Premiere Corrupting MP4 outputs

[Jeff Mottle]

Today is really not going well. The latest issue trying to get all of the renders done for the 3dawards event is that my MP4 for the film festival is corrupting. It renders without issues, but when I try to open the file it's corrupt. I've tried rendering both in Premiere and in Media Encoder with the same result. I just imported the sequence into a new file and am rendering that now. Fingers crossed. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. I only have a few hours left to get this done or there will not be a film festival at mundos. here are some other stats/notes/ideas

 

1) The file is 1 hour long made up of multiple videos in MOV and MP4 formats with audio. The pieces are all different frame rates, but I am rendering to 23.976 fps.

2) I'm rendering to H.264 18Mbps VBR 1 pass

3) The file is about 9GB is size

4) I've been able to render smaller sections ok

5) I've not tried rendering the entire piece to another format

6) I'm saving the output to a network drive and the all of the files are on the network as well. I've not tried to put everything on a local drive or save to a local drive.

7) It's taking approximately 1 hour to render the file with the current settings.

 

If I try another format (likely MOV or WMV) which settings or codec would you suggest that will maintain excellent quality and keep the file size within reason and not take hours to render.

[daveparmenter]

Have you tried opening the resulting file in MPEG Streamclip? It's a free app that can sometimes open what seems un-openable. If you can get it to load, you will have options to save it out again as an .mp4 or other formats.

 

Also, I know that any time there are unexplainable problems with us at work I blame network voodoo and try to take as much local as I can. Maybe try saving your output locally to start, and if that doesn't work try grabbing all the source and working entirely locally.

 

-dp-

[Jeff Mottle]

Thanks Dave, the next full render will complete in 20 min and if it does not work, I'll try that. I tried VLC player and it could not open the last file with that.

[daveparmenter]

Hopefully your latest one will miraculously work. For what it's worth, at Neoscape our standard 720P and 1080P deliverables are QuickTime movies with the h.264 codec. What system will this be playing back on? A laptop hooked up to a projector? Is it going into a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation?

 

Another option is to see if you can get a reasonable chunk of it to render without corruption, like 30 minute clips. Then you'd only have to "change the reel" once during the event. Not sure if that's an option but who knows.

 

I'll keep thinking on it...maybe something else will come to me.

 

Best of luck,

 

-dp-

[Jeff Mottle]

I believe it will be playing from a laptop, although it might be on the control booth system at the convention center. In past years though I think they have been playing it from a laptop. It's not going into any sort of presentation, just playing direct from a player. 5 min..fingers crossed.

[Jeff Mottle]

@$%#!! Rendering from a new file did not help either. I tried opening it in MPEG Streamclip and it said "File Open Error: unrecognized File Type". I tried to "open anyway" but the app just hangs. Going to try rendering to an MOV/H.264, but it won't let me render at Full HD!? I keeps telling me the frame dimensions are not supported. Ugg!

[daveparmenter]

Might be ridiculous, but could you send your Premiere Pro project to After Effects and try rendering it there? In After Effects, go to File > Import > Adobe Premiere Pro Project (that's how it is in CS5.5...I don't have CS6 yet)

 

Also, start at least saving the output locally. If moving all of the source files locally is an option, I'd do that too.

 

Last thing: on Facebook I saw someone suggest stitching it all together in an app like QuickTime Pro. Honestly, I'm guessing hardly anyone would notice if it was a "3rd generation transcode," so if that's the only thing that works I'd do it without any reservations whatsoever.

 

Keep at it...you'll figure it out!

 

-dp-

[Jeff Mottle]

rendered a chunk of video MOV/H.264. Finally got it to start rendering. I set the quality to 100 (although that's way too big to be usable). I don't really like rendering to MOV though due to the gamma bug in QT player. I recall there was a hack fix. Going to try to render this in sections now. What a nightmare. I guess I won't be sleeping tonight.

[tmacbriar]

Adobe forum suggests that rendering nested files to mp4 will cause corruption. They suggest using Adobe Media Encoder

 

No personal experience so I don't know if this valid advice.

 

Good luck.

 

Sent from my MB855 using Tapatalk 2

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I have always had good luck with Microsoft Expression Encoder if I want to use Windows Media format. I write out uncompressed AVI's and then use it to compress to a WMV. I typically set it to 'Quality VBR' and bump the quality setting to 98.

 

Jut make sure to download the free version and not the Pro version.

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder4_Overview.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24601

 

In the office we often write to a Animation compressed MOV and then use Quicktime Pro to compress the footage to a H.264 mp4 format. This also provides excellent results.

Edited July 1, 2012 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Jeff Mottle]

Thanks Travis. Last year I did render to WMV, but the facility requested H.264 for easier later use, but I may go that route again anyway. I have the pro version of Expression Encoder. (Does the pro version not work?) We use it for CGschool stuff as it's the only encoder that will read GoToMeeting's proprietary codec.

