Hi all, i have had Premiere Pro CS3 give me an "Unknown error" when trying to export a film using Media Encoder recently. It would almost finish rendering, then pop up with the error notice when I tried exporting to MP4 and WMV. I can confirm that it works exporting to MPEG and I haven't tried any others. Has anyone else had this problem and how do you fix it?

Colin:

We have Premier (CS3 and 1.5) on two different machines. This error occurs from time to time with both systems. We have found that you need to save and close your project. Exit Premier and shut down (don't re-start, actually shut down). Turn the computer back on, open Premier, and then render out your project. Do this every time and you will not see the error again. (at least we have not). The best explanation seems to be that shutting down clears something in some area of the computer that interferes with something related to Premier in someway??????(Ha!) It does work though.

Hope it works for you. Let us know!

Best,

Kevin Fox
AATR Video

Thanks for the advice - I'd never thought about that! I ended up exporting as an mpeg as it was just for a "backup" youtube version. I will keep this (and all the other advice i've gotten on this forum :)) in mind during future projects.

Kevin's method works for me too!

Kevin's method works for me too!

I always do this for big projects. PP CS3 has a significant memory leak and Windows is notorious for them. Starting with a clean boot means your system will start its render with about as pristine a system as possible.

If this doesn't work all the time, suspect your audio codecs. Workaround is to render out the audio in the timeline to a wav file in the same format as the project and replace the original audio with it. It also solves other performance quirks.

For example, I was editing native HDV with a 2-camera multi-cam timeline nested into a timeline with other HDV footage and audio for cutaway shots. When working around in the timeline, the CTI would lag a bit when dragging it around and playback would not start for 2-3 seconds after I pressed play. Once I rendered and replaced the audio, the delays disappeared completely.

sorry to dig this up but i suffer from the same problem. unfortunately Alans workaround did nothing for me :( i can't even render previews in Adobe Premiere.

All attempts of reinstalling etc. have failed as well. this just happened out of the blue

any ideas?

You apparently have bigger problems. I've been there too. My first recommendation would be to search the Adobe site support section for system optimization tips. Recommendations will include using selective startup, not running anti virus software and more. If you're running Vista 32-bit, also investigate using the "3GB switch". Google it for more info. System optimization can help a lot.

The other alternative is more drastic. Uninstalling the software and re-installing it. I've done that too. In fact, I went so far as to blow away the OS and start completely from scratch. For the most part, things have worked well since then.

Without really understanding the technical inner workings of PP I cannot know why but everything tells me that PP loves memory and hates running out of it. Freeing up memory for PP to use will make it happier.

at least i am not alone...

i am trying a fresh installation... thanks for your advice!

well, i've reinstalled my entire system. just to have the very same error yet again :(

i can't render anything. has there been a rather new update for adobe software or windows that can create this error?

I don't think there's been any update for CS3 in a long while, but I haven't checked recently.

If you've reinstalled the OS and software, and have followed all of Adobe's system optimization techniques and still have problems, your trouble might be in the hardware. Memory is a likely culprit. You can removed and reseat the memory, proper precautions observed of course, and try rendering again. If it persists, find some diagnostic tools and run them overnight to see what happens.

I am working with CS4

I've got already 24 hours of memtest behind me as well as 24 hour of prime95 - no errors.

I Really need to finish up my project. When i am rendering a preview in premiere that contains an dynamic link AE composition it also aborts with 'unknown error'. when i click the red X in the lower right corner i get the message 'Time out Rendering dynamic link media'

Is there a specific guide for CS4 in terms of optimizing? My System is running on Win7 x64 with a QuadCore 3.2ghz INtel CPU and 8 GB Ram. I am using this AE Composition for about 2 years now without any problems - it simply just stopped working :(

I had this problem in CS4 and the work around that worked for me was to set up a new user profile in Windows. Log in with that profile and it worked for me. There is also a scrubbing utility on the adobe site that will fix this problem. I will see if I can find it for you but for now try creating a new user on the machine.

Try here as well

Adobe - Adobe CS4 Clean Script (http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs4clean.html)

thanks but i am still stuck :(

i've noticed that when i disable motion blur and frame blending in my AE Composition, everything renders fine.

So it seems like a 'performance/memory' problem. Are there any 'safe'settings for AE that allow the best ram usage?

Daniel... can't you simply render your AE comp and drop it into your Premiere project?

If so, that eliminates your AE project as a source of your woes.

When you have time, you should try Dynamic Linking with a fresh AE project into your existing Premiere project and see if it succeeds.

