Premiere Pro 24.1 unpredictable performance on M2 PRO

[TomKan]

Others have brought this up and I can't see any solutions except to wait for a release that makes Premiere Pro v24.x not hang on every command with the spinning disc. I not only have all the symptoms others have stated but I also have this weird audio problem whereby the audio track is silent on repeated tries to playback. Then it just works. And then it fails again. For a while.

The one indication I can see in the lagging performence behavior of 24.1 appears to relate to other interconnected features being automatically engaged. Text transcription, for example, might send the CPU off to think a bit before that minor audio cut/edit is completed many seconds later. All functions appear to be waiting for something before proceeding with whatever that step entails. I do find that this behavoir worsens over time and that if the app is restarted frequently, the amount of waiting is diminished but grows again. Somewhere there is a bug causing anything and everything in Premiere Pro to wait. Every step. And I suspect new AI features may be part of the problem, with their CPU/GPU intensive demands for even the most innoccuous of tasks. 

Grr. Please fix this ASAP. Top priority, please!

Tom

[Bruce Bullis]

> Please fix this ASAP. 

It's not immediately apparent from your post, what behavior you'd like us to fix...? 

It sounds like you're experiencing pretty bad performance. To address it, we'd need to know the specific steps you're taking, that provoke the poor performance. [Lots of users see great performance on M2 machines, myself included, so we're hopeful that there's some other issue provoking the problem.] And yes, text transcription can be pretty demanding...

> All functions appear to be waiting for something before proceeding with whatever that step entails.

That's always been true. 

> I do find that this behavoir worsens over time and that if the app is restarted frequently, the amount of waiting is diminished but grows again.

That's an interesting clue! What are you doing during these PPro sessions, in which the performance worsens? How much memory are you reserving for other applications, in PPro's memory prefs? 

[Bruce Bullis]

Trying to get actionable details.

[Daniel Muirakitan]

It is NOT true that Premiere works perfectly on M2 machines!
I have a Mac M2 Pro and Adobe video programs just don't work right. They become slow, they freeze and crash... This failure reported in the post (in relation to the audios) happens to me too.
My colleagues who have an Apple M2 chip report experiencing stress and difficulties just like mine. Furthermore, there are MANY, MANY posts on the subject, both here in the community and on other forums about editing programs.

It seems that there is a difficulty on Adobe's part in assuming that there are defects to be overcome in its products for Apple M2 users. Support simply disappears and leaves us without any prospect of a solution to our problems (and without working software to be able to work on our projects).

Sad reality and revolting abandonment at the same time.

[Bruce Bullis]

>It is NOT true that Premiere works perfectly on M2 machines!

We believe that you, and others, are encountering the reported issues on M2 machines.
Encouragingly, the problems you're facing do not seem endemic to all M2 machines; PPro works great on many (tens of thousands) of M2 machines, including those belonging to our devs and testers. 

We are pursuing reliable repro cases of those issues, from any users, whether or not they're using M2 machines.

[TomKan]

Bruce,

I expressed this as a general problem because it doesn't seem to matter what I am doing on the timeline. The behavior of PPro is that the spinning disc (which amost always came up On Click before v24.1 but finsished quickly) waits longer to finish the longer I work on my project. It matters not whether I am editing video, cutting a clip, repositioning audio, or simply moving the playback head to play a portion of the project. It just takes longer and longer. I restart the app every 30-40 minutes and the problem mostly goes away until it is bad enough to restart again. If I were on a software engineering team, I might suspect a memory leak but I have plenty of free RAM while the problem occurs. Or I might ssupect there are ever-more-convoluted actions being taken On Click by PPro that cause the wait time to increase each step I take. I would happily get on a Teams or Zoom call with a tech and show them the behavior. 

Tom

[Bruce Bullis]

Helpful, thanks Tom.

[TomKan]

I might be wrong but after locating the automatic transcription setting and turning it off, I am getting much better performance. So it appears that the always processing the transcription in real-time is really inefficient. If the spinning disc returns as before I will post an update, but for now that one setting seems to do the trick. 

Tom

[TomKan]

I was wrong. Turning off auto-transcription didn't eliminate the gross lagging performance. PPro still gets super sluggish within 30 minutes of use. This is a fairly large project with hours of video and audio on the timeline while I pic out the shots to use in the edit. I am certain that load is affecting the performance, but the project is the same size as when I was using v23.x and performance was good. 

Tom

[Mitch W]

Hi Tom,
Both I and another Adobe person emailed you directly about this issue on the 22nd but we didn't get a response. I'm assuming our emails got lost in your spam. We'd like you to capture a process sample for Premiere Pro when the app is in the hung/sluggish state. Check your email for instruction on how to do that. If you can't find the emails, respond here and I'll email you again.

[TomKan]

Went to SPAM. Replying in email. 

Thanks,

Tom

[TomKan]

I just tried Beta v24.3 and the performance has returned for me. I trust it will be in general release soon.

Thanks for listening, Adobe!