Can´t play/preview 4k footage

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 4, 2021
4 replies
4011 views

Hi everyone,

I have a problem that i can't find a solution for.

I have a dual pc setup and I recently recorded 4k footage from Streamlabs obs from gaming pc, and i can see the footage without any problem with the VLC player, but when i import it and try to edit it on Premiere Pro, the preview player freezes constantly again and again, can't really see what i want to edit. Its a 295GB file and i have a i9, 32GB Ram and a 2080ti. Please, someone tell me what the issue is and why it happens and how to fix it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpeb3Ozss9w&feature=emb_imp_woyt

I wish you all a great 2021!

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Phillip Harvey

Community Expert

The media you work with has a lot to do with your performance inside of Premiere (or any editing software).

Things like:

Video Codec -- Some codecs are good for editing, some are for streaming and playback -- part of why if something plays well in VLC or another media player, it doesn't mean that it will work well in editing software. (H264/5 is the video codec you'll be working with from OBS, and this is a delivery format meant for playback, not editing.)

Bitrate -- How much data needs to be piped through your system? How fast is the drive that it's on? This isn't likely your issue as the files coming from OBS are usually fairly compressed h264 files, however you do have a large file size, so depending on the duration maybe you do actually have a high bitrate file - you would need to specify.

Variable Framerate (where applicable) -- And in your case it's probably applicable. Anything shot on a phone or screen capture can have Variable Framerate (VFR), which can wreak havoc in editing software. This is also another example of something that works fine in a video player but not editing software. A video player can change the FPS on the fly, whereas editing software is trying to work in a constant framerate.

Framerate -- Higher framerate is more to decode at a faster rate. The higher you go, the worse it will make any issues related to your video codec even more difficult.

So chances are you have some compounding issues here. High res, high framerate, bad editing codec, potentially VFR, and potentially high bitrate. As other users have pointed out, you didn't really tell us anything about what you have.

Resources:

VFR: https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/wiki/faq/vfr

Codecs: https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/15/choose-the-right-codec/

Media Info: https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

Peru Bob

Community Expert

Also:

What are the hard drives (how many, what kind, what is on each, and how full)?

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Phillip Harvey

Community Expert

Since that's 7TB I'll go ahead and assume it's an HDD, but what is the drive speed?

Your media is a high bitrate at almost 1000Mbps

A regular 5400rpm HDD speed is going to top out somewhere around 800-900 Mbps, and a 7200 won't be a whole lot farther ahead of that, so it's possible that you are exceeding your I/O speeds with that media and getting frame drops.

Even if that's not the case, it's still 60FPS, high bitrate, H264, so even if it was on an SSD I still don't know if it would play that easily. Good news is that it's not variable framerate.

I would just make a low res, low bitrate proxy out of that. I usually just go for the low resolution Quicktime ProRes Proxy preset that's native to Premiere.

Peru Bob

Community Expert

Please use the free MediaInfo and post a screenshot the properties of your media in tree view:
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

Many users are having issues with VFR. If the file is variable frame rate, use Hand brake to convert to constant frame rate:
https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
Here is a tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=xlvxgVREX-Y