25.2 Horrible Playback Lag

@jamieclarke 

The latest Studio driver 572.83.

Hi @aspenn - Can you confirm which GPU driver version you are using and whether it is the Game or Studio driver.

@jamieclarke 

Playback settings don't have anything related to AJA or Blackmagic:

Also, the system search didn't return anything that would imply those drivers would be installed (I have never installed them and I've been the only user of this system).

Here's a sreen recording. Notice that the stuttering starts a couple of seconds before the rendered green section ends. The yellow sections should play smoothly (like they do on two other systems I tested), but here the stuttering is very bad because there is a reverse speed clip (marked red) on the timeline. After passing the red clip, it takes several seconds for the playback to become smooth again.

Also notice the mouse lag. I was moving the mouse in a steady circular motion, but on the screen the mouse pointer jumps wildy, making it difficult to do anything. This same mouse behavior happens all the time when using Premiere. When you click something, the mouse jumps for a few seconds.

The sequence is about 16 seconds in length, but because of this lagging it takes about 38 seconds to play it. This certainly is not the expected behaviour on a high-end laptop designed for creative professionals.

Hi @gened78432486 - This doesn't sound like it should be happening, sorry for the frustrations.  Can you see the pinned post and see if we can help you.

I agree. Premiere has become almost unusable, especially when editing multicam clips which I do all the time. When editing a multicam sequence, I have to hit play multiple times for it to start playing. When it hits an edit, it stops on the last frame of the previous edit for a second or two and then picks up on the next clip one or two seconds into it so I can never get a sense of the edit. This happens with every edit in the sequence. This happens even when I'm not editing multicam clips. And when doing the actual edit, I turn off all effects, 1/2 or 1/4 resolution, use proxies, and still the system acts like I'm asking it to climb a mountain.

I have a fast Mac. M3 Max with 64GB RAM. I'm using Oyen Bolt and ProGrade Digital Drives. These all have cost me over $1000 each, plus $4000 for the Mac and you'd think I was editing on Windows 98. I've tried switching to Davinci Resolve, whihch performs much better, but has a few things I don't like. I may need to try it again thought becasue it has become too frustrating. Whatever coding they are using seems like it is super heavy.

Hi @aspenn - You mentioned that you’re not seeing the issue on two other systems. I think the key will be identifying what’s different between them particularly in terms of installed software.

In your Playback settings, do you see any reference to AJA or Blackmagic? Also, could you search your system for anything related to those?

When you render the timeline, the codec used is based on your video preview settings. However, you shouldn’t need to render just to see your changes so it sounds like something else is going on.

Would you be able to upload a screen recording?

@jamieclarke 

I've changed the preview file format to QuickTime Apple ProRes 422 Proxy, but it doesn't make any difference. And how could it, if I'm not rendering previews? The problem is, that the video clips should play (as they have in the past) without lagging without rendering any previews. Now the situation is that in order to see something else than a slide show, I need to render the whole timeline every time I want to see the changes I've made. This unproductive waiting time then takes a big chunk of the working day.

I disabled one video effect (Block Swap) according to your instructions. No effect.

No Aja or Blackmagic drivers installed as far as I know.

@nbechere 

The Media Intelligence has been turned off, but it doesn't have any effect.

I made some more testing, firing up my old much slower Asus G14 laptop (Ryzen 9 4900HS, RTX 2060, 32 GB RAM, Win 10, Premiere 25.1), and even though the laptop was struggling a bit with the footage, it could still play back the same clips of the same project much smoother than the Asus ProArt P16 (Win 11, Premiere 25.2.1). And during playing, there was no mouse lag.

I also tried the same project on desktop PC (Ryzen 9 9900X, RTX 4060 Ti, 64 GB RAM, Win 11). I tried both Premiere 25.1 and 25.2.1 versions, but there was no lagging or stuttering on either. It was possible to play back three clips layered together at the same time. And no mouse lag.

So it seems that the Asus ProArt P16 laptop has some issues that make it unusable with Premiere. Which is a real bummer when it's otherwise a premium laptop and marketed to perform well in video editing.

Just to make sure we rule that one out - one big addition to Premiere Pro 25.2 has been Media Intelligence which needs to scan all the videos in your project once to make sure we can create an index of all your files. This is relatively quick (around 3 minutes for an hour of footage) and once it's done it done. 

The feature has a lot of safe guards to not get in the way of your editing (e.g. it stops the millisecond you run playback or scrub, it only uses a limited amount of CPU cores etc) and in our testing we found that to work very reliably - but just to make sure, can you go to Settings->Media Analysis & Transcription and turn off Media Intelligence? I'd just want to make sure that this is not causing any lagging for you. 

PS: You'd also see Media Intelligence running in the progress panel (the blue progress circle in the header bar). If that one shows no activity then we can rule out media intelligence as well. 

Same here--super slow, lagging playback and skipping even at low playback rate. I place the cursor on any frame and see nothing, hit play and after some seconds, the video starts slowly/lagging playing. Hard to edit when you can't find the exact spot to edit because of the lagging/image not appearing.

I thought it might be my 2020 ASUS ProArt using NVIDIA specifically designed to run Adobe programs fast, so I switched to my newer ASUS ProArt also specifically designed to run Adobe programs at peak speed using NVIDIA and which I maximized with memory and graphics card to only to edit videos. But playback is also slow and laggy.

Never noticed it before the recent updates. Both computers have all the recent Adobe, NVIDIA and Windows update. Very frustrating and not an efficient work flow. Guess we'll have to wait until Adobe fixes whatever their update did that caused the slowness so many are experiencing. They fixed the audio warning box pop-up problem pretty fast.

Hi @aspenn - Can try and change your video preview to Quicktime ProRes Proxy and let us know if that helps your issue.  Also, can you close any third party panels you have open and disable your plugins.  You can disable plugins by going to the effects panel under the hamburger menu and select manage video effects, this is where you can enable and disable your plugins.  Panels are different those need to be closed.  Do you have any aja or blackmagic drivers installed?