I had high hopes that a brand new computer with a clean OS and a fresh install of Adobe Creative Cloud would get me around a few of the more glaring bugs that have plagued my workflow.
I was mistaken …

The dreaded Red Frame Of Death (RFOD) bug still exists.

Adobe are you listening?

I know you monitor this blog.

There are entries on your own forums as recently as January 25, 2015 complaining about the RFOD in Premiere.

Its a bit of a joke that the Adobe moderator in the thread claimed that this bug was fixed back on December 13 of 2013.

Um … no.

Let’s all help Adobe with this issue. We can all do some troubleshooting.  We can call it a social networking troubleshooting groupthink.

Usually I experience the RFOD in Premiere.  It has been plaguing my workflow in various ways as far back as Premiere 5.5.  It has happened once this year on my new iMac while crunching an H264 from Premiere.  That project was heavy with MXF footage.

This time the RFOD appeared in After Effects when I was trying to play back MXF footage.  As a matter of fact the MXF footage was the only source material in the Ae project at the time.  This confirms my suspicion that MXF files seem to be the culprit, or at least one of the culprits.  I’ve seen complaints online from people using other codecs while experiencing the RFOD.

Here is my social troubleshooting idea.

Here is a link to the MXF file that caused my latest encounter with the RFOD in After Effects.
I want everyone to download this file, insert it into After Effects, double click on the file and scrub thru the clip in the footage window (not a sequence).  If you get the OSX beachball while scrubbing then I guarantee you will find a shiny new red frame in your footage once the beachball disappears.

My RFOD occurred three frames from the top of the clip.

Share this blog post with other digital content creators.  Try the clip on home and work computers.  Report your findings in the comments.  I would like to get an idea of how prevalent this issue is.  Maybe if the occurrences are frequent enough then Adobe will finally fix this thing.

Then again … maybe not.

More later

Lou …

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