Blackmagic Forum

PierreEmmanuel wrote:

danielsenphoto wrote:

PierreEmmanuel wrote:I confirm that the problem seems solved : 4h12 rendered with HEAVY processing and no artifact at all.
What I did : 10.9.4 AND latest cuda.

I'm running the latest OS 10.9.4. Isn't Cuda irrelevant when running the dual AMD D700 that are in the nMP?

yes, you are right, cuda is for nvidia, but this is the only changes I made .. mmm

I installed Cuda and no changes in the line-bugs, lots of them. Then I restarted and reset NVRAM / PRAM (cmd+opt+p+r) and now I've miraculously just had two renders with no artifacts. I did what you did, but additionally reset the NVRAM / PRAM. I don't get wise on this... fingers crossed the bugs don't come back.

Edit: It should also be noted I've reset the nvram/pram before installing Cuda and that did no notable fix, however now with Cuda installed it seems to work (for now).

DAMNED !

I have rendered about 8hrs of film, with tons of plugin applied, optical flow, resizing, Luts, etc.. no artifact for 24hrs, and suddenly, in the middle of a 2min sequence, I got a green horizontal light..

It seems that its still unclear if this is a software or hardware problem, but that the chances are extremely high that it is a hardware problem since Chris definitely solved the problem by swapping out his machine.

Has anyone at all on this forum solved this issue other than Chris?

Best-
-Nat

p.s.
obviously I'm having this issue as well. 12core nMP, 64GB ram, Dual D700s, 1TB SSD, OS 10.9.4

I've been having this exact issue as well. Today I tried 10.9.4 and the latest Cuda. At first it didn't fix it: and then it occurred that the Cuda installer did not force me to reboot unlike the Mac OS update. After reboot of the CPU, the artifacting has ceased. Fingers crossed.

I am curious: what was the process with Apple for getting a new CPU? How quick were you able to get a new CPU? How did they qualify the replacement? Thanks.

Michael Amundson wrote:I am curious: what was the process with Apple for getting a new CPU? How quick were you able to get a new CPU? How did they qualify the replacement? Thanks.

If the machine is new enough and you bought it directly from Apple you can just do an exchange through the store. In my case it took a couple of weeks (they let me keep the old unit while waiting), but I had a very early unit, and supply was much more constrained then.

Basically I just described the problem to Apple. They had me take the unit to a store for hardware diagnostics (which didn't find anything; the tech admitted the machine was too new for them to have any tests targeting system-specific issues), and I showed the tech at the store the artifact and explained that I'd been in touch with the application vendor and they hadn't seen the problem on their test machines. He agreed that it looked like a GPU issue.

If you get any pushback, you might try pointing out that Resolve is one of the apps Apple uses in its marketing material for this machine — it should damn well run correctly. Usually Apple is pretty good about this stuff, though.

Michael Amundson wrote:I've been having this exact issue as well. Today I tried 10.9.4 and the latest Cuda. At first it didn't fix it: and then it occurred that the Cuda installer did not force me to reboot unlike the Mac OS update. After reboot of the CPU, the artifacting has ceased. Fingers crossed.

I am curious: what was the process with Apple for getting a new CPU? How quick were you able to get a new CPU? How did they qualify the replacement? Thanks.

I was on the phone with Apple support yesterday and they seemed to be aware of the issue. However since my machine is bought in March (more than 30 days old) they wouldn't ship me a new unit. Now I have to deliver it to a local Mac certified store and they will repair it (I'm guessing they will ship it somewhere for that). If the problem persists for more than two repairs they will ship a new unit. That really sucks as I'm working on a project that has a deadline. If this really is a hardware issue shipping a new unit is at least what to expect on this high end product... and to prevent everyone from having downtime.

Got one terrible freeze, the whole interface of OSX was not responding at all, sound looping, and it was as hot as my BMPC, can you imagine ?

Time to replace the tube. How hard was it for you to reinstall everything ? like how can you reinstall software like FCPx, or Plugins like Neat that do register themselves online ?

Got few artifacts, Resolve said 2h30 for delivering.. rebooted.. no artifact 1h20

What the !? Really weird, isn't it ?

When I experience the horizontal line artefact on my MacPro 2013 DaVinci 10; I drop the screen resolution on one of my gui displays down one setting, then set it back again.

