The H264 Codec in Premiere Pro CS6 Creates Files with Variable Frame Rates

[poisondeathray]

Can you describe what is "complex" about that section ?

Perhaps you can break it down and prerender some effects & layers separately for that section and renest them - if your setup cannot handle it all at once. ie. Divide and conquer

Voukoder is unlikely to help with your current problem - as your problem seems probably more related to MPE , GPU, drivers, or inadequate HW

[poisondeathray]

Yes, I knew about that affiliation, but it has always reduced quality first time around in my experience. It's very complicated. It does a great job of smart rendering or using lossless if you re-use the videos it creates in another project, but that first export is not good. In fact it usually results in floating foreground noise. I have a feeling it's because it uses the previews despite selecting otherwise

If the reason for the deterioration is using previews - you can setup previews to use a lossless codec instead of the default (usually mpeg2 for HD sequence)

This is also another reason why people frequently clear the cache - it clears the previews so there is no chance of using them and it forces a re-render for export

[Alan Romain]

Thanks, I'll look into that. I was going to select the higher quality option for previews today, but changed my mind. I've been clearing the cache regularly lately. Quite a marathon and I'm running out of steam.

[Alan Romain]

Sorry, I missed one of your comments. Complex: One Image has grain effect, Brightness contrast and Gamma, and it is being zoomed out, then another image (newspaper) with transparency starts to move over the first image, and that's where the RAM goes to 98% and the CPU drops to 13%, it continues like that for about 30 seconds, then the error, premiere has to close. I know how I can get around it, but since it was exporting before 80% of the time, I'd like to see if I can get my system back to that state. Thanks for the Voukoder comment.

[Alan Romain]

I just read this statement in online: Incorrect settings in Adobe Premiere Pro can also cause the Mercury Playback Engine to malfunction. It doesn't elaborate, but it got me wondering if this is the problem.

[poisondeathray]

since it was exporting before 80% of the time, I'd like to see if I can get my system back to that state.

Aspiring for an 80% success rate...seems a bit sad... I wouldn't be happy with anything less that 100% success rate.

It was inconsistent to begin with... but the increased frequency of problems seem to coincide with that GPU driver update

I just read this statement in online: Incorrect settings in Adobe Premiere Pro can also cause the Mercury Playback Engine to malfunction. It doesn't elaborate, but it got me wondering if this is the problem.

To vague to be useful

Incorrect settings in any program can cause malfunction

[Alan Romain]

I'm much the same PDR, I always shoot for 100%, but this has been a huge investment of time that I don't have. Once I have enough money to buy a new system, I will reassess. For now, I may have to settle for 80% because my GTX 1050 is too powerful for this old computer. It has been problematic from the start, but it was the only one available to replace my 470 which worked like a charm with this system. In any case, I have spent the entire day reading info on alternative drivers. There are only two NVidia Studio drivers for this GPU, and both are for Windows 10. But reading the release notes, it does say they can be used with Windows 7. All other drivers are Game Ready. Nvidia is overrated anyway in my opinion. I doubt that this is a driver issue however, because the GPU doesn't get used at all during export. zero percent.

[poisondeathray]

I'm much the same PDR, I always shoot for 100%, but this has been a huge investment of time that I don't have. Once I have enough money to buy a new system, I will reassess. For now, I may have to settle for 80% because my GTX 1050 is too powerful for this old computer. It has been problematic from the start, but it was the only one available to replace my 470 which worked like a charm with this system. In any case, I have spent the entire day reading info on alternative drivers. There are only two NVidia Studio drivers for this GPU, and both are for Windows 10. But reading the release notes, it does say they can be used with Windows 7. All other drivers are Game Ready. Nvidia is overrated anyway in my opinion. I doubt that this is a driver issue however, because the GPU doesn't get used at all during export. zero percent.

One of the major "selling points" about "Mercury Playback Engine" was certain operations were GPU accelerated - such as some effects, scaling. If you're zooming out, MPE is being used (or supposed to be)

If your GPU is not being used - at all- maybe that's the problem. Some communication or compatibility issue with your GPU and MPE causing the crash

[Alan Romain]

Very interesting PDR. Not only zooming out, the newspaper is also rotating and moving laterally. Of course, I've had other videos with even more effects and transitions and layers and they've always exported, mind you, most of these were interlaced exports. Strangely, of the hundreds of comments and suggestions I have read on export crashes, not one person including the Adobe people have mentioned the points you've made. All I can do is try a few different GPU drivers and see what happens. I don't have the technical background to diagnose the problem any further, nor the money to pay an expert to figure it out. Frankly, I don't think a driver is going to fix it. Of those hundreds of people trying new drivers, I think only one found this to be a solution. I think it's probably a BIOS issue, but again, that's out of my league. If I'm going to spend any money, it would be to have an expert check out my bios settings. There's only one tech in the entire region who knows anything about this.

[Alan Romain]

I may even try an old driver from 2016 when that GPU was first released, albeit I purchased mine in 2020 I believe.

[poisondeathray]

I think it's probably a BIOS issue, but again, that's out of my league.

