Lion and Cuda

[Marcus Durham]

Upgraded my Mac Pro to Lion with a Quadro 4000. Seemed to go well. Was prompted to upgrade my Cuda when it was all complete.

However although Premiere loaded, it refused to play any video in Cuda mode.

I removed CS5.5 and reinstalled. and I reinstalled Cuda.

It now seemed to work, but only when it felt like it.

If you close Premiere it now seems to hang, if you restart that also hangs. Basically a solid application has become rather flakey.

Anyone had a similar experience?

Thanks.

[Marcus Durham]

8 hours spent on this last night, and I thought it best to share in case anyone else experiences the problem.

In the end there appeared to be two separate problems. Mercury Hardware playback was broken and something was crashing whatever part of Premiere handled Quicktime (even if you were in software mode). Premiere would simply suddenly decide that it didn't want to have anything to do with anything ending in .mov.

I first of all tried reinstalling CS5.5. That made no difference. I then started looking at the drivers and found some people had experienced success with Snow Leopard Quadro drivers. Do not do this. It broke the Lion install (wouldn't boot).

Got into "safe mode". Removed CS5 and then reinstalled Lion, updated the CUDA driver for a second time. Then I rebooted, followed by a auto update of Lion to the latest version.

Then after another load of rebooting I installed CS5.5 again followed by the updates. Then another reboot.

I now had a working setup. Projects would load, CUDA was working.

However one project was still failing to load in and indeed was causing Premiere to hang halfway through loading. So I deleted all of the cache files and lo and behold the project loaded in and Premiere seems fine.

I'm still not quite sure what fixed the initial CUDA problem but I guess retracing my steps and reinstalling Lion probably helped. It also showed me that if Premiere is kicking up, deleting the project cache files might solve any crashes.

The one thing I do know is that paying extra for CS5.5 DVD's and Lion on a USB stick was a very very wise decision as I had everything to hand when I needed to restore.

I haven't used Premiere on Lion that much yet, but my one comment is that the slightly laggy feeling that it suffered from when shuttling across video compared to the PC version seems to have gone. Far more responsive. Hoorah!