This seems to have the affect of flushing the memory on the gpu (I read that on the internet somewhere, so it must be true).

I'm usually artefact free for the rest of that grade session.

Alright, here we go again. After installing Cuda and performing a NVRAM/PRAM reset I've had a few successive renders. Today the bugs started appearing again 2/3 out in a 10 min render.

BMCC 2,5k with grading and some Optical Flow, so shouldn't be too heavy on the nMP.

http://danielsenphoto.com/bug_3.jpg
http://danielsenphoto.com/bug_4.jpg
http://danielsenphoto.com/bug_5.jpg



Edit: Here you can see how the artifacts (I've referred to them as "bugs") are showing up when using the curves too: http://danielsenphoto.com/bug_curves.mov

Hello! I have some strange artifacts with my new Mac Pro and i have to update my Pegasus drive to the latest firmware version and that fixed everything.
Best regards
Robban

This is absolutely 100% a hardware defect that effects some new Mac Pros. This is not a software issue, so everyone troubleshooting this by swapping CUDA versions, driver versions, OpenCL vs CUDA, purging NVRAM, etc should save the effort.

I was getting this problem constantly, sometimes it would go away for 30mins or so after a reboot but always came back.

Replacing the hardware (nMP 12c 64gbRAM 2xD700) with an identical machine and cloning the boot drive onto the new machine solved the problem 100%.

It would be really useful to know specifically what part of the hardware is failing, it seems like GPU, but who knows, and it would be great to have a hardware test that tested for this.

best
-Nat

natjencks wrote:This is absolutely 100% a hardware defect that effects some new Mac Pros. This is not a software issue, so everyone troubleshooting this by swapping CUDA versions, driver versions, OpenCL vs CUDA, purging NVRAM, etc should save the effort.

I was getting this problem constantly, sometimes it would go away for 30mins or so after a reboot but always came back.

Replacing the hardware (nMP 12c 64gbRAM 2xD700) with an identical machine and cloning the boot drive onto the new machine solved the problem 100%.

++

People keep convincing themselves that they've solved this problem by tweaking something in software because of how intermittent it is, but I messed with this for a solid couple of weeks, trying everything up to full re-installs. The problem always came back. Sometimes I'd get hours of clean outputs, but it always came back. Then Apple swapped the unit out for me. The new unit was initially running the exact same versions of the exact same software, yet the problem was gone, and I haven't seen a hint of it in the six months since.

It's hardware, folks. Stop messing with driver and OS versions and RMA the unit.

I came to the same conclusion.. I have 8hrs to render, I was not able to render them properly. I thought I got it corrected, but this was pure chance, I am heavily using Resolve, and never able to get the whole 8hrs rendered properly.

Now I sometimes get a weird login screen : like part of a puzzle, with square pieces misaligned..

PierreEmmanuel wrote:Now I sometimes get a weird login screen : like part of a puzzle, with square pieces misaligned..

Same here, and it freezes. I'm arranging for a repair... frustrating.

10.9.4 and latest CUDA did not fix the issue. Can't upload an example as "the board attachment quota has been reached." We are proceeding with repair/replacement of the Mac Pro.

Michael Amundson wrote:Can't upload an example as "the board attachment quota has been reached."

Upload your image to an image host like tinypic.com and then post the link here using the IMG tag. Like so:

Thanks Lee.

Hello,

It's NOT a problem of drivers, it's an hardware problem. Only solution to solve the problem : ask to apple to change your computer.

I am having the same issue (artifacts in footage) rendering from a New Mac Pro D700 graphics, 6-core processor, 32GB Ram (all factory installed)
Running OSX10.9.4 w/Cuda update in Davinci Resolve 11.1 beta.
I'm rendering Cinema DNG RAW files (4K and 2K) recorded on a Sony FS700 into an Odyssey 7Q recorder.

I've been back and forth with our local Apple store (Fashion Place Utah) for the last week with extensive conversations with multiple managers and lead genius bar technicians without any resolution and complete frustration. They said they were testing the machine for multiple days including every piece of hardware at 100% sometimes for up to 10 hours at a time and there were no issues. They had no way to run the tests in Davinci Resolve and they asked me to look to BMD for a solution and said it must be software related. I pointing them to this thread but that did not help nor did pointing them to the fact that Apple use Davinci Resolve in it's marketing so it better be supported (as has been mentioned previously).

