Extreme Lag on 30-minute Multicam Sequence

Question

Hi there,

For context - I'm a professional commercial editor who regularly edits 4K & 8K footage, plus fairly intricate motion graphics in After Effects on my MacBook Pro (specs below), usually with little to no noticable lag in either program. Most of the videos I edit are under 5 minutes in runtime.

I'm working on a side project with a 30-minute long sequence which mostly consists of a 4-camera nested multicam sequence, and I'm experiencing lag like I never have before. Almost every function in Premiere, even just switching between sequences or panels, moving my playhead to a different position, or changing tools, brings up the spinning rainbow wheel and takes up to a minute, making editing almost impossible. I don't often work with sequences longer than 10 minutes or with multicam footage, so I'm not sure if I'm missing something. The footage is XAVC S 4K (mp4), shot on a Sony A7III, and I made 1024x540 Apple ProRes 422 (mov) Proxies.

One of the "cameras" being referenced in the multicam sequence is itself a nested sequence, which I'm using to add some masks over parts of the frame I want to cover. Not sure if that could be an issue. I've also been passing my premiere file back and forth with another editor who uses a PC. Doesn't seem like that would cause a problem but I'm just trying to account for all the new variables.

Some things I've done already:

- confirmed my proxies are attached, and the proxy button is enabled.

- closed all other programs to maximize my Premiere's memory usage.

- dropped the viewing resolution to 1/4

I could probably try "flattening" the multicam sequence, but I'm not at the stage where all of my angles are locked down yet, so I want to retain the ability to switch them.

Any tips? Does a longer sequence or using the multicam feature normally slow down Premiere dramatically?

֑nubnubbud · Answer

AE is a 30 year old program made for editing single VFX shots, not scenes, hence the lack of a proper multi-track NLA editor. It is mostly not multithreaded (you heard that right, more cores get single percent uplifts and GPU is basically not used, and RAM is used to hold previews.

now, Macs have a nasty habit of being really liberal with swapping. On Mac, many programs (such as Blender, will not throw an error when you run out of RAM, and will simply thrash your disk, shortening its lifespan and becoming glacially slow to use. I'll also just come out and say, AE likes big, fast CPU cores. Yours runs at roughly half the clock speed of one I got 7 years back. You might wanna check your temps too. Macbooks are notorious for poor thermal design, and firmware that's throttled super hard to keep it under temps in such a hot (but smooth and shiny) environment.

It's not reccommended that you use shots over, say, 30 seconds. AE is bad enough at storage and optimization, that 30-60 seconds at 4K+ can max out intel's consumer RAM limit of 128GB. Also note that if you switch resolution, the previous resolution will not immediately be cleared from RAM which can sometimes be a bit funky with RAM and playback.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded