it just stopped working with the time remaining still displaying. no errors.

I next tried to do it with after effects and the same thing happened. It stops at random places not the same place.

What should I do? it is so frustrating because it takes so long just to get stuck..

[smrpix]

What are your system specs?
What version of the Adobe software are you using?
What kind of source material are you using (including video and audio codecs)?
What are your render settings?

[poisondeathray]

Also,

Does it only occur with that video specifically ? Or does problem occur with all source videos and projects

If it affects everything - Besides system specs, check your system temps . If overclocked, try stock settings . Might be a good idea to tun some system stability tests, including memory

[thumperkat]

Amd a10-6800k
8 GB RAM
Geforce gtx 970
Windows 10 64-bit

This is the only time it has done this but this is also double the size of any othr video i rendered before.

Using lagarith lossless codec. What else do you need to know?

[SameSelf]

That is a major downer and I know exactly how you feel. I used to have this problem as well when I was a heavy PP user (I forgot all about it until I saw your post). It was random. Infuriating. And tbh, I think an Adobe bug. I ended up reinstalling everything from scratch, including Windows, and making sure only the bare minimum was installed (e.g. made sure to avoid codec hell by only installing the exact codecs I needed). I also upgraded some key parts like the psu and cpu heatsink because a 15 hour encode is a loooooong time to max out the cpu on a consumer machine (as opposed to a Xeon workstation with ECC ram). I would reboot the machine just before encoding and make sure nothing else was running. Clear caches. Sometimes I would chop up the video in pieces and stitch them together afterwards. Sometimes the encode would crash at the exact same spot every time, and the only solution was to rebuild the timeline and suddenly the problem was gone. So as you can see, it can be very hard finding a solution and sometimes workarounds are the only avenue. It may be related to Lagarith. Try using UTvideo or maybe even uncompressed AVI if you have the hdd space. Ultimately, I quit using PP except for very specific tasks.

[poisondeathray]

Stops at random places suggests system problems. You need to do the stability tests, memory tests, temperature checks, etc...

Stops at specific place everytime suggests issue with source video or some manipulation or filter combination related to that point on the timeline

SameSelf suggested chopping up video; along the same lines, many people with heavy renders (not just Adobe, any software especially CG) use image sequences . You can net render of multiple machines and if one or more fail you still have usable work . But for video - even if you divide up to multiple sections - if any fails, that entire segment will be unreadable. You only lose 1 frame for each node with image sequences

[thumperkat]

Thank you guys! I chopped up the video and rendered it through AE using logarith lossless codec. Then i stitched it up and rendered it through ME. My display went black after it was done but it did finish. I do think it is some heatsink issue ill look into that. My case can fit 8 more fans so i will plug in a few more.

I will keep image sequencing in mind and try it next time see of that works better
Thank you for your help!

[thumperkat]

Also, i did reinstall everything from scratch before and it still happened till i chopped it up.

[SameSelf]

Glad to hear you found a workaround. If you are not exporting from PP/AE as the final encode, then I can vouch for poisondeathray's advice to export image sequences (e.g. TIFF). They take up a lot of space, but they offer the HUGE benefit that if the application crashes mid-export, then you can just restart at the point it crashed versus from the beginning when using a non-image codec like Lagarith. TIFFs are inefficient in terms of compression, so my preferred image format is openEXR. The only problem is PP does not support EXRs readily which is another reason I no longer use PP for much, but ffmpeg and x264 readily support reading in image sequences. The one thing to keep in mind is image sequences like TIFFs are RGB, not YUV. However, if you are working in a compositing program like AE, they typically operate in RGB space anyway, so a YUV->RGB conversion is unavoidable.

If your display went black, make sure you have all power saving options disabled on your PC including screen savers. That can play havoc with an encode.

[poisondeathray]

TIFFs are inefficient in terms of compression, so my preferred image format is openEXR. The only problem is PP does not support EXRs readily

CC supports EXR natively, and there is a free plugin for older PP versions from fnord (I think minimum CS5) . The ProEXR version for AE has been made free now too by the developer

Another popular options instead of TIFF is PNG, which offers lossess compression, supports 8 and 16bit and are very compatible in all programs. EXR is really only supported in VFX pipelines. Most "common" programs won't support it

[SameSelf]

Cool. I am not sure when, but AE, which the OP is using, has been able to read/write openEXR for a while now. Good to see that PP CC now supports EXR natively (not that I will ever pay Adobe for CC). As for the EXR plugin for previous versions, there is only one, and I don't recall it being free, otherwise I would have tried it (unless that changed since I last investigated it). PP pre-CC is really the only program with which I have encountered support problems for openEXR. I have a lot vfx in my videos which is probably the reason I settled on it vs TIFF. I chose TIFF when I first started using image sequences. I can't recall the exact reasons I switched to openEXR, but I think it was mostly file size. While storage space is not an issue, playback in the NLE/compositing/finishing program can be. I know PNG is an option, but I was hesitant to mention it because I seem to recall it being even more inefficient than TIFF. It has been a while since I last tested all the image sequence formats.

[poisondeathray]

As for the EXR plugin for previous versions, there is only one, and I don't recall it being free, otherwise I would have tried it (unless that changed since I last investigated it).

As I said, the dev made it completely free now. About a year ago the PP plugin was made free too

http://fnordware.blogspot.ca/2017/01/proexr-is-free.html

[SameSelf]

Well, fo' shizzle! Just downloaded it and sho' nuf, I can now read in my EXR seqs and it is listed in the export options. Need to do some more testing, but it looks like I can add PP back to my workflows. Although, I have gotten über comfortable with DR as an NLE.

Thanks for sharing!