H.265 / GH6 "Open Gate" footage, extremely unstable editing

Question

So I've been shooting on a Lumix GH6 for a couple of months now. I've primarily shot on the 5.7k / 24p - ProRes Codec and had almost no issues with editing the footage. Hundreds of hours of footage already, zero major complaints.

This week I switched to the 5.8k / 24p "Open Gate" (anamorphic) mode in the H.265 MOV codec. Everything changed immediately. The edting workflow is perfectly fine (my computer is powerful enough that it isn't an issue). The problem is Premiere just keeps crashing. Mainly when I switch Workspaces, or start to color grade footage (Lumetri Color). Premiere becomes widlly unstable and crashes every couple of minutes toward the end of my edit. I've had more system crashes in the last 2 days of using this footage than I did the previous 1 year of editing on Premiere. Need to see if anyone has thoughts or input on how to improve this, or if it is a known bug?

This recording format is AMAZING for producing vertical social media content (something I do a lot of), but Premiere crashing so much is making the workflow painful. Producing a 1 minute video shouldn't take this much hair pulling. The next worst experience I've had is that Premiere just cannot figure out my Mavic Air 2S drone footage at its 5.8k H.265 level (that I have to transcode to ProRes). Feeling like Premiere and H.265 don't play nice yet. It is very rapidly becoming the standard so that is concerning.

Specs of what I'm working with:

Premiere Pro 22.5.0

Windows 10 (21H2)

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX3080 (Studio Drivers - 516.94 - Released 8/9/22)

RAM: 64GB G.Skill DDR4

SSD: Western Digital 3.84TB Enterprise NVME drive

Camera: Panasonic Lumix GH6 (firmware update V2.0)

Footage: 5.8K Anamorphic (4:3) H.265 MOV codec

mandicreally · Accepted Answer

I figured out my issue.

Despite my computer being relatively powerful, it wasn't powerful ENOUGH. The 5.8K H.265 GH6 footage was using 8-10GB of VRAM on the GPU when editing. As such it would sometimes hit or cross the 10GB amount the RTX 3080 has. When it demanded more RAM than the GPU had, Premiere crashed. I've moved to a RTX 3090Ti with 24GB of VRAM and it is editing well now.

Yes transcoding to ProRes likely would have been a solution as well. However my projects are often made up of 100+ short clips. Transcoding all of my footage before even starting an editing & having redundant files taking up storage space would just be a time waster for me. Luckily I was able to justify the higher spec GPU and I can edit without needing to Transcode now.

Warren Heaton · Answer

For ediitng, ProRes is suprior to H265 in just about every way. Sure, minute for minute the file size is larger, but that's excatly why it's a CODEC for editing.

You'll notice that there's no yellow line in the Timeline with ProRes source footage in a Sequence with the Video Previews at the same ProRes settings as the source even if you reverse or scale the footage. When you do see yellow, let's say for Transitions, they'll render faster as it's ProRes to ProRe (not H265 to I-frame Only MPEG. In other words, you're getting better performace by using a CODEC that's good for editing all around.

It doesn't matter which NLE you're in or how powerful your computer is. H265 isn't an editing CODEC.

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