Error retrieving frame in Premiere Pro/Media Encoder

[catferoze]

Yesterday my export failed in media encoder due to:

"Error retrieving frame 36889 at time 00:25:37:01 from the file: whatever.m2ts, substituting frame 36888"

It was a sequence I had successfully exported the previous day and hardly any changes were made since. I was also exporting two other sequences in the same project and another failed due to the same error while the other worked fine. I also discovered upon opening this project in premiere a similar error message would pop up about error retrieving frame. I attempted various fixes from the internet including: turn off GPU acceleration, update GPU drives, reboot, reinstall premiere/media encoder, recreate source files, recreate project, clear media cache. I finally got it to work (almost) by converting the source file to prores (using ffmpeg) and replacing it in the project. My original source file was a m2ts created in tsmuxer from a mkv created by makemkv from a blu-ray. I actually got the same error again but this time it failed at a later point in the export due to a different source file. I will convert that to prores and report back if it succeeds.

This is a frustrating issue that I would love to have resolved but if this workaround succeeds it wouldn't be too bad. I suppose it's better to just use prores sources since I always end up making proxies for smoother editing anyway. Anyone else come across this issue or have suggestions?

see update below

 

[catferoze]

Update: converting my h264 video source to prores (or dnxhd) allowed me to avoid the issue. I tried prores first but the resulting video file had significantly altered contrast. dnxhd didn't create contrast issues so I replaced my source in premiere with that and successfully exported my project in media encoder.

I've had issues exporting from premiere pro using h264 sources before so maybe I'll start converting to dnxhd/prores before starting future edits. on the other hand, I usually don't have issues and editing with a proxy works just fine and it's pretty easy to later convert and replace the source if I do run into issues like this in the future. I also discovered krausfadr's "A 2021 General Fanediting Best Practices Guide for HD and UHD" which recommends a similar file conversion process for editing. Maybe this will be useful info to someone else.

 

[krausfadr]

@catferoze if you ever get the chance to compare Cineform Film 2 vs dnxhd I would love to hear your opinion of any quality differences.