FAQ: Fixing stuttering, stuttery, choppy and overall slow playback in Adobe Premiere Pro

[Kevin-Monahan]

One of the common issues is slow and stuttering playback. Here is a video by the inimitable Colin Smith about how to combat this issue:

• Addresses:
  • Premiere Pro Issues:
  • Issues with certain formats:
  • Issues with your system:

[T_Yates]

Holy crap this finally fixed my choppy playback! Thank You!

[Pedro_Be]

I was almost breaking down when I tried switching the audio latency. I don't know why it was also picking old preferences but anyways, changing from 30ms to 100 made it work like a charm!

[MadPlaid]

I had Adobe support show/do that trick on my computer, it didn't work. 

[Anthony235023461jby]

Kudos to you, Collin Smith.  Your section on hardware solved my problem of dropped frames.  The cinematographer gave me the raw video and audio on a thumb drive.  I plugged the thumb drive into my computer and never downloaded it into my harddrive. So, when I tried to use Premiere Pro, I got a stuttering of video.  Dropping frames like crazy...transfer of data from the thumb drive into work station.  Transferred the raw video and audio onto my harddrive and...puff, problem gone! In my thickest Chicago accent "YOU DA MAN"

[Kevin-Monahan]

Very glad to hear that, Anthony. Colin is the man! He used to work at Adobe, you know.

Cheers,

Kevin

[MarkWeiss]

For me it doesn't matter whether I'm editing standard definition DV footage or 4KHEVC footage it still stutters particularly at the start of playback. And if the footage is 60 frames per 2nd it drops off about 30% of the frames no matter the resolution. I have a dual xeon PC with 768GB of ram using a server motherboard and AGTX1080 graphics card. All media and temporary drives are solid state drives.

[Anthony235023461jby]

Wow. That some heavy-duty equipment you have there. Sounds like you have some software issues...programs not playing well with each other. I'm new, so your way more qualified than I. It was my understanding that Premiere Pro is able to take the 1st shot and automatically sync all other shots from different equipment to the 1st shot. If your interested where I seen this, let me know. I'll research where I saw that in the tutorials.

Are you an editor?

Tony Rodriguez
(PII removed by moderator)

[Warren Heaton]

Have you tried Smart Rendering?  I work on a range of systems from $17,000 desktops to $1,600 laptops and ProRes source footage in a Sequence with matching ProRes Video Previews works just fine.  

[DUFANG31291751lyp3]

SEVEN HUNDRED GB RAM??

[mad_styles]

Something that has worked for me is by turning visibility off all of the layers where I have multiple clips, other than the one I'm working on.

Ie, if I'm wanting to playback a clip on track 2, and it overlaps a clip on track 1, by turning off visibility of track 1 it seems to fix the issue.

[MadPlaid]

But do you think that should be a way the program works? It seems like you and others are having to make comprimises that shouldn't be part of the normal expected functionality of the program. 

[mad_styles]

Maybe not, but who cares if it fixes the problem. I'm just grateful to have finally found a work around, this issue was driving me nuts.

[Rob Ainscough]

This is a fairly old post and video ... much has changed in 3 years. 

Methods to improved performance:

1.  Use Proxies (at medium or low resolution option) ... this is really easy to do now but not ideal especially for color grading and/or HDR.

2.  Convert to Apple ProRes before working with any files in a sequence.

3.  Never link in Ae projects directly, render them out first and use rendered output in sequence.

4.  If possible (the FX/features your using support it) set project to GPU hardware acceleration.

5.  If software rendering (as many CPU cores as you can and as fast as you can, AMD seems to shine here)

Methods that made little or no difference to performance:

1.  Memory settings (Performance or Memory) neither makes any difference

2.  Adding more than 64GB RAM makes no difference regardless of file or image sizes

3.  Very expensive GPUs makes little or no difference.  My nVidia 1060 vs. 3090Ti perform the same when GPU acceleration is enabled.

4.  Expensive and very fast M.2 drives with 7GB/sec xfer speeds doesn't seem help at all, about 200-300MB/sec is the cut off, anything above that isn't realized in terms of performance.

5.  Using a RAM drive, actually slowed performance down just a little ... I had a system with 256GB RAM and tried out a 64GB RAM drive and put my footage on that RAM drive and it made absolutely no difference to workflow performance nor exports.

Obviously Adobe forces compromises in order to get better performance:

1.  Apple ProRes convesion is a long extra step and produces large files sizes taking up disk space.

2.  Proxies just aren't good enough do any HDR and/or color grading work ... use proxies for rapid editing (cuts/delete/inserts etc.) only.

3.  Not being able to directly link in Ae projects without a major performance hit means extra steps to render out and round trips between the two apps Pr and Ae.

Pr 2022 is full of bugs (more so than any version I've used in the past), especially around HDR and Exports.

Rob.

[Andy 1968]

The Mercury Playback Engine used to work great. As of 2022 not so much as seen in the video link below. 

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[EnjaySea777]

I went through all of your steps and didn't have any luck. I have 128 GB of RAM, a Ryzen Threadripper 32 core CPU, an NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3090 graphics card and all the footage is on an SSD drive. But this 1440 x 1440 clip is unplayable.

By the way I'm new to editing on a PC. I've always used Final Cut Pro on a Mac (for the last 20 years) and when a clip can't be played in that software, you can create much lower resolution proxy footage and that plays as smooth as butter. Does Premiere have something like that?

[Warren Heaton]

@EnjaySea777 

1440-by-1440 is out of spec for video frame sizes, but it should play fine if it uses a mezzanine CODEC.  In the same way that ProRes provides great playback in Final Cut Pro classic and Final Cut Pro X, it does so in Premiere Pro as well.  If used for source footage, Sequence Video Previews, and exports, it also takes advantage of Smart Rendering.

Working with native formats is covered in this best practices guide: Best Practices: Working with Native Formats.  There are other best practice guides at the bottom of that page worth reading now and referencing again later.

While proxies should not be necessary for the system that you've described, they're easy to create and use in a proxy workflow; however, unexpected issues can happen if making proxies from a non-mezzanine format.  The proxy presets are meant for horizontal video, not square or vertical.  While this link was created for how to create a custom proxy preset for vertical video in Premiere Pro, it's likely to be helpful with making proxies for square video as well.

-Warren

[MarkWeiss]

The last few times I used Premiere Pro, I noticed that when video playback faltered, my hard drive light would come on solid. I'm beginning to think Premiere has a problem with disc I/O.

I've recently bought two DaVinci Resolve Studio licenses and I'm not having any playback issues there, so I know it's not hardware. I'm even editing 17K BRAW footage with no problem. Multiple 4K videos scaled in a collage... no problem. Whereas, Premiere even has problems with 1080P in a single stream. I've pretty much given up after the past ten years of dealing with this.

[Warren Heaton]

@MarkWeiss 

Sorry to hear that you are having trouble.  While issues come up now and again, I get good performance. 

[MarkWeiss]

I've gotten a lot of work done over the years (mostly long form concert videos with surround sound) in Premiere, but it has been frustrating to sit with a client while the video stutters.