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

After 15 years of struggling with Premiere Pro, I finally fixed my stuttering playback problems--by switching to DaVinci Resolve Studio. It runs like a scalded ape and even plays smoothly 17K footage from URSA 65 with a heavy grade on it. 4K footage is like SD in terms of effortless play.

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.

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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"

Hi,

I may be the only person in the world with this issue but I eventually figured out that my playback was laggy because the default audio input was wrong. I went to Edit --> Preferences --> Audio Hardware --> Default Input. The default input was the mic on my ancient webcam from like 8 years ago. I switched it to a more modern microphone and the playback improved a lot. I assume switching it to be nothing would have worked to (I'm not using the audio input for anything) but I didn't confirm that.

Regards,

John