Crashes and playback issues on 1.75 hour documentary feature seq from Premiere production

[MichMcg]

Hi all, 

I've been working on this film since 2017. 2 years ago I converted it to Productions because it was getting very slow and difficult to open up timelines and work. That seemed to help performance for a while but now that I have finally stitched the entire rough cut together, it is bogging down, beachballing and crashing. This happens all over the timeline, not in one particular spot and I find the crash happens most consistently when trying to redraw the timeline while resizing the tracks to do audio edits. I'm working on a iMac Pro 8 core 3.2ghz with 32GB of RAM. Using OS 11.7.1 Big Sur with Premiere v22.6.3. My scratch disk is an OWC 24TB thunderbay Raid 0 using Thunderbolt 3. All camera original footage has been proxied to ProRes proxy resolution, all video I source for achival is also converted to prores proxy. All audio is converted to AIFF or WAV regardless of where it came from. I even convert all the temp stock footage I download into Prores proxy at 1920x1080. The timeline resolution is 1920x1080 and video previews are set as prores proxy. I had some nested sequences in the project but have exported those at ProRes Proxy MOVs and cut them back in. I had 3 instances of motion templates using the waveform generator but have also converted those to ProRes proxy and cut them back in. It is very expensive to upgrade the RAM on my system so I need to know if that is really useful at this point. I know plenty of people who can cut feature films in Premiere and are able to playback without issue. I feel like I'm doing as much as I can to make this easier on Premiere but it continually falls on its face. Any help or guidance is appreciated thank you!

[MichMcg]

Hi All, I'm still having this issue over a year later. Any ideas? thanks!!

[R Neil Haugen]

@mattchristensen  ... any ideas?

[MichMcg]

@Kevin-Monahan any ideas?

Also this is a rough cut the director likes to see the film with LUTS, rather than apply lumetri to every single cut, I have been putting a Lumetri effect on an adjustment layer, which means there are many adjustment layer clips in the timeline. Do you all think this is contributing to the performance issues? Should I just apply the LUT via lumetri directly to the clips? This is not a trivial task so I'm hoping for some ray of hope here before I'm willing to dive into this work. Thanks!

[MichMcg]

@Kevin-Monahan @mattchristensen , I have an update on this project of doom. I've recently bought a mac studio: m2 Max, 96GB RAM, Sonoma 14.5. I'm using premiere 23.6.0 because I can't keep upgrading this project and have it continue to fall apart. I chopped my rough cut from 99 minutes to 30 minute reels. The last 30 minutes which is all multicam with proxies created and synced in ppv23 is not crashing but moving sooooo sloooowly that any copy and paste of a clip from one end the TL to another results in a beach ball and a slow redraw. Pressing play results in 10-20 sec delay and stopping playback has similar delay if not worse. Its basically extremely difficult to cut this film. Any ideas would be deeply appreciated. thank you! ~Michaelle

[Kevin-Monahan]

Have you tried deleting the media cache?

Kevin

[MichMcg]

many times yes, and trashing prefs. all the usual stuff. 

[MichMcg]

I have isolated the timeline into a 15 minutes segment and it is living in its own project in the production. Even this is incredible slow to cut with. I am using markers and multiclips. None of the markers are clip markers they are all sequence markers. The multiclips are 2 angles only with about 4-5 tracks of audio (WAV). Everything is prores proxy at 1920x1080 23.98fps (medium res) All audio is wav files, all stills are jpg or tiff.

[MichMcg]

one thing that has helped at least for the 15 minute timeline was turning off duplicate frame detection. I can scrub through the timeline without a beach ball and maybe edit for a bit. I will also turn it off for the larger timeline but will work in small segments until I hit the slowdown again

[MyerPj]

I'm just following along here, but how do you create or what is a 'multiclip'? Multi-cam clip or merged clip, etc?

[MichMcg]

Sorry I'm using an old term we used to use on Final Cut Pro. Its a multicam clip 🙂 Its when you group several camera angles and audio clips together to form a single clip. Kind of like a fancy nested sequence

[MyerPj]

Cool! I recall from the PP Best Practices Guide, they have a fairly big warning not to use Merged Clips.

Premiere Pro Best Practices Guide

[MichMcg]

Indeed, I have always been a HARD no on merged clips 🙂