In terms of beating a deadline and getting things done, I would just render your AE project.

not really, too much dynamic stuff and layering in it :(

It really is the motion blur switch. I've experimented so much with all those 'how much ram per cpu' settings and 'how much ram to leave for other aps' that i am really not sure anymore what those settings are supposed to be. is there a Adobe KB article on those things?

But have you confirmed that you CAN render your project directly out of AE?

That would seem to be an important element in trouble shooting your scenario.

not with motion blur enabled... :(

Okay.... In following this thread, it sounded as though you were dealing with what you thought was a Premiere issue, but this seems to clearly be an AE problem or a limitation of your system specs.

You may have already scoped out the related forums.

Without seeing your project, the only thing I can think of is to either do some preprod work in Photoshop with your layers, or break up your project by either time or layers, and recomp.

Either way, you are going to have to render that sucker because until you can render cleanly from AE, Dynamic Link isn't going to help.

yep i agree on that. but what really makes me wonder is why i was able to render that project even with my old rig (4gig ram). I've now tried to render it without motion blur but get another error :(

maybe my settings are totally wrong? Could you advise on that?
Thanks so much!

Daniel... is it possible you are attempting to output to a format that does not allow the size of frame that you are working with?

Perhaps you are missing a plug-in from your older AE version?

You've revealed two separate issues.... the RAM and motion blur, and now the frame size.

Try setting up a new AE project using one of the presets.... then import your existing project into it and try rendering from that.

You also mentioned Win7... is it possible that when the old project was working it was with a different OS and/or different machine? Yes, Win7 is supposed to be great, but perhaps CS4 isn't certified/optimized for it yet. And certainly if it was working two years ago it wasn't with CS4.

Has it ever worked on this system, with this OS, on CS4? It sure wouldn't be the first time that something which worked fine in CS3 went belly-up in CS4.

its a standard 1920x1080 project - and basically is a remake of this tutorial:
VIDEO COPILOT | After Effects Tutorials & Post Production Tools (http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/fracture_design/)

nothing too fancy.

i've been working with CS4/windows 7 since it's first beta, I've used the Project template last week and it worked fine. Then it suddenly stopped working. Then I've reinstalled my OS but still no luck :(

i've attached my AE ram settings.

Little summation:
- works if I disable motion Blur and Render within Premiere
- does not render at all in AE (either the 'not enough memory for shadow map' or 'unable to allocate space for buffer' error)

I hope you guys have an idea...

*looking really sad at my deadline*

Have you installed any new SW recently? Drivers, codecs? Updated anything? Virus checkers? Does the PC have a live Internet connection?

freshly installed windows with office, adobe, skype and winamp. plus nod32 antivirus

Daniel... have you installed the latest AE updates?

One process I have done, and it's tedious depending on the complexity of your project, is to switch on layers with each render to see if there is one element that has gotten corrupted or its effect is causing a hangup.

Have you attempted dedicating LESS RAM for AE? What about unchecking the render of multiple frames simultaneously?

This is a stab in the dark, but is AE's render queue a SEPARATE operation? Are you maybe choking render queue of RAM by allocating all but 1gb to AE?

It's strange that Premiere can handle the render (albeit with motion blur off), and AE can't. That seems to speak to the installation of AE, or a needed update.

I'm certainly not a qualified Adobe troubleshooter.

All the latest updates are installed. I am going to try that layer switching now.

thanks for your ongoing support! :)

I also got the same unknown error. In my case at randomn moments.

After some troubleshooting, it appeared that AME is taking a lot of CPU resource.
And that makes the processor so hot that the PC/CPU decides to stop the proces.
So that explains the randomness.
In my case I could turn up the FAN-speed so that my cpu is cooled better.
And after that all went fine again.

I hope this might help for some people...

Grtz Eric

For me, it's the memory leak in Premiere Pro that prevents me from completing some exports. What I do when running AME is to also launch the Task Manager and keep an eye out on the memory usage. When it gets around 90%, I force an end process on pproheadless.exe. The memory usage immediately drops to around 50%, and then pproheadless automatically relaunches and starts the memory climb again. Sometimes I have to end the process 2-3 times, but I eventually get it to complete the export.

I'm using CS4 4.2 editing RED footage after working with Edius for years, and not using Premiere since 6.5 - how on earth can anyone work with this appalling software? the media encoder is so limited and slow in the extreme, as well as failing constantly, I'm at a loss as how to get my project off this platform in one piece.

My project is 4 mins 50 secs, RED 2k and I'm trying to render out a 1920x1080 lossless avi, it takes over 2 hours and always fails with "unknown error" this on an 8 core quad machine - hopeless indeed.

What on earth would you do if your project was 2 hours long?

Paul