Premiere playback of sequences and clips choppy and choking, impossible to view edits

Question

I'm trying to edit in premiere pro with a 2014 macbook pro 2GHz laptop.

The playback for the video sequences and clips is so choppy and sometimes completely chokes making it impossible to edit. The sound playback is fine however.

Embarrassingly when I imported clips (GoPro Timelapse) into iMovie the playback was fine and took 5 mins to cut.

I've used this laptop to edit previously with no problems although I don't think we were using 4k footage.

We've tried different external drives, different sequence settings, 1/8 playback quality and everything else we can think of (my friend is a professional editor) and nothing is working. Its the same result for GoPro mp4, Drone mov, Sony 4k mp4, and Sony MXF files............... Help?

R Neil Haugen · Answer

Hmmm ... the files you're having difficulties with are all H.264 long-Gop codec rigs. Some of the nastiest media to edit ever created. Even GoPro for the manual for their Studio software included the following bit about why one should transcoded their own cameras to Cineform (an interframe codec) before attempting serious editing:

Comparing basic playback players with an NLE is comparing a thumb-drive and Jupiter. They don't have really anything in common. Especially in the load the two software types put on the system.

You have two options ... transcode to an interframe codec (every frame is a complete but compressed frame) such as Cineform, DNxHD/R or ProRes (ProRes is Mac-only encoding), or on ingestion into PrPro, have Cineform proxies made.

Either can work for you, the latter is probably a little quicker & easier. Either way, you only use the transcodes or proxies for the project, don't worry about storing them as you can re-create them later without issue from you small original media files.

Neil

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