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AndrewTheGreat
AndrewTheGreat
Known Participant
April 10, 2026

Premiere + BorisFX = insane lags

  • April 10, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 64 views

Hi, I know that the title implies I should post it on BorisFX forums (which I also did), but I’d post here too since Adobe should cooperate with BorisFX in order to solve their common problem.

The problem lies in insane performance drop when BorisFX plugins are used in Premiere Pro. 

Here’s a screenshot of a single BCC Film Glow:

Just one property is animated with 3 keyframes, and the timeline shows this already:

In a FHD sequence with a 8-bit 420 4K clip in h264. I can assure you that the long-gop here is not the problem. I have a 14700K-RTX-4080-64Gb PC which plays back 9 physical copies of this staff with no frame drops but a single BorisFX effect nails my system down. And it happens with any BFX effect. 

I have no problems with any other third-party plugins, Film Impact here can even be used in batches and no playback issues at all. But BFX are just the worst performers, any of them.

And I checked the same BFX plugins in Davinci and magically there are no issues there. All the BorisFX effect are played back in real time and render fast, so it’s a Premiere Pro specific issue.

For those who will ask this - I have BCC v19.0.1 but the plugins version does not matter at all since the problem just accompanies these plugins since their first day, I think. Something must be done here.

      2 replies

      Warren Heaton
      Community Expert
      Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      April 10, 2026

      Whenever we see red in the Time Ruler, that’s a good time to render a Sequence Preview for smooth playback.  When that turns green after a Preview is rendered, it should play smoothly.

      AndrewTheGreat
      AndrewTheGreatAuthor
      Known Participant
      April 11, 2026

      You should not have written this to a person who’s used Premiere for 15 years. I obviously know how it works and obviously it is not an inch a way out especially with complex workflows and multi-storey effects.

      Stop trying to edit and EDIT!
      R
      Community Manager
      Rach McIntireCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      April 10, 2026

      Hi ​@AndrewTheGreat,

       

      Always good to hear from you.  Thanks for the detailed report and the screenshot. The fact that the same BorisFX effects play back in real time in DaVinci but not in Premiere is a useful data point and worth looking into on our end.

       

      A few questions that would help:

      • What exact version of Premiere are you on?
      • Does the performance issue occur with BCC effects on all clip types, or specifically with long-GOP H.264 footage?
      • Does applying BCC effects to a short test clip in a brand new project show the same behavior?
      • Have you tried disabling GPU acceleration for the BCC effect specifically within the BorisFX plugin settings?

       

      I will also flag this for the team. That said, since you have already contacted BorisFX, it would be worth asking them specifically whether they have a GPU rendering path configured differently for Premiere versus Resolve, as that might explain the discrepancy.

       

      Sorry for the frustration. Thanks for flagging this.

      AndrewTheGreat
      AndrewTheGreatAuthor
      Known Participant
      April 10, 2026

      Hi, ​@Rach McIntire Rach McIntire

      It’s Premiere 26.0.2. I normally work with h264-265 long-gops, most of the time. I also work with mxfs compressed in XDCAM HD422 which is also long-gop, and it had the same issues. So I converted a file into Apple Prores just now and… it got even worse! My whole PC was freezing, even the mouse was lagging and I could barely take this screenshot:

      Then I dropped a film impact and a couple of Red Giant effects (randomly) on it and marvelously all the freezes were gone. Though I definitely saw the timeline go red, it played back with no dropped frames.

      As for short clips in new projects - it’s better. Some BCC effects are fine, they even go real time (after a short lag) though almost always with dropped frames. Right now in this project of mine you can see there’s only one track occupied with video clips:

      ...plus a bunch of text layers in 4 parts. This project should be a piece pf cake for my machine and it is until you hover your mouse over the first 4 seconds where the BorisFX Film Glow resides on one single clip and you are done. I showed the amount of dropped frames in the first message above - it’s exactly the part. I just cannot understand how so simple effects can demand so much machine power.

      By the way, there’s this screenshot above where I showed a prores + BCC, you can see how my CPU is sweating while my videocard is nearly idle (it’s normal for Prores but it’s not for a GPU accelerated effects which BCC claim to be, so it’s strange too), but I can confirm that my PC is nearly idle on long-gops too. As if the resources of my PC are not correctly distributed for the calculation of BCC effects. In Davinci where everything is GPU-accelerated, I get this picture with the same file and the same effect:

      And this is what I see in Premiere:

      I suppose the GPU spike happens when Premiere decodes the h264 file, because then it goes down but the CPU load stays high. 

      And finally. I haven’t tried disabling the GPU acceleration, I doubt it’s help, but let’s try this one too. What do you recommend, turning off CUDA renderer in the project settings or NVidia GPU decoding in the Preferences? Or both?

      Stop trying to edit and EDIT!
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