After some intense discussions with their tech guys, I wanted a better solution. In the end, I went up to the store had them take their floor model New Mac Pro (base model D300 cards) and set-up both my machine and the store model side-by-side. I downloaded Resolve on the new machine and rendered a clip on both machines side-by-side at the genius bar. The clip from my machine showed artifacts and the store model rendered the clip without problems. At this point, the lead genius Engineer said they were going to have to take the machine for a few more days to test new components of hardware one at a time while doing the same render in Resolve (First replacing RAM, then trying new GPU's, etc.). They don't know how to use Resolve so I had to walk a tech through each menu so that he would be able to replicate the render after each new piece of hardware was put in because there still wasn't enough evidence to replace the machine. At this point I about flipped. I'm a week behind on a critical project over this issue and I'm getting the run-around from Apple. I said, fine, but I want you to at a minimum put new graphics cards in this machine for your testing. I asked for a new machine and initially was told that was not an option. They would try testing each piece of hardware while running the Resolve render and then get back to me.

After all of that back and forth, Ironically on my drive home the genius person called me and told me after consideration they were going to order a new machine (which would be 10-12 days). (Side note: I really did not care if they got me a new machine or new graphics cards for my current machine, I just expected it to work. A new machine at this point is actually more of a pain for me to deal with due to the reinstalls, etc.)

Anyway, if others are having this problem and the Apple store won't help, I would suggest you ask their techs/managers/genius' if there is possibility that their testing is not 100% comprehensive of every possible glitch in a piece of hardware. If for example software exists that will push this machine harder (or at least in a different way) than what their internal testing reveals then there has to be a way for those of us who have dropped $5-10k on this machine to know it will handle the hardest loads possible. The Genius tech agreed that there is a possibility that their testing may not push the machine in the same way that running a 4K render in Davinci Resolve does which could result in revealing an faulty graphics card.

I will say again that I was hoping it was a software issue that was fixed in 10.9.4, but THE PROBLEM HAS NOT BEEN FIXED. I will also say that while all of the evidence to date shows that this is a hardware issue (likely GPU D700), I will not know for sure until I get a new machine and begin renders. I firmly hope that their was some QC issue with AMD new D700 cards will fix this, but I agree that we also need more scientific evidence of this from people out their that have received new hardware proving this to be the case. So speak up people! If you have a new machine or new hardware, have you seen any more problems or are we in the clear?

The last thing I want to have happen is to get new hardware only to see this issue again (I think I will pull my hair out) and let Apple or Blackmagic sit back and relax without expediting a fix on the software side. This needs a resolution now.

Update - while the I await my new Mac Pro, I had the store put a New D700 graphics card they had on hand into my current machine so I could at least get some work done while I wait (they only had one card in stock). So it has one old card and one new card. I'm rendering footage now and it has successfully rendered about 2 hours of footage so far (no artifacts). Maybe they got lucky and picked the right one to swap out. Fingers crossed it keeps working.

Hello, do you read what Chris Kenny and I told you ?

We both changed the unit (After long negotiations with Apple on my side), the problem disappeared. It's NOT a driver problem. It's NOT a BMD problem. It's NOT a cuda problem. It's nothing else than a bad MacPro unit with Bad D700.

Apple knows about this issue.

Robin

I too have a flickering line on my rendered footage from Resolve 10.1.5 lite on mac os 10.9.4 What's the best way to go about having my MacPro replaced? Contact info at Apple would be helpful too.

Is there anyone here that had the video card replaced as a working remedy?

Hello All,

I've been following this thread since I had the dreaded line render problem with my new Mac Pro received in May. Thanks to this thread, I decided to call support to get the cards replaced.

I did visit an Apple store, and as a warning to all those with this issue, they were no help. They wanted to keep my system for a week for testing, then order the part, then five days for repair. That's unacceptable for a working editor/colorist with projects underway.

I called Apple Support and got a Senior Specialist who told me that I qualified for an in-house repair. I did have to send him a screen grab of the issue. He knew right away it was a card problem. After ordering the part, the tech came out. Unfortunately, he had two identical parts shipped to him, so he only swapped one of my cards.

Now, my machine is running great. I can use Resolve again and haven't seen the line render issue appear. I've rendered several projects without issue.

So, if you are having this frustrating render error, call Apple now! Only a card swap will bring you peace.

