Color Balance Effect - loading CPU %100 - Preview Playback not Smooth - Performance Problem

[Cenk227962368d04]

Hello,

When I add Color Balance effect to a video in addition to other effects already in the project such as Levels, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask etc..and start preview playback in Full Resolution, my CPU utilisation goes up to %90-100% however the preview is not playing smoothly, its like stoppping and resuming for a very short period continously until the end, the playback is continuously interrupted - like a performance issue.

When I remove Color Balance and leave the other effects untouched, the problem is not seen. Interestingly, when I remove all other effects and have only Color Balance, then the problem is not seen. It looks like using another effect together with Color Balance (I tried Sharpen, Levels, Unsharp Mask) together is loading the CPU 100% and causing a performance issue. However, Color Balance alone is not.

Preview starts playing smoothly only when I decrease playback resolution to 1/4.

The video is 4K 120fps HEVC 4:2:0 (Full Range) and audio is 48KHz Stereo. If I remove audio, the problem is the same so audio has no effect.

My system is:

CPU: Intel i9-12900KS

RAM: 64GB DDR5 6000MHz Dual Channel Dual Sided Dual Slot RAM - running at 6000MHz overclocked.

Disks: Samsung 970 NVMe SSD 1TB for Windows 11 OS, Samsung 980 NVMe SSD 1TB for media cache files, Samsung 980 NVMe SSD 1TB for media files. 

GPU: Gigabyte NVIDIA RTX 3090

Motherboard: MSI Pro Z790-A WIFI

Premiere Pro:

* version: 23.1.0  (Build 86)

* settings:

- hardware decoding and encoding are enabled: NVIDIA tick box is ticked. Intel tick box not ticked.

- video rendering and playback - renderer: Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)

- project scracth disks: Samsung 1TB 980 NVMe SSD

During preview with Color Balance and other effects together:

- CPU frequency stays around 5.1 - 5.2 GHz during preview with all P-cores shooting up to 100%.

- GPU utilisation is around %70-%80

- Total GPU memory used during preview is 8 GB

- Preview is using 5.5GB dedicated GPU memory during playback

Any ideas for where the problem is or any recommendations for  how to increase the performance to achieve a smooth preview in Full Resolution when Color Balance is used in combination with other effects is very much appreciated.

Many thanks,

Suphi

[Richard M Knight · Accepted solution]

Any of the sharpen effects are very processor intensive, you may have to render the timeline.