Mac M1 and Windows Premiere Pro performance is so bad with h264 footage

[Gabby16bit]

I know h264 is hard to transcode ecc. 

But if final cut can handle it, why not premiere Pro?

I used to edit with vegas h264 back in the days and zero lag.

If you use one h264 track is ok. But if you have to do picture in picture then two tracks and it explode.

It happens a lot on my windows machine aswell. I'm always on the last beta version, because the normal

one lags more. I remember there was a release in the beta not much time ago that was perfect for windows, it stopped the lag for h264 footage, but a version later it appeared again. What? 

When i edit on two tracks 60 fps it lags so bad that is impossibile to edit.

When i edit in 30 fps is almost ok with occasional lag on M1

on windows the timeline is faster but overall editing is clunky and not smooth.

Please consider that a lot of creators nowaday are using h264 for editing, so is important to have this CODEC. I personally use it because i like that it has small file size and is more pratical for what i have to do. 

Mac m1 Mini 16 gb ram

My windows machine specs:

Windows11

RTX 3080

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

32 GB ram

X

Footage attached.

[Ann Bens]

Moved to Premiere beta forum.

[R Neil Haugen]

I work with and teach professional colorists. Almost all have what would have been called "heavy iron" in the trade. MASSIVE computers, typically with 256GB of RAM, multiple attached physical huge 10Gbe RAIDs, we're talking basic computers that cost over $15,000 to begin with. BEFORE adding the i/o cards from BlackMagic and AJA, the pro reference monitors, outboard scopes ...

And they despise H.264. They can typically run multiple 8k Red files without issue ... but two H.264/5 files will cut the performance dramatically. On the beefiest computers out there.

So what do they do? As part of the coform process to get the project's media and EDL/XML files into Resolve or Baselight, if there's any significant H.264, those files are transcoded to a middle/upper grade ProRes prior to beginning the grade. Or at the very least, ProRes proxies are made to do the working process with them.

Yea, H.264 ain't good stuff. Small, yes; but lousy for editing/grading/fx work.

Neil

[Gabby16bit]

Hi Neil thank you for your point.

I understand that, but still there are softwares like Final Cut and Sony Vegas that can handle them better than premiere pro. Why i can edit h264 without significant slow down on DaVinci or Final Cut and in Premiere Pro it almost crash the software sometimes. I think there is room for improvment to make this software better handle footage like a normal 1080p h264 i'm not even talking about 4k stuff. But basic 30 / 60 fps 1080p.

- Gabriel

[R Neil Haugen]

It varies by machine. And note, my comments about colorists are TOTALLY Resolve based ... they don't work in Premiere of course. And they hate long-GOP media with a purple passion. On their mega machines.

Would it be better if any particular codec worked better? Of course. But H.264/5 are simply problematic codecs across apps. And the variability of performance for H.264/5 is based on the specific combination of all the hardware bits and the way the software utilizes them. Each app handles some things differently than another, which is part of why some rigs work better with X app than Y.

They have added more use of hardware bits in Premiere over the last year, thankfully. As long as you make sure you've got the hardware encode and decode options checked in the Preferences, that's the most you can do right now.

Neil

[Gabby16bit]

I wish i never bought an Amd CPU then, Intel is better for h264. My laptop (intel) can edit in PP h264 better than my rig. Now they are releasing a new sobstitute for h264 which is AV1 and looks better aswell. I hope this will save my some space, because i will need a lot of space for 1 hour long footage in prores...

Thank you.

[Gabby16bit]

beside that i'm talking about the m1 mac which cannot vary so much in configurations, but you just can't multitrack editing h264 on that machine. I will see if switching prores will improve my workflow at least on mac.