Editing Sony FX3 footage.

[ChrisKonjian]

Is anyone else having difficulties editing Sony FX3 footage on their Premiere Pro timelines?

I'm using the latest version of Premiere on a 2020 Mac Mini M1 16GB RAM and my Sony FX3 footage are in 4K 29.97fps and 120fps put on a 1920x1080 25p sequence "25fps to match another main camera".

I had a similar problem before where my files used to glitch while playing them back or even rendering and the glitches where appearing on exports, that was fixed when Adobe Support team asked me to start Premiere using Intel mode which somehow sorted my problem back then. But now, I cant even read the playback altho no settings in camera has ever been changed. This is frustrating to be honest and I would really like to find myself a permenant solution. 

Thanks.

[Guest]

Same here on an Apple M2 Max with 32GB ram. Playback works somehow but editing without transcode is a pain. Resolve and FCPx have MUCH petter performance. 

Be sure that you DONT have the Sony plugin installed, it slows down playback massively and even converts 50p into 25p on playback and export. And you cannot remove it frome the files once you imported your files with the plugin activated.

[Guest]

Just finished a documentary and now I am trying the performance when I transcode everything to Prores. I am using a 12TB software-Raid0 configuration of two WD RED 6TB, so I get read or write speeds of about 360MB/s (of an EMPTY drive, it will become slower when it fills up). Prores 422 UHD 50p should be around 1000Mbit/s or 125MB/s, so I will see if this works for me. Using an SSD for smaller projects would be ideal, but for a documentary those file sizes become too huge.

[Guest]

So Apple Compressor does very well, it uses the full write speed of about 350MB/s and still only uses 5 percent of the processor power.. But it would still take 9 hours for the whole drive to fill with prores.. and it will get slower towards the end. Thats where a fast m2 SSD will speed up massively. But 12TB could get quite expensive.

[Guest]

at first glance the timeline is quite snappy.. even from two standard HDDs and softraid.. And I only needed less than 4 TB for all footage.. so even a 4TB SSD could be enough.

[Guest]

At second glance, the timeline with source footage are fine, but the finalized timeline with effects on take a few seconds to even start playback. So all in all I would prefer an SSD and hope this could be enough.

[Guest]

Just for fun I created a JBOD Volume from all my three (old SATA) SSDs (1TB+1TB+2TB) and copy everything over to see if that speeds everything up or if its a premiere performance issue. (it will take six hours) I am trying to find out if a new m2 SSD can solve all those issues.

[Guest]

Still in the last project I had some issues with noise in the shadows. (even the FX3 has issues if you record at ISO 4000 for example - too far from the base 800 so dual is 125000 would be better here). I guess that Prores 422 could make shadow noise worse and Prores 422 HQ could be preferred, but then we are talking about MASSIVE file sizes.

[Guest]

All in all, its not as snappy as prores HD, I think its just lagging a little because it has to downconvert UHD to 1080i, as I have to work in interlaced. I will still edit with HD proxies and then convert only the finished timeline to prored UHD HQ. I hope this works with premiere productions.