Copy/pasting long sequence is extremely slow

[Joost van der Hoeven]

On a big Production, copy/pasting long (1h40m documentary) sequences is really slow from one project in de production to an other. Feels linke Pr hangs, but eventually, like 7 minutes later is will respond again. While using the duplicate command on the same sequence is faster. This is in Pr 23.2 on a Mac Studio, 32 GB RAM, with a 10 GBit conection to a server. Project is UHD. Media Manager caltulates that the footage used in that sequence is 4,6 TB. Proxy are in use and active.

This feels like a bug. Is it? 

[mattchristensen]

@Joost van der Hoeven you can copy/paste items between applications like Premiere Pro and After Effects, and the way this works is that when you use the Copy command in Premiere Pro, the items you selected are bundled up into their own mini-project and put onto the system clipboard. For most things there's no real delay, but, for very large sequences there can be quite a delay as essentially an entire new project structure is made for the clipboard.

For your use case in a large production, I'd recommend two alternate approaches that avoid putting everything on the clipboard:

1. Duplicate the sequence, then drag it over to the new project. Or you can hold Command/Ctrl while dragging and a copy will be made.
2. If the sequence is by itself in a project, you can also right click > Make a Copy on the project and now you've duplicated the project and sequence, very quickly.

[Joost van der Hoeven]

Thanks for the details @mattchristensen, I now undestand what the copy command actually does. Will use this info in may training/teaching. And thanks for the alternative methods!

[johnpooley3]

Check this behaviour in 2024. I am being told by some of my editors that copy-paste performance in 2023 was abysmal compared to 2022 and 2024. @mattchristensen fyi