Why does Mercury ANYTHING just NOT WORK!?

[Zack Birlew]

Hey, everybody, I'm getting quite annoyed that if I have Mercury GPU acceleration enabled for anything or even having GPU acceleration enabled on a plugin, my project will either crash entirely or cause some unknown bugs or distortion in my footage. I looked up how to enable a full screen video monitor on a secondary display in After Effects and that requires Mercury to enable it, unless there's some way for CPU or standard display options I'm not aware of, so I'm quite worried about this even working or messing up my project.

I can't believe Adobe has made nearly everything dependent on Mercury acceleration and especially the better features of Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I've tried different software versions, different GPUs (currently have a Quadro RTX 8000 coming from a Geforce 2080 Ti), and we've even switched platforms from Xeon to AMD 64-core 3990x Threadripper with FRESH install of everything and still Mercury acceleration bugs up everything! We nearly had to restart our entire post on our feature film until I found out it was Mercury acceleration bugging up Premiere and After Effects, I thought it was everything from a bad install, corrupt or overfilled media cache, Windows 10 issues, or simply some sort of incompatibility with our older RED One MX footage or mixing Prores and Blackmagic Pocket 4K CDNG into the mix or something. Nope! It was all the Mercury playback engine and any Mercury acceleration setting I could find causing all the trouble. Doing an internet search, I can't believe how many people have had the same or similar problems and Adobe still keeps enabling Mercury by default and even expanding it into multiple areas of the software. I would say they need to make it one setting and keep it that way, if it doesn't work then you simply have to click it off, not have to dig around in the software for every instance of Mercury acceleration for multiple aspects of the program.

Has anybody else had a nightmare of a time with Mercury acceleration like this? Also, is there a way to preview video on a second monitor in After Effects without Mercury? I'm seriously considering switching to Davinci Resolve for any future projects as I simply can't depend on Premiere with this Mercury preference. After Effects will have to be as it is but most of the bigger problems have been with editing and I was shocked how stable everything was after I turned all the Mercury engine stuff off but then I lost some of the speed that was there before. It's such a let down from Adobe!

 

[DJ Meyer]

I know this probably isn’t helpful but I’ve been cutting .r3d and prores on primarily Adobe since FCP was discontinued and have never had any substantial issues with Mercury. The only thing I can remember is occasionally hitting a VRAM ceiling when cutting 8k on <11GB GPUs.

 

[Zack Birlew]

Thankfully the secondary monitor isn't causing issues with any projects as of yet but I still get error reports and bugs with GPU accelerated plugins. With a Quadro RTX 8000, I've got 48GB of VRAM so a RED One MX 4K 16:9 HD project shouldn't be giving me any issues but there it is and I've come from a 1070, 1080, 2070, and 2080 Ti and all had issues. It's not as if I'm using odd brands either, we're talking OEM Dell/HP pulls, EVGA Founder's Editions, PNY, and the Quadro is direct from nVidia and our systems were built by Boxx so we're using the same stuff anybody else would be and we even had to fresh install Windows 10 Pro due to a motherboard driver issue when we first got the AMD system so it's as standard issue clean and top of the line as you can get and I keep it updated too. I don't get it but again, thankfully we have 64-cores so the speed drop isn't too bad. If anybody knows what the problem could be, even if it's annoyingly just one setting we might have wrong, I'd greatly appreciate the help in figuring this out!