Annoying amount of dropped Frames in Premiere Pro CC. FIX IT.

[Garrett Despain]

Constant dropped frames in premiere pro. Extremely frustrating. To the point I'm scrubbing back over and over again to try and watch it fluidly.

Macbook Pro late 2016.

2.9ghz intel core i7.

16gb DDR

Radeon Pro 460

Intel HD 530

-I've tried proxies. Footage currently proxied from 4K to 720p at 1/4th res playback.

-Another forum mentioned to hide the workspace bar, no dice.

-I am not in Lumetri scopes.

Working off an external drive, USB-C SSD. Plenty of space on drive and on the computer.

[Garrett Despain]

Every thread I've found offers many ideas but NONE of the other threads have been solved.

[Garrett Despain]

Super weird Neil... Adobe just did an update and improved performance on macbook pro users - now I'm having no issues at all and running smooth as butter BEFORE proxies. They did fix it, so thank you Adobe!

Neil . . Something something slow GPU... 4 core something something?

[R Neil Haugen]

Let's see ... a laptop with a slow, 4-core CPU and a GPU that's a bit slower according to online comparisons than the old Nvidia 970's, with your apparently 4k media on an external drive. If you're running long-GOP media on that, standard mov/mp4 from DSLR/mirror-less/drone/devices, that stuff needs many fast cores with a bunch of RAM per core.

So, what's the original media?

And did you use the Cineform proxy presets, or make the rather common mistake  of using H.264 for proxies? The whole reason for proxies is of course to get something that plays back better ... and using a long-GOP codec with the high load of CPU/RAM that entails is not a good choice.

Neil

[Garrett Despain]

I'd humbly accept your response without insult if this problem wasn't all-of-a-sudden. I've been editing on this machine, same footage, with no problem up until recently. I have changed no workflow, and now I'm having issues. I'm considering just editing off my PC that I built for gaming at this rate, if it is my machine.

Proxied to 422 LT. Original media is h.264 Linear PCM - 4K 150mbps, MOV files (8 bit).

Curious if you think I should proxy them to something else?

When I first got this machine brand new, I wouldn't even proxy the files and wouldn't get this many dropped frames (I would drop quality to 1/4 playback, and still got dropped frames, but not this bad). Thanks for your input.

[R Neil Haugen]

PrPro takes a bit more horsepower each version. It's a pain but what the hay.

That H.264 is nasty stuff for editing as it requires so many core/RAM create/recall cycles per frame. As most of my media is that, I've good experience. And I'll run to the Cineform what ... 960x540 proxy preset.

Next, I've had OS updates and other things that have messed my playback also. So it could be something like that. Or some other app now has an update that reserved resources of some kind.

If you're using ProRes proxies that's probably fine. As I understand things all ProRes are intraframe.

A couple people recently who had performance issues finally reformatted their OS drive and reinstalled everything with PrPro the first app installed after the OS.

And were amazed how much faster PrPro ran.

That said, hope you're budgeting for a new rig. I'm running a 6-core 32GB RAM with a GTX1060. And looking at going to 8 core and moving up the other items accordingly.

Doing stuff in PrPro, Ae, and Resolve. They're doing ok, but ... as I'm adding more effects than I used to, well ... another version and I'll need more is what I'm expecting.

Neil

[elkalamar]

I'm similarly starting to see some problems with dropped frames - without going into the details, I had tested quite thoroughly my files at the start of the project, and have created proxies for those which will not play back smoothly. All good. But now, I'm starting to find that codec / resolution combos which previously worked fine are now stuttering during playback, and sometimes the timeline is getting laggy when hitting the spacebar.

Have deleted cache, out of curiosity, and it makes no difference.

I haven't updated my OS (or anything else on my system for that matter), and I'm still in the same version of PP (12.1.1).

I'm baffled as to why the dropped frames have started now (and how to solve the issue)

[Ann Bens]

You could reinstall premiere and before doing so use Cleaner Tool.

[elkalamar]

Thank you Ann, that's useful to know as a potential solution (though I'm mid-project and can't really afford to be doing that right now - still it's good to know)

[R Neil Haugen]

Doing a CC Cleaner Tool uninstall, reboot, reinstall takes about 15 minutes. And can be done without disturbing any current projects.

Neil

[elkalamar]

Ah, good to know. But will it be possible to install the current version I am running? (12.1.1)

I don't want to get into a position where I have to install the latest version (for the same reason that I'm in the middle of a project, I don't want to risk updating to 12.1.2 which appears similarly buggy)

[Ann Bens]

[elkalamar]

Thank you Ann!

[elkalamar]

I'm considering doing this to see if it helps. Am I going to lose my encoding / export presets in Premiere? Of course they can be recreated but I would prefer not to have to do that. So two questions I suppose, towards trying to solve the dropped frames:

1. Deinstalling PP & using Adobe Media Cleaner prior to reinstall, will I lose my export presets? And for that matter, my ingest proxy presets?

2. If so, is it possible to save these presets so that they can be made available again after reinstall?

[Vishu_Aggarwal]

You can try updating Premiere pro to the latest version Bug fixes in Premiere Pro version 12.1.2 which have bug fixes related to playback & rendering 

[elkalamar]

Thanks - yes I'm aware that I could but I'm waiting to see what the next update is like, 12.1.2 potential introduces further bugs/problems that I'm not experiencing in 12.1.1

[Garrett Despain · Accepted solution]

Let it be known, the new update fixed my problems. (Premiere Pro 13.0 October 15th 2018 release) Good luck everyone.

[elkalamar]

Hi Gary, that's good to know. I hope this works for everyone.

I did try deinstalling PrPro and using Adobe Media Cleaner tool prior to reinstall as advised here, and it made no difference whatsoever. So hoping this latest update works (and doesn't bring in new bugs of it's own!)

cheers

[athinab45863125]

This issue seems to come up with nearly every release its like Dropped Frame roulette every update! I was getting dropped frames stuffering playback, Premier Pro unresponsive and crashing. all thats mentioned here and in other threads. Im running AMD 1100T on Asus M5A97 with SSD system drive and media on NAS. I have preview files set to local storage (SSD).

I just wanted to share what worked for me after hours of trying different combinations.... In the sequence settings change the edit format to anything MPEG2. I found a Cannon one "Cannon XF MPEG2 1080i/p" and suddenly I can play the whole sequence through with zero dropped frames (occasionally 1 or 2 frames dropped which I can live with). This was true with both CUDA and Software rendering.

Im not fully sure why this is but likely its to do with the way MPEG2 can be decompressed a lot easier than H264 which most of the other editing modes are.

You could also try converting all your project clips to MPEG2 before starting for the same reasons (I haven't but I suspect it will speed things up dramatically, will try soon). If youre wondering what bitrate to use etc just use exact same rate as the original. H264 is only better than MPEG2 at lower bitrates. Once you get up to the rates that come out of 1080 or 4k cameras the quality is pretty much the same. Doing this will significantly lighten the load on your system.

Hope this helps!

[nickb50244379]

This made all the difference!! No idea why but on Premiere Pro CC 2019 13.1.2 it's like night and day.