Stuttering Preview for Premiere Projects on network drives

I am a desktop support technician. Two staff in the marketing team have asked for assistance with previews in Adobe Premiere Pro. The previews are horribly choppy or stuttering. It is so bad it seems to freeze every 30 secs.

Having putzed around with these staff I believe the clear source of the problem is that they are opening large project files across our WAN.

They are trying to store them in a team network drive so they can collaborate on them.

The folder of the Project we have been testing on appears to be around 1.6 GB. Our network shares are centralized in a data center that is not in the same suburb. I expect the stuttering comes from Premiere trying to access a scratchdir across the WAN.

Copying the test project folder to one of the laptops took > 9 minutes. Once you get the folder to the c: drive it runs like a dream. Obviously copying the folder to the c: drive, working on it and copying it back is a bloody poor workaround.

If you:

• open it from the network share and
• get our far more experienced Marketing Manager sets the video and audio scratch dirs for video and audio to "c:\videos"

-it works better (but not as well as running it solely from the c: drive).

Opening the folder from a network share in the office (within the LAN) is better but we still get significant stutter. We also got six alerts about difficulty finding linked files. The lady I was assisting expected something like this ("Moving projects breaks links to files").

Opening the Project from within the office network folder -with the scratch dir set to the local c: drive- will probably work fairly well. For ONE user.

If the Marketing Manager changes the scratch dir location (Edit > ‘Project Settings’ I believe) and saves the project what will happen to his assistant?

Will it use HER c: drive as the scratch dir?

Will it try to access his c: drive?

Will it crash Premiere or at least generate and error?

**What I would dearly love to see is a way to set the Project to set the scratch dir to be the c:\temp\folder of any computer used to open the Project. I am thinking things like variables or loopback addresses or something.

Is this possible?

Is Premiere set up for collaboration in this way? I am told lock files or something similar will prevent two staff accessing the same project at once. Does Premiere have enough smarts to be used across a LAN or WAN with local scratch disks for whoever opens the Project?

Other details because the first forum links advises it is good ettiquete.

Version:               Adobe Premiere Pro 2017.0.2. v11, Tanq

Updates:             Creative Cloud updated this within the last two weeks.

OS:         Microsoft Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (64 bit)

Source footage: varied

Error:     None playback is just VERY stuttery.

When problem occurs:   Preview playback from within Premiere

Worked before: Possibly. I don't understand how though.

What else is running:      During tests, nothing

3rd Party effects:             None so far as I know.

Hardware.

=========

Processor            Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz

O/S        Microsoft Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (64 bit)

RAM      15.6 GB of usable memory

Hard-disk space AFTER installation            125 GB free

Displays                Currently 1920x1080 and 1280*1024 (dual screens).

Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration?       Unknown - don't want to bother my end-users yet again.

The problem seems to happen with the Preview via Premiere. Playing it from the same folder via another app (e.g. Windows Media Player) does not give any stutters - Possibly the full file is cached on the c: drive before it tries to play?