 

I think an for an hour of uncompressed AVI's it would be huge. I bet that would run almost a TB. May try if this second half does not render properly.

 

I just rendered the first half of the 1 hour piece as H.264 (MP4) and it worked and the second half is rendering now. With any luck this will work. I'm also rendering the output locally. We always run the presentation from 2 machines, so they can use the video switcher to edit between the two if this works.

[Jeff Mottle]

Adobe forum suggests that rendering nested files to mp4 will cause corruption. They suggest using Adobe Media Encoder

 

I'm already rendering in AME and run into the same problem.

[cgrant3d]

Main thing that jumps out at me is that you're reading/writing to the network. Maybe your network is rock solid but that sounds like it could be your problem. I typically source all files from network and write locally but success will be related to network cable/hardware quality too.

[cgrant3d]

One more thing. In the past (cs5 I think) I had updated source clips in premiere to a frame shorter and believe it or not that caused premiere to crash when rendering. It's like there was a missing frame that it needed but it didn't gracefully handle - crashed no matter what codec I rendered to.

 

And another - you could try switching premiere to CPU only to make sure it's not GPU related.

 

Good luck - wish I could be there!

[Jeff Mottle]

Main thing that jumps out at me is that you're reading/writing to the network. Maybe your network is rock solid but that sounds like it could be your problem. I typically source all files from network and write locally but success will be related to network cable/hardware quality too.

 

Provided this second half render works, it could be the issue, although I have a gigabit network here with Cisco gear. The NAS on large files is able to read write around 80-120 MB/s which is close to the theoretical limits of Gigabit. Who knows though. If it does work, I'll try rendering again overnight locally as one file. If I can get two working halves I can work with that too. 5 min min and I'll know.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Thanks Travis. Last year I did render to WMV, but the facility requested H.264 for easier later use, but I may go that route again anyway. I have the pro version of Expression Encoder. (Does the pro version not work?) We use it for CGschool stuff as it's the only encoder that will read GoToMeeting's proprietary codec.

 

I assume the Pro version works fine. It is simply not needed for WMV encoding though. However the Pro version allows you to use a MP4 container. I would guess that it would allow you to use a H.264 codec.

 

It sounds like you have the problem solved, but if not it may be another option.

[Jeff Mottle]

Thanks for all of your help and suggestions everyone! Two halves rendered ok locally. Thank God! Will have to test to see if it's the file size or the local saving, but for now I at least have a file to use.

 

If only I could now solve the problem that has plagued me for years. That is jerky playback of certain files. I'm not sure if it's a byproduct of different framerates in all of the pieces or poor video decompression by the video card. I'm guessing the former as I can for example play a 30fps original ok, but once rendered to 24 fps it jumps all over the place. The frame conversion in Premiere sucks. If you have a solution for this, I would love to hear it.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

The frame conversion in Premiere sucks. If you have a solution for this, I would love to hear it.

 

I can't personally vouch for it but I think O'Brien uses Twixtor for frame rate conversion.

http://www.revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/downloads/#ae_compatible_4

[Jeff Mottle]

Ahh that's right. Forgot about that app. Might have to test that out sometime and see if it helps. thx!

[belabessnyei]

if you have the clips in image sequences try to make other formats out of them, or convert the clips to other formats and use them. Somewhere this it must work unless your software is buggy or corrupted. If buggy you may try different versions.

[Fooch]

Hopefully your latest one will miraculously work. For what it's worth, at Neoscape our standard 720P and 1080P deliverables are QuickTime movies with the h.264 codec. What system will this be playing back on? A laptop hooked up to a projector? Is it going into a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation?

 

Another option is to see if you can get a reasonable chunk of it to render without corruption, like 30 minute clips. Then you'd only have to "change the reel" once during the event. Not sure if that's an option but who knows.

 

I'll keep thinking on it...maybe something else will come to me.

 

Best of luck,

 

-dp-

 

Ditto for squint. QuickTime h264 or sorenson. I personally prefer h264.

The trick of fixing the gamma issue is using QuickTime pro, going to movie properties, switch to blend all the way on the bottom. Push it to 100, which will make your film look very white and switch that to straight alpha. Scrub it a lil and voila you will find your gamma is fixed. Save it then.

 

My export settings are :

QuickTime

Codec: h264

(either 720 or 1080p)

Fps : 25 , well for us here in Aust/uk.

Key frames : 15 - 50 (for motiongraphic bits, I go really low. Sometimes even 10. 50 is for filmic based stuff)

If you have an option for CBR or vbr, I would keep my Mbps from 6k-8k. 18 is way too high.