Thanks to all here for the wisdom.

I tech came out for an on-site repair today and replaced both my D700 cards. No artifacts in rendered footage so far. I work in stills too with Capture One and was getting artifacts all over processed raw files to tiff and jpeg. That problem seems to have gone away too.

I returned my nMP to an Apple Store in The Netherlands today for testing. They told me this would take about 2-3 days but I'm pretty sure my video cards are not up to handling RED 6K material and have to be replaced. While working with these files in Resolve in an 1080p timeline and a quarter resolution there were no issues, but when exporting to UHD things went south, as you can see below. These errors were completely random and only one frame long. In the end I decided to export several times and then went back into Premiere to remove all the faulty frames from the film using other exports, only to export the film again.

jelleHNL wrote:I returned my nMP to an Apple Store in The Netherlands today for testing. They told me this would take about 2-3 days but I'm pretty sure my video cards are not up to handling RED 6K material and have to be replaced.

I don't think this is a related issue. I've seen artifacts like what you show/describe many times with R3D footage, on lots of hardware; they're the result of corrupted media (if they happen in the same place all the time) and/or bugs in decoding software (Red workflow is pretty buggy in general, honestly).

Chris Kenny wrote:

jelleHNL wrote:I returned my nMP to an Apple Store in The Netherlands today for testing. They told me this would take about 2-3 days but I'm pretty sure my video cards are not up to handling RED 6K material and have to be replaced.

I don't think this is a related issue. I've seen artifacts like what you show/describe many times with R3D footage, on lots of hardware; they're the result of corrupted media (if they happen in the same place all the time) and/or bugs in decoding software (Red workflow is pretty buggy in general, honestly).

But like I said it does not happen in the same places all the time nor do the files seem corrupt. I had the same thing happening on SD and HD footage (all sorts of flavours) before OSX 10.9.4. The update cured a lot of errors on my system but seemingly not everything. The fact that I had errors all over the place from the start seemed to indicate faulty hardware after reading this thread. Especially when reading that the problems of others were cured after a replacement unit.. By the way, these screens were the most severe ones, most of them are the blue/green/pink horizontal lines.

jelleHNL wrote:But like I said it does not happen in the same places all the time nor do the files seem corrupt.

Like I said, I've seen it both ways. Sometimes this sort of thing is corruption in the clips, sometimes it's just software misbehaving. The resulting image is highly suggestive of wavelet decompression going wrong; GPU artifacts aren't likely to have that type of structure. Observationally, I've seen that sort of effect with Red footage on known-good hardware, and meanwhile I never saw anything that severe on with our faulty Mac Pro, across many hours of test renders, with non-Red footage.

jelleHNL wrote:I had the same thing happening on SD and HD footage (all sorts of flavours) before OSX 10.9.4. The update cured a lot of errors on my system but seemingly not everything. The fact that I had errors all over the place from the start seemed to indicate faulty hardware after reading this thread. Especially when reading that the problems of others were cured after a replacement unit.. By the way, these screens were the most severe ones, most of them are the blue/green/pink horizontal lines.

If you also see artifacts similar to the 1 or 2 line horizontal lines, it is, of course, easily possible you've got the Mac Pro GPU issue being discussed in this thread and you're running into Red workflow flakiness. Neither of these seems to be especially rare, so encountering both the same machine isn't all that implausible.

Chris Kenny wrote:

jelleHNL wrote:But like I said it does not happen in the same places all the time nor do the files seem corrupt.

Like I said, I've seen it both ways. Sometimes this sort of thing is corruption in the clips, sometimes it's just software misbehaving. The resulting image is highly suggestive of wavelet decompression going wrong; GPU artifacts aren't likely to have that type of structure. Observationally, I've seen that sort of effect with Red footage on known-good hardware, and meanwhile I never saw anything that severe on with our faulty Mac Pro, across many hours of test renders, with non-Red footage.

jelleHNL wrote:I had the same thing happening on SD and HD footage (all sorts of flavours) before OSX 10.9.4. The update cured a lot of errors on my system but seemingly not everything. The fact that I had errors all over the place from the start seemed to indicate faulty hardware after reading this thread. Especially when reading that the problems of others were cured after a replacement unit.. By the way, these screens were the most severe ones, most of them are the blue/green/pink horizontal lines.

