Quicktime MOV files causing long slow load save times

I know this may not resolve any of your issues, but it has seemed to work for me in at least a few situations where I had AE comps (with MOV assets) within Premiere Pro.  If your issues are strictly with Premiere Pro projects that have no AE comps, then I'm guessing this won't help you at all- but in case anyone happened to overlook their AE assets, maybe this will be helpful- if not, sorry to waste your time.

I actually haven't noticed problems with Premiere Pro with MOVs, but certainly, have with AE. I had a Premiere Pro project (Premiere Pro CC18 12.1.2 build 69) that was taking several minutes to save.  I discovered my problem to be some dynamically linked AE files that happened to have a rogue MOV file within the AE project.  I always make it a point of "Render and Replace"ing the files within Premiere Pro to DNxHD first, then "Replace with After Effects Composition", so that I never bring QuckTime files in AE.  But somehow I missed this or it was from a previous project that I imported.  My fix was:

I renamed "ImporterQuickTime.prm" to "ImporterQuickTime.prm.old" within "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2018\Support Files\(Media Core plug-ins)\Common"

This let me open the premiere pro project and save almost instantly, even with the AE files still being present.  HOWEVER, obviously, the Quicktime assets I had in AE show as offline.  In my case this wasn't a problem because I knew what the QT video was and simple transcoded it in Media Encoder, then brought it back into AE.  Getting rid of the ImporterQuickTime.prm also prevents me from accidentally importing QuickTime media.  I've actually had AE projects crash while opening due to QT assets.  Removing this importer cripples the project (I had to transcode and relink EVERY offline qt asset), but I was at least able to open the project (which was literally impossible after AE decided one day it was no longer going to open the project- I think it knew I had a deadline).

In any case, maybe this doesn't help anyone or doesn't actually have anything to do with the original issue you're posting about, but maybe it'll help the person like me who couldn't pinpoint exactly what the issue was but knew it was something to do with Adobe and QuickTime.

-Stephen

digitlman  wrote ... i remove those files and import 10 quicktime MOV files. They take a very long time to import and then when i hit save it takes a very long time. It actually "hangs" the program in windows sometimes and even will say (Not Responding) at the top for a while sometimes but then eventually saves. ... Any ideas?

I concur... I actually hit the same issue... I've had tons of the same types of MOV files in AE just last year, and with more complex projects, and it never took this long before.  I did a web search and found your post.

My footage is straight from a 70D (H.264 within .MOV), each MOV added to AEP seems to add very roughly about 1.3 seconds of save time.

Easy to reproduce: I grab 10 files, pop into aep, takes about 15 seconds to save, add 9 more, takes about ~25 seconds. Note, the resulting AEP is 103KB, tiny... so something's else is up.

I dug further with perf tools...

ImporterMPEG.prm seems to be making ~800 calls to dxgi.dll!CreateDXGIFactory1 per h.264 MOV file. Each call takes about 1 millisecond so that portion alone seems to be causing about 800 milliseconds (close to a second) per file added to the project. It's puzzling that ImporterMPEG.prm is asking for so many IDXGIFactory1 instances, about 800 per file. I don't know why that code path would need to enumerate adapters so many times within a second, or add such adapter enumerations per file.

I sense either a code change which inadvertently incurred this penalty because the author was not expecting the cost, or where this API call was already in place for a long while but it's implementation and therefore overhead increased sometime recently. I unfortunately don't have time to install old CC versions to test further... but if installing CC2017 makes the issue go away, it would indicate this AE code path changed in CC2018... if not, it might mean a dx change or some such.

Until there's a fix, the only work around I can think of would be to transcode to a format which does not hit this, or limit files which cause impact from being added to the project. Since I don't have the disk space to convert every mov I need to use in projects, I'll just deal with it until there's a fix and try not to add MOVs I don't know for certain I need in the AE project.

Note, the above is what I observed on my system.. I can't say it's the same issue as yours but it certainly seems like it.

What codec are you using with your .MOV?

When did you start noticing this slowdown? Was a script, software or Extension installed recently? Are these files on a network? Have you tried working with QT files on a local drive?

You're not trying to use AE as a video editing application when you should be using Premiere Pro, are you?