8 is from old DVD making habits where DVDs / m2v max out at 8 (they take 9 but you would keep 1mb for audio and some players don't recognize if it's all taken up)

Audio, if you need to push it down , I would compress it to AAC and at 44100. Not much difference btwn the 48 anyway.

 

This will give you something that will definitely run without stuttering and with a pretty high quality.

[Ernest Burden III]

Late in the game, but I'll add that I have recently been encoding my animations to play on ipad2 and ipad3 using PremiereCS6. Using H264 I noticed that I got much worse results when using the Quicktime format. The results are better starting with the 'H264' option, which creates a m4p file, which can be re-named to .mov if you like.

 

There are choices for 'Profile' and you can look them up here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H264

chart at the bottom of the page to choose a profile that suits the hardware. For the ipad3 I have great results with:

H264

up to 1080p at either 24fps or 30fps

High Profile Level 4.1

no set keyframe distance

datarates at 18mbps target, 24mbps max (but see that chart for actual maximums)

audio is AAC- up to 160 kbps stereo (option for quality, highest seems fine)

 

There is a checkbox at the bottom of the video tab for 'highest quality rendering' that does just that, but having it OFF means a much faster output. ON does not make a huge visual difference.

 

I hope this helps

[Jeff Mottle]

Only got 4 hours of sleep last night, but got another version rendered to the local drive. Writing the file as one big file still does not work, so there has to be something with the 9GB file size. Broken into 5 and 4 GB seems to work ok. I re-rendered the sequence at 25fps with frame blending and that solved about 60% of the shuttering problems as most clips were submitted at 25fps. The other 40% are clips that had a different frame rates and have varying degrees of shuttering due to the frame rate conversion. Someone suggested using Twixtor as it does better frame interpolation, but also means the final will be a 3rd gen transcode. Not sure why Premiere can't do a better job with this. It's not like I'm the only one in the world who assembles clips of varying frame rates.

 

@fooch Yeah, you're probably right about 18Mbps being to high, however a lot of original submissions were 6-12Mbps, so I just did it a bit higher. Another well know studio recommended I render it that high. I guess that's what they use. I did not have time to test to see if the extra bitrate was just adding file size or if it helped in reducing artifacting from 2nd gen transcoding. Really need to sit down one of these days and sort all of these problems out. It's been a problem for the last 9 years and I've still not found a 100% perfect solution. This is the first time however I've ever had problems rendering out

 

I'm always so picky about trying preserve the original quality as much as possible as I feel like I'd be doing the original artists a disservice otherwise. I think this year I spent about 80 hours just preparing the edits for the ceremony and about 250 hours total for all the work that went into the 3dawards.

 

Just finished copying the last file to my travel harddrive and I leave for airport in 20 min. How's that for cutting it to the wire!

 

Thanks again for everyone's help. When I get back I'll keep this thread updated with some more test progress. Any other suggestions about the frame rate conversions, would be greatly appreciated.

[Fooch]

Only got 4 hours of sleep last night, but got another version rendered to the local drive. Writing the file as one big file still does not work, so there has to be something with the 9GB file size. Broken into 5 and 4 GB seems to work ok. I re-rendered the sequence at 25fps with frame blending and that solved about 60% of the shuttering problems as most clips were submitted at 25fps. The other 40% are clips that had a different frame rates and have varying degrees of shuttering due to the frame rate conversion. Someone suggested using Twixtor as it does better frame interpolation, but also means the final will be a 3rd gen transcode. Not sure why Premiere can't do a better job with this. It's not like I'm the only one in the world who assembles clips of varying frame rates.

 

@fooch Yeah, you're probably right about 18Mbps being to high, however a lot of original submissions were 6-12Mbps, so I just did it a bit higher. Another well know studio recommended I render it that high. I guess that's what they use. I did not have time to test to see if the extra bitrate was just adding file size or if it helped in reducing artifacting from 2nd gen transcoding. Really need to sit down one of these days and sort all of these problems out. It's been a problem for the last 9 years and I've still not found a 100% perfect solution. This is the first time however I've ever had problems rendering out

 

I'm always so picky about trying preserve the original quality as much as possible as I feel like I'd be doing the original artists a disservice otherwise. I think this year I spent about 80 hours just preparing the edits for the ceremony and about 250 hours total for all the work that went into the 3dawards.

 

Just finished copying the last file to my travel harddrive and I leave for airport in 20 min. How's that for cutting it to the wire!

 

Thanks again for everyone's help. When I get back I'll keep this thread updated with some more test progress. Any other suggestions about the frame rate conversions, would be greatly appreciated.

 

Silly qns, is the drive you are writing to a fat32 portable drive. That can't go over 4gigs in size.

[Jeff Mottle]

Silly qns, is the drive you are writing to a fat32 portable drive. That can't go over 4gigs in size.

 

You'd think so, but no. It's a network Linux based NAS. The local drive is an NTFS Intel SSD.