GoPro 4k/60 footage playback in Premiere extremely choppy

[SMwesley]

I'm running a brand new iMac and my Premiere is playing back my GoPro 4K/60 FPS footage really poorly. Note that in Quicktime it plays back full resolution flawlessly with no issue whatsoever. I can go super fast, pause, backwards, anything I want, and it is precise and instant. In Premiere, even in 1/8 resolution, it is HORRID. Clearly something is wrong here. Any ideas?

Specifications:

Computer: 2017 iMac 27", 5K display, OS High Sierra 10.13.2, 4.2 GHz core i7, 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM, Radeon Pro 575 4 GB Vid card

Premiere: 12.0.0 Premiere Pro CC

Footage: GoPro Hero 6 Black 4K/60 FPS

Note I have no other issues with any other video files in Premiere, and I have edited many different setups on this computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Kevin-Monahan · Accepted solution]

Hi SMwesley,

Though tempting to do so, comparing QuickTime Player's performance should not be compared with performance for the same media in an NLE.

Long GOP 4K at 60fps is no picnic for an NLE. My advice? More a smooth editing experience, spend a little time creating proxies or transcode to ProRes 422 or LT. Let us know how that works for you.

Thanks,
Kevin

[SMwesley]

Pardon my naivety, but if the video files were too cumbersome for smooth performance, then why would it have the exact same behavior being played back at 1/8 resolution as it does in Full resolution? Note I have edited RED footage which is 4K and it has no issue whatsoever. Not even a little bit. I feel it has something to do with the GoPro compression codec maybe?

[Ann Bens]

Red is no Gopro.

Gopro is highly compressed and needs horsepower to decode and play decently on the timeline.

[SMwesley]

Hm, I see. And that wouldn't be effected by dropping playback to 1/8 then? I can understand the compression requires a lot of power to decode but I guess my confusion is that playing it in 1/8 doesn't seem to change anything?

Also, if transcoding is the route I need to go, which program would you recommend to do so most effectively?

(Also thanks for the helpful input guys!)

[Ann Bens]

AME!

PROXY

[SMwesley]

I'm going to start looking into this tomorrow. Given that my workflow is I am editing one volleyball video per week (roughly 3 hours of footage cut into one 15 minute video), which of the options would you recommend? Should I just straight Transcode them, or do you think doing a Proxy would be the best way? Thanks in advance!

[yenaphe]

I would go the transcode route, in something like Prores.

It will be smoother experience. Note that it will require more disk space because the files are going to be larger (and you will need to keep them, unlike proxies that can be deleted afterwards). But long Gop 4k h265 files are really complicated to work with, even with high end video cards.

Hope this helps,

Seb

[SMwesley]

After much experimenting, setting up Proxies is by far the best way to do this. Thanks!

[Insomnios]

I read all of this and it worked well for my 24 and 60 fps footage, but trying to use the 240fps footage for slow mo doesnt work with Media Encoder. it caps out at 60fps. 

GoPro shut down GoPro studio and the only other thing that works with the hero 8 is GoPro Quik which is useless. is there another encoder setting that would work?

[mohun360537596fxv]