Hi, I'm a professional video editor and use the Adobe Suite to get everything out of my brain and into a video. Over the last year and a bit I've noticed a trend that really worries me for the future, performance in the latest versions of Premiere (especially on windows) on complex timelines is practically unusable.
I want to preface this post;
I use premiere on both macOS (at work) and windows (at home). The mac being an m1 studio and my windows pc being a 5900x, 3070ti, 64GB of ram and only solid state storage. All projects get rendered to proxies and only get worked on off of them. The rest of work uses v23 project files so for the most part I'm also using v23 (I don't often need to work from home). I've done all the typical troubleshooting steps like wiping cache/plugin cache, resetting workspaces, reinstalling, etc, etc.
My main complaint really is skewed more towards windows, v23.5/6 on macOS is.. at least usable, during the cutting phase, and then utilising rendering previews beyond that is slow but works. But windows continues to trend in the opposite direction.
Here is a tweet showing just a slice of what it's like to work in v23.6 on windows: [link1]
and here's the exact same project file after using a web tool to downgrade the project file to open it in v22.3.1: [link2]
I apologise for the harsh wording in the tweets but as you can imagine, trying to deal with this in the middle of a work day is incredibly frustrating when I have deadlines that need to be hit.
My timelines consist of two multi-cam tracks and another nested track that contains 5 perspectives at the same time and then a final nested sequence - my timelines ARE heavy, even just in the cutting phase that's a fair bit to deal with but with modern hardware it's basically nothing to zip through all of it before any effects are being applied. And yet that v23.6 clip is before any effects have been placed on anything and is during my initial rough cut pass, meanwhile the v22.3.1 clip is after I've started making more adjustments to clips..
But Premiere's performance dropping to near 0 as soon as there are a substantial amount of edit points on the screen feels like a joke, there's no way rendering that many lines is enough to bring the program to its knees... right??
These two clips only show a small sliver of things that seem to be going backwards in more recent versions; from timeline performance that ranges from pressing play/pause and waiting tens of seconds for a response, to adjusting something as simple as x/y position or scale and waiting seconds for the video to show those adjustments, to just other elements of the UI slowing to a crawl for absolutely no reason at all.
I will say that the earlier versions of v23 were even worse than the last few releases, 23.0-23.4~ weren't even worth trying at all and proxies somehow made things worse (so maybe we're trending back in the right direction?).
I would really just love to see Premiere trend back towards (and then even beyond) performance of v22.3.1, but as it stands I'm stuck on those earlier versions until things improve. I really do love using Premiere, I just really wish the focus at the moment with Resolve pulling away more and more of the userbase was to get performance up to par more than focusing on shiny new features (don't get me wrong, they're great too and I'm sure there are multiple teams doing different things). Adobe's reputation for having near unusable software feels less fake than ever lately.
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