How to Smoothly run Preview Mode?

[KoreanAmerican]

Does anyone know the ideal specs to watch your footage? Like a better Video Previewer or something? I'm baffled how having the Preview setting at 1/4, an Intel-i7 8th gen, and a GTX 1060 isn't enough to scrub through the basic timeline, no effects. Just raw 1920x1080 footage. It's really choppy and impossible to edit on.

[Kevin-Monahan]

KA,
You might try some basic troubleshooting. Delete media cache with from Preferences > Media Cache is one thing you can try. Deleting Preferences by pressing Alt/Option at launch is another. If not, it's probably your footage. Is it H.264? From a drone? Make sure hardware settings are correct in Preferences > Media for H.264. Otherwise, you can transcode or create proxies when you import footage. If it's from a screen capture, you might try transcoding the footage to constant frame rate in Handbrake. 

Need a bit more info, though.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Graeme Bull · Accepted solution]

Kevin has a few suggestions that may work. Your video card is old, probably doesn't have enough memory to work well in Premiere. You didn't say what the framerate of your footage is. 120fps has trouble even at 1080p. Whatever way Premiere caches or doesn't cache frames, seems to cause very poor playback. It's probably the absolute most common complaint of the software, which sadly is the most needed "feature". More memory and more power helps!

[KoreanAmerican]

yoo thank you, I finally figured it out now! 60fps 1920x1080 footage would work just fine but whenever it came to anything higher (120fps as you mentioned) it would be horrible to edit on, I'll keep that in mind, thanks! 🙂