Playback occasionally becomes terrible for no reason

Question

tl;dr - experiencing terrible playback on multiple projects for extended periods for no apparent reason

I'm generally only working with small to mid-sized projects (~50GB on average)

10-bit H.264 from a Sony A7SIII 1080p 25fps video (sometimes 50fps at 50%)

All footage, project files and cache being run from a high-speed NVMe SSD

Basic colour-grading, standard EQ/compression/mastering on the mixer

Nothing that my PC shouldn't be able to easily handle:

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Storage: 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD (all media, files and cache on one drive)

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5900X 12-core processor @ 4200 MHz

RAM: 64GB @ 2133MHz (58GB reserved for Premiere)

GPU: GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB GDDR6)

And that's the thing - it'll sometimes work fine. Smooth playback, no dropped frames or delays in hitting play/pause. And then apropos of nothing, it sometimes takes a sharp nosedive in performance. Up to 2-second delay when hitting play/pause, struggling to show even 1 frame every 3 seconds, very little improvement despite switching playback resolutions to 1/4 and disabling colour grade. I've also tried the following:

• deleting cache files

• disabling autosave

• priorotise "Performance" in preferences

• disabling/enabling GPU playback

• disabling/enabling high-quality rendering

• resetting audio input/output within preferences

• deleting preferences

• uninstalling/reinstalling Premiere completely

• updating to the latest version

Looking at my PC during these bouts, Premiere is using about 30% of the memory and the CPU is around 50% load with temps under 60°C, nothing out of the ordinary. I'm not running anything else in the background outside a couple of Chrome tabs. The fact that it seems to happen randomly, even with pre-rendered selections of ungraded footage, just doesn't add up. The only way to "fix" it is to restart Premiere, which sometimes solves it... but not always.

So with all that said, does anyone have any ideas on what I might be missing here? I've been doing this for 6 years and feel like I'm pretty clued up when it comes to tech, but this has me absolutely stumped.

Cheers!

PaulCAN · Accepted Answer

Hey folks, just posting an update here for any future fellows who find themselves in a similar pickle.

I think I fixed it! A quick tl;dr followed by details:

1. Uninstall all unecessary programs

2. Delete cache folders from all locations using file explorer (not just Premiere)

3. Ensure Premiere and graphics card drivers are fully updated

4. Set Premiere to High priority on Task Manager

On from @R Neil Haugen's recommendations, I uninstalled a ruck of programs, one of which was "Sparkocam", a 3rd Party webcam interface that curiously wouldn't remove itself until Premiere was closed.

I then dove into the default media cache location (not the one I'd specified/cleared in Premiere) and removed a glut of old files that didn't seem to be doing anything. If you're on Windows, that location is in the following diurectory:

C:\Users\*you*\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common

(you'll have to select View > Enable Hidden Items to see AppData)

Once in the common folder, highlight and delete the Media Cache and Team Projects Cache folders.

I then ensured that Premiere and my graphics drivers were fully updated before restarting my PC and opening Premiere.

Finally, something new I've discovered is setting programs to high priotity, definitely worth doing if you're running a 12-core processor with shtloads of headroom.

• While running Premiere, hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open Task Manager

• Tab over to details and find Adobe Premiere Pro in the list of processes

• Right-click > Set Priority... > High (don't go Realtime, it prety much swallows 100% CPU)

With all this in place, editing/scrubbing/playing/pausing is now faster and more responsive than ever. So if you're reading this and have been encountering some slow-down despite strong specifications, give the above steps a bash to see if it irons out some creases.

R Neil Haugen · Answer

That's a frustrating bit. And has me wondering is some other app is running something in the background at that time that uses just enough resources to slow things. I know some audio drivers for various gaming cards can do this sort of thing marvelously well.

There was another user a couple years ago with a similar thing. He finally wiped his machine, loaded Premiere as the ONLY application ... and worked without issue. Added one app at a time back in over several days. And found that some app was the cause ... with no idea why or how, but with that app installed his playback would randomly (but routinely) go to laggy, then back to fine.

With it uninstalled, no problems. And worse ... he couldn't see anything in the hardware monitoring available as to what it was doing to cause the problems. The interactions these things can have is completely opaque to us users, and ... very frustrating.

Do you have time to do what that guy did to analyze? I don't ... jeepers.

The only thing I'd comment about your setup is Premiere is SO dependent on the cache files for smooth running. I always have the cache files on their own fast drive, and nothing BUT cache files on that drive. Currently, on my second Nvme SSD.

Neil

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