If you also see artifacts similar to the 1 or 2 line horizontal lines, it is, of course, easily possible you've got the Mac Pro GPU issue being discussed in this thread and you're running into Red workflow flakiness. Neither of these seems to be especially rare, so encountering both the same machine isn't all that implausible.

Wow, I must be a lucky guy then..

This wavelet decompression thing, I've never heard of it. For me this is the first time encountering this sort of artifacts with RED footage. Is there something you can do or check to see if it is indeed something in the RED footage?

In the mean time I do hope the Apple tech's find something and replace either the videocards or the entire machine.

Doh, and I just got hit with it today:



This is blown up in order to make the horizontal line more visible. Interestingly, the problem only surfaced 24 minutes into a reel, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's heat-related.

And as an update: I was able to avoid the problem simply by rebooting and re-rendering. I checked each 20-minute reel in 20 different places and saw zero problems.

Since I've been rolling along for more than six months with this setup and hadn't encountered this problem to date, my hope is that it was just a fluke. It's also the first time I've dealt with Red 5K footage, which understandably puts a lot of stress on the system.

I think this is a case where you have a car that works greater under 100MPH, then it starts to get a little unstable once you cross that speed threshold.

Marc Wielage wrote:I think this is a case where you have a car that works greater under 100MPH, then it starts to get a little unstable once you cross that speed threshold.

Totally, generally I have this problem around 6 hours into a session and usually on raw/high resolution shots especially when using OFX. It's very annoying, but rebooting resolve generally fixes the issue for a while. Had a few stressful renders close to deadlines that had the issue though. Also it can happen when smart caching, so sometimes they have to be re-cached.

Hoping to find time to take it to apple and get it tested, but it's the only work machine I currently have so it's hard to find the time.

I've had my MacPro 2013 replaced by Apple and the horizontal artefacts are no longer evident.

My Mac Pro had the two AMD FirePro D700 cards [2.7 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon E5]

The workstation was taken into my local Apple retail store and looked at by their Business team. They performed their standard extended testing without being able to log any issues. Their initial suggestion was it was my particular configuration of hardware with this particular bit of software (ie DaVinci Resolve v9.x through 11.x).

After I was able to re-create the artefacts using Adobe Media Encoder CC2014 (Mercury Engine), and after we asked a friend to bring in his MacPro with the same configuration to test in our grade suite setup (same footage, project, outboard video monitoring, RAID storage, displays etc.) without the artefacts, we felt we had sufficient cause to represent our case more firmly with Apple that we needed a replacement workstation.

My impression with Apple was of a need to be though and methodical in discovering how best to manage our issue. Whilst the lead-times were somewhat extended, I could still grade on my MacPro and render on a iMac 27" to get jobs out the door.

I feel once Apple was satisfied the issue was machine-specific, they were happy to place an order for a new machine and I'm now up an running again. That said... I also think my contact at the Apple Business Team went into bat for us a few times to push things through; of which I'm grateful for.

HI all,

i've noticed a strong heat above my Mac Pro when doing RESOLVE (gpu processing) ... a way to explore ?
same big issues on our two Mac Pros (2 D700 each) few days after receiving them from Apple ... i'll try little more cooling and side rack mounting ...

hey guys,

i know have the same problem..hav my macpro with d700's quadcore since 5 months...

here a picture



is it really a hardware issue?? or could it be because i was rendering it out after a 10hour grading session.. i didnt had this before..but before i only delivered smaller grading jobs.,..

if it is really a hardware issue,,i dont know if apple will give me a new machine..because guarantee is only 90 days

This all is just sad.

I was considering one of those machines and they seem to lack the power as i have suspected long time.

Hey everyone.

I have nMP with D700's and had this issue for about 9 months.

After updating to yosemite and resolve 11.1.1 the issue went away! (The single line issue)

I still was getting the full frame glitches (usually on r3ds, like described above) if there was a lot of processing to do, but after updating to 11.1.2 that issue seems to have gone away also (was working in a project plagued with it (trying to render it out) - then in desperation updated to the latest release and the glitches no longer happened).

I wouldn't say 100% that the 2nd issue (full screen glitches) have been fixed by yosemite and resolve 11.1.2 (too early to tell) but in my case, the "glitch line of doom" has been fixed - without having to replace the cards.

Is this problem with D700 only? Or does this happen with D500 or D300 also?