Frustrating latency problem with Timeline panel

[EvanL03312]

During playback, timeline position marker either doesn;’t move until playback stops or it jumps several random times during playback.

During playback, the time counter on the timeline panel is frozen until playback stops and then it jumps to stopping position.

Program panel showing the video works fine and time counter moves forward with video playback.

I have searched the internet for solutions to latency in the timeline panel.  Apparently others have had similar issues.  I have made the following suggested changes.

• Move media cache to external harddrive – done; also set hard drive to not power down.
• Delete cache – done
• Change resolution to 1920x1080 done
• Change memory to give a big chunk to PR: I have 32GB (31 usable) have set it to 25 GB for PR and 6 for other apps.
• Changed playback resolution in program panel to 1/2 or 1/4; no impact to timeline pointer movement or time metric – done
• Have not tried proxies yet, as that seemed confusing to manage.

This is very frustrating and makes it difficult to perform editing.  This seems to have begun within the last 3 weeks.  Need More help.

I am running windows 11 Pro, 64 bit, on an Intel Ultra 7155H chip with 3.8 Ghz.  I have 32GB memory and both internal and external hard drives are very large with a lot of space.

My prior PC, with half the memory and slower chip, never had this issue with Premiere Pro.

[PaulMurphy]

It sounds like your system might be struggling to keep up with the demands of your project. Could you share more details about your media, such as the resolution, frame rate, and codec?

If your footage is higher than HD resolution (e.g., 4K or above), I recommend using proxies to improve performance.

[EvanL03312]

Hi Paul.  Here are a few of the parameters of my version,  project and sequences:

Premiere Pro v24.6.4 Build 3

My sequence settings:

Frame Size 1920 x 1080

Square Pixels

29.97 FPS drop frame timecode.

Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Open CL)

No preview cache

[PaulMurphy]

What about your media?

[EvanL03312]

The software and project is on my local hard drive: 929 GB, 515GB free space;  I run the cache files and workarea on an external harddrive, 7TB, with 4TB free space.  Hope that was what you were asking.

[R Neil Haugen]

Format/codec, framesize and framerate, is actually the important data on the media. Created by what also is handy.

And your CPU and GPU.

[EvanL03312]

Thank you for the dialog.

Here is some more information:

Intel Ultra 7 155H 3.80 GHz

64 Bit Windows 11 pro

Intel Arc Graphics; 1.4/17.9GB shared CPU memory

I do a lot of animation using .png files. These are 90% 1920x1080, with a few at 4096x3072.

For all of these stills they  have green screen background so I am using the Ultra Key to remove the background.  Other common effects used are crop and on a few lens distortion and basic 3d.

There are a very few .mp4s at 3840x2160 resolution.

During playback, I see GPU staying low as above.  CPU runs in the teens and twenty percent range.  Memory runs at approx. 17 GB with 14 available.

Nothing stands out as culprit for the latency in PR, ie:  nothing pegged in performance.

[R Neil Haugen]

@RjL190365 is the Resident Expert in hardware issues on PCs. Maybe that user will pop in.

[Hutch Harris]

Hi Evan, can you share what exact machine you have? Based off the specs you shared I'm thinking it is a laptop with integrated graphics (reported as "Intel Arc Graphics" by windows). This would mean you don't have a graphics card, so you aren't getting any of the performance boost by using the OpenCL. In particular, you say you are using Ultra Key a lot - this is a GPU-accelerated effect that really struggles if it only has a CPU to work with. If your prior machine had a discrete GPU, even if your processor was slower, it probably handled Premiere (and particularly the Ultra Key effect) much better.

To prove this point: if you take a normal h.264 clip (here's a link to a free download from Pexels if you don't have something handy) and drop it onto an otherwise empty timeline - do you get smooth playback? If yes, then the issue is likely related to your lack of GPU and usage of Ultra Key.

For a fix- it'll be a time-consuming process, but the only way I can think of for you to be able to edit comfortably would be to do all of your work without Ultra Key applied (or apply it and then disable the effect while you are editing) and then apply the key just before export.

Alternatively:

1. Import your PNG sequence to your project
2. Drop the resulting clip into a timeline
3. Apply your Ultra Key to the clip
4. Export clip with either the "ProRes 4444 with Alpha" or "GoPro Cineform RGB 12-bit with Alpha" presets
5. Reimport your keyed clip
6. Repeat 1-5 for each clip
7. Edit with your reimported ProRes or Cineform clips - these will have the the green keyed out so you'll have the transparency you need, but your computer shouldn't be experiencing the slowdown from having to apply the effect in realtime.

Probably obvious, but the drawback to this method is that you can't adjust the key. You'd have to go back to your source clip, make the changes desired, re-export & replace.

Hope this helps!

[EvanL03312]

Hi Hutch.  Thanks much for the detailed response. 

I have a Dell Lattitude 9450 2-in-1.  According to the manual: it has and Integrated GPU with Intel Graphics controller.

My prior PC was a Dell Inspiron 13in 7373 2-in-1, 16G memory, Video: integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620.

Since submitting my issue I have been able to upgrade to Premiere Pro 2025.  I've only done a little testing, but it appears to be significantly better.  The position line moves as does the time display during playback.

I will definitely play around with the ideas you suggested.

Thanks again!

[EvanL03312]

Another thing I've been doing, though also time consuming, is to first edit my pngs with Canva.  Canva has a function to remove backgrounds and save a png with transparent background.  It works really well.  My green screens are actually ones I made myself with paint and melamine.  Not the best way to go, but it worked most of the time.

When I use Canva, I don't need to use the ultra key at all because I've remove the greenscreen with Canva and then save as a "clean" png.

[Hutch Harris]

Smart! I think thats the best play - anything you can do to avoid using ultra key in your timeline is going to give you much smoother playback. If you have access to Photoshop and are interested, the background removal tool is very good. You could automate some of your work by batch-removing backgrounds. Check out the thread here for more info on that.
Or just stick with Canva if it works for you - looks like you can bulk-remove backgrounds there, too (which you may already be doing!).

[Peru Bob]

Try Preferences > Audio Hardware and set Input to None.

That will sometimes fix playback issues.