Is Sony A7 footage just known to be sluggish in Premeire?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
November 5, 2021
2 replies
1579 views

My machine can play anything buttery smooth from BRAW to AVI to ProRes to R3D but these relatively rinky dink video files off the A7iii play like I feel after losing the chili eating contest.

Is this a known thing? If so, is there any way to improve it?

Performance

This topic has been closed for replies.

Kevin J. Monahan Jr.

Community Manager

Hi Brady,

Sorry this issue has you frustrated. This sounds like one of our Known Issues. See here. The workaround is to try Full Res rather than half or set the Program Monitor to High Quality. Bug fix is coming soon. Can you verify if this works?

I hope that the next update will finally get you to the promised land, I just have to ask for a little more patience as we fix this bug. Sorry about the frustration.

Cheers,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

A

ah.photo

Inspiring

@DestinyPatterson On the contrary, the footage the a7 III creates (H.264) is not rinky dink. H.264 is a very difficult edit to work with due to the more demanding decoding required. This is why these files are so space efficient. Lots of work to both encode and decode these compressed files.

ProRes files may be massive, but they are significantly easier to work with. It's a codec built for editing, with less demanding resource drain on your machine.

I can't speak to every raw format out there, but some raw codecs might even be optimized for editing as well, at least compared relative to H.264.

My suggestion is to create proxies for your H.264 footage. One of the editing-centric intermediary codecs like ProRes, DNx, or Cineform. Once you have some proxies in place: it's smooth sailing!

D

DestinyPattersonAuthor

Inspiring

Yeah, transcoding is always an option, but the entire reason to use Premiere is to never have to transcode becuase it (normally) takes anyting you throw at it and plays natively. That said, H.264 from any other source playes like butter in PP so something Sony is doing is making those files clunkier to edit with. It still feels a bit ridiculous that my m machine can play R3D 8k files or Blackmagic Q0 BRAW or Blackmagic ProRes 444 with zero stutter and a compressed H.264 from an A7iii plays like slop. That it's a decoding issue means nothing to me.

I guess I'll just tussle with this Sony crap until either Sony or Adobe makes the files play smoother, but knowing how Adobe screws everything up 5 times before releasing a version that actually works I'm not holding my breath.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

That "heavy" media you're talking about as noted above is actually a ton easier for your computer than the A7S3 clips. That's just life in the real world.

That said, I'm running some A7s3 clips through several projects now, on a 24-core Ryzen with 2080Ti and 128GB of RAM, and it's playing back smoothly with even several extensive layers of Lumetri and Colorista and a couple other RedGiant effects applied.

The projects also include files from a RED Dragon in r3d and BRAW from a BMPCC4K, and a Mavic drone in typical drone H.264.

So ... it may depend also on the specific system involved.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded