Issues with 4k transparent animations (.mov) in Premiere 2022

[chandon26420137e3cj]

Hey! Long story short I'm at a loss. I'm trying to make the jump from creaky old Vegas 15 to Premiere 2022 but PP won't stop crashing, has unusable playback even when reduced to 1/16, and eats memory like Cookie Monster at the Keebler factory (task manager is stating it's using 55% - 96% or more of allotted system memory all the time when the project is open, even when I'm not editing).

I've made a series of transparent 4k 59.94 fps QT animations (.mov files, MPEG-4 Quicktime). These are 3 layers of animation that are normally placed over captured game footage (which is normally captured at 1080p or 2k 60fps). The final product is rendered at 1080p 60fps and uploaded to YT. Normally Vegas 15 can handle this without issue, even if I add some more similarly-formatted animations and stills over the top. EXAMPLE

My rig spec is pretty decent so I'm finding it hard to believe that a few animations can so easily bring PP to its knees - Vegas 15 would have some preview stutter, but that was easily resolved with lowering the preview playback quality. Not