Unlikely , otherwise you would expect programs be affected, not just PP



Crash during export (multiple type of export formats), but not crash during preview is interesting observation, because they both go through the same initial pathways . To be clear on "preview" - I mean you advance frame by frame on the sequence and you have program monitor set to full quality. If there was a MPE problem I would expect a crash in this situation too (without exporting or encoding), because MPE is being used

A long GOP sequence export, such as typical AVC /MP4 will consume more memory than an I-frame format export (Such as image sequence, or AVC-Intra). In the former case, multiple frames are held in memory to be analyzed for temporal compression . I mentioned image sequence before but not sure if you tried it. If you don't like image sequences, then AVC-Intra, or DNxHR/DNxHD or cineform are valid alternative I-frame "video" formats

And it might be worth trying voukoder anyways because you're really out of other options

(I know you want to get back to 80% success rate using the internal AVC export, but it's worth doing these tests , because they might provide more information on what the real underlying problem is. If one works, then that provides more clues to help narrow down the root cause)

[JN-]

"A long GOP sequence export, such as typical AVC /MP4 will consume more memory than an I-frame format"

The supplied sample, although it's long GOP it's a nice short one. I appreciate u are speaking in general terms. ffmpeg's default of 250 can be problematic, so if the OP uses voudouker best to be specific re: GOP.

"Problem Section Exported to H.264.mp4" ...
N = 12. M = 3. [ IBBPBBPBBPBPI ]. Mini-GOP = [ IBBP ]. Stats: I = [12.00%]. B = [56.00%]. P = [32.00%]. Input file = [ Problem Section Exported to H.264.mp4 ]. Codec name = [ h264 ].

Mediainfo output of ... "Problem Section Exported to H.264.mp4"
Format settings, Reference frames : 3 frames
Format settings, GOP : M=3, N=12
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Alan Romain]

I'm having a hard time following, although I understand your suggestions PDR, which I will try. JN, I'm not sure what you are referring to. I submitted the crash log last week among other things, don't know if it was received or even where to look for it.

In any event, the sequence is set to progressive, and the rendering has never crashed Premiere. Only the export does that, and only that short segment with the effects and transitions going on. However, if I compare the CPU and Memory usage of exports using Mercury and Main Concept Engine, there's a huge difference, both in rendering and exporting. With the MC engine, both meters are stable as mentioned in the 70 to 80% range for all segments. With the Mecury E the CPU and Memory meters fluctuate allot, and then the moment the complex part starts, the CPU drops to nothing and the RAM goes up to 98 %. As mentioned, I am using the same codecs and same settings when exporting from either engine, yet the exports using the MC engine have some blur. This may not be the case with CS5.5 or CS6, but I will figure that out this week.

[Alan Romain]

The meters react similarly rendering as they do exporting, but not quite as extreme for rendering when it come to Mercury. The Ram doesn't max out, but it's up there, and the CPU is not quite as low during that complex part.

[Alan Romain]

I just tried to export that problematic section after uninstalling all Nvidia drivers, leaving only the Microsoft Standard VGA driver to control the display adapter. The exact same behavior and crash. Meters Erratic then CPU usage goes down, Ram up then 30 seconds later crash. Doesn't seem to matter which driver, but I will try a couple of drivers that I've never tried later just to be sure.

[poisondeathray]

Long gop (in a nutshell) is temporal compression - frames are not necessarily individually complete, but instead rely on data from other frames for predictions. Only I (IDR) frames are complete by themselves

So if you have a memory problem: the idea is instead of using more frames (or partial frames, the residuals) in memory for the encoding process, you use individual complete frames, 1 at a time. The GOP size is 1. The setting is the "key frame distance" in the export settings, set it to 1. And it's not just the final uncompressed frames before exporting for the encoding process - all the effects and operations beforehand that go into making those frames in a GOP are partially accumulated; So both system memory and GPU memory , as well as memory release play a role too . Eitherway, intra encoding will reduce memory consumption at the expense of encoding efficiency (you will need higher bitrates for a given level of quality) . But the point of this is not to tweak a final render - it's to see if your system is able to complete without crashing with that single adjustment - if it does, then you have more clues that the problem is memory process related

[JN-]

I am simply suggesting that when u export using Voukouder to ideally make sure to use a shorter gop than defaults gop, use for example 60.

Exporting using voukouder is something u should do now if u haven't already done so as it bypasses mainconcept codecs etc.

I know nothing about Premier Pro, I use Vegas Pro, which also uses MC, but have never heard of any vfr getting exported.

With all due respect I think u are overthinking a lot.

1. Try a voukouder export and see if its vfr. If it’s cfr then job done. Use it instead of MC.

2. Try a trial version of PP, assuming u are not already using the latest version. See if it’s vfr.

3. If the latest version of PP export is cfr and u cannot use it then the suggestion in post #20 by _AI_ is the way to go.

“If you have project edited already just replace old DV avis for the new fixed DVavi files, not sure what Premiere uses for it. If you have DV avis chopped in clips, then you have to fix them in a batch and then force Premiere to read them (same names) from different directory, or you replace them.”

Equivalent in Vegas Pro would be … do lossless (or Prores HQ) conversion of dodgy original files to cfr then use “”replace” files within project.

4. Output complete project to lossless / Prores HQ then convert output to h264 using handbrake or any ffmpeg based utility. Perhaps u have already tried this?

One other thought on all of this. My ConformFR util only converts hevc and h264 codecs so is of no use for avi's. I often use export to Prores HQ as export for dodgy files as although its not lossless it holds up great and final output even with this Intermediate is good enough. I assume that your nle can use Prores?

[Alan Romain]

I appreciate both opinions and will try and follow your advice, one piece at a time. It all takes time, and I am putting in long days. To be fair to poisondeathray JN, he has been following this thread religiously from start to finish, which hasn't been easy, because we've gone from talking about VFR to talking about other technical issues that surfaced as a result of conducting endless experiments. For instance, at some point along the way, it was no longer possible to export a busy 50 second section of the timeline because PP would crash. This section btw has no standard avi footage, rather photos with effects and transparencies. As part of my troubleshooting, I have uninstalled PP CS6 and gone back to CS5 to see if this export problem still occurs, which it does. And btw, as both of you have indicated, the exports to Premiere's H264 are always CFR, so there may have been something going on with my CS6 install, albeit someone did confirm that the export showing VFR did in fact have frames that were 30 fps compared to 29.97 for the rest. I have since explained that I have found a solution to the H264 VFR issue, even in CS6, which is to export through Quicktime to H264, giving me CFR. So the discussion over the past 1 1/2 weeks has been around this crash problem exporting the section with the images. Again, I will follow your suggestions the best way I can.

[Alan Romain]

BTW, exporting to Quicktime's H264 and DNxHD both result in crashes. I will try adjusting the GOP to 1 keyframe and also to 60 keyframes and see what the results are.

[JN-]

BTW, exporting to Quicktime's H264 and DNxHD both result in crashes. I will try adjusting the GOP to 1 keyframe and also to 60 keyframes and see what the results are.

My 60 gop was in reference to Voukodour only.

[Alan Romain]

OK JN, thanks

[Alan Romain]

By the way, is it recommended to not install 3D Vision with my nvidia drivers.

[Alan Romain]

Another piece of information. Having run CCleaner, it seems that Edge Chromium is always running in the background and there seemed to be no way to turn it off. In fact CCleaner has to force it to quit before running the scan. I subsequently turned everything off in the browser settings such as: "Start up Boost", "Continue running background extensions and apps when Ms Edge is closed" and "Use hardware Acceleration". Also, there are three instances of MS Edge in Services, and these need to be set to Disabled, not Manual in order to prevent Edge from running in the background. If all fails, you can manually turn it off by opening the browser, then clicking on the three dots and choose "Close Microsoft Edge" at the bottom of the list.

[Alan Romain]

I tried exporting to H264 with 1 keyframe and it crashed. I installed Voukoder classic, restarted my computer, opened PP then the moment I clicked on the Voukoder in the export window, the program crashed with the message "Sorry, a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere Pro to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project." Seriously wtf. I'm completely exhausted from all of this and very discouraged. I think my next test before I even re-install CS6 is to remove one stick of RAM at a time and try re-exporting. It's my final option as I see things. It's always the exact same pattern. The CPU meter goes up and down while processing the image with the effects and zoom out, during which time the RAM sits around 60%. Then, the moment this image meets the transparent rotating image with the newspaper, the CPU drops and the RAM starts to climb. The RAM then sits at 98% usage with the CPU around 25% for about 30 seconds then crash.

[JN-]

“ I have since explained that I have found a solution to the H264 VFR issue, even in CS6, which is to export through Quicktime to H264, giving me CFR. So the discussion over the past 1 1/2 weeks has been around this crash problem”

I guess I missed that. So you are now only concerned with the nle issue. Have you reached out to whatever Adobe forum support there is available for PP ?

[Alan Romain]

No, I have read through countless discussions on Adobe forums that talk about crashing during export, and none offer any solutions. The suggestions by Adobe employees are always the same. Uninstall all adobe products, run cleaner, re-install then reinstall the GPU driver. If necessary, reinstall your entire system etc etc.
One person specifically insisted on reinstalling C++ runtime. Not too many mentions of RAM problems, and in my case, given the behavior on the meters that I described, I'm not sure that's the problem either, but short of reinstalling my system which would result in a massive workload reconfiguring programs ect, it's worth a try I suppose. I haven't even mentioned all of the nightmares I have encountered throughout this process, like drivers messing up my system......... It's been a bad nightmare.

[Alan Romain]

BTW, I used the Classic version of Voukoder. Not sure if Voukoder Pro would work with CS5 or CS6.

[JN-]

A lot of times it can be a media issue.

If u can work without crashes with other media most of the time but not with this projects media then that can be a pointer.

[Alan Romain]

JN, thank you

[rgr]

Your file should be 29.97 fps constant.
You can try two things:
1. remux to mkv.
2. use the Fix framerate function of clever FFmpeg-GUI.
Both are fast and maintain quality (streamcopy).


[Attachment 77146 - Click to enlarge]

How does it work technically for VFR? VFR clips are converted to CFR and each frame is retained, but given a fixed time (instead of a variable time)?