premiere pro exports are corrupt / wont play or upload to YouTube

Question

I have tried 4 times now to export a 16 minute long video consisting only of an image sequence and audio tracks.

The video is a 360/vr video, and on this old machine, takes roughly 2 and a half hours to render every time, only to output a corrupt video that will neither play in vlc nor upload to youtube (youtube abandons processing pretty quickly.)

when I export a significantly shorter video from the timeline it outputs just fine, and other video projects I've rendered have never had this problem. the file just ends up 0 bytes every time

Answer 1

solved: the problem, for whatever reason, was that I was using an image sequence instead of a video. this works for shorter durations, but for long durations its no wonder premier has trouble. to solve it, i followed these steps:

1. using FFMPEG, turned the image sequence into an .mp4 with ffmpeg -framerate 60 -i %d.png -framerate 60 out.mp4 which ensures the framerate is both interpreted and written as 60fps
2. replace footage in premier with the newly rendered out.mp4
3. render from adobe premier- remarkably, the process is also substantially faster. it took me roughly 10 minutes, down from 2 and a half hours.

Answer 2

Don't use Media Encoder for the export, do it in Premiere.

Export a small section first, to see if that works.

If the small section works, expand it - maybe try half the sequence, and see if that half works. If it does/doesn't, then hone it down until you find where the problem is in the timeline. Purge the cache, keep trying...

How big is the final exported file? Could it be a file size limit based on the format of the drive you're exporting on to?