iMac 5K lagging while editing 4K video in Premiere Pro

Question

Hello all,

I recently started shooting 4K footage from my DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and am having serious performance issues when trying to edit the footage in Premiere Pro CC 2017.

Here are my system specs, do you think I should be having severe lag issues?

iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015

4GHz Intel Core i7

32GB 1867 MHz DDR3 RAM

1TB Flash Storage SSD

AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096MB

I tried moving my cache folder on Premiere to an external hard drive, and also reduced playback to 1/16 resolution and still getting extreme lag when scrubbing the footage or trying to playback.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

R Neil Haugen · Accepted Answer

For most use of PrPro with drones & other long-GOP media devices ... such as DSLR/M-4/3 cameras produce ... using the process within PrPro's Media Browser to Ingest media while creating proxies is quite adequate. I would suggest the Cineform preset that comes with PrPro in the dialog box that clicking the Media Browser's wrench icon gets you too. In the options to create proxies. Do NOT use the H.264 one ... that will just create smaller long-GOP files, and the full intraframe Cineform files edit so much better.

To transcode, you can either use the Transcode option found by going through the wrench icon's setup options as listed above, or use Adobe Media Encoder. If you learn a little about using Media Encoder, you can quickly setup a "watch folder" with a specific transcode command set for it, so say you could drop a bunch of your drone files in that watch folder, and it would automatically transcode to whichever preset you want for codec, frame-size/rate, all that sort of thing, and when done, put the new files in a specific folder.

This can be useful when you've got a number of files ... and say want it to run while you're at lunch or overnight.

Neil

R Neil Haugen · Answer

Most drone footage is highly compressed, which places a lot of work on the CPU for de-encoding during playback. You may find it a better experience to have PrPro make proxies on ingest, perhaps using the Cineform option, so that the playback is much smoother.

Using a good 3rd generation SSD for system drive, and say m.2/NMe or a fast Samsung EVO pro SSD for media/project files/cache files can help also. They are vastly faster at sustained data transfer, and in Bill Gehrke's testing (and he's the expert on such things) the 2017 versions (11.x builds) of PrPro seem much happier on 3rd generation SSD's than even a large fast hardware RAID array, as has been typical practice in the past.

And for externals ... the Samsung T3 drives over USB3 maintain sustained read/write speeds at or above most internal spinning-disc drives. Most other external SSD's don't match them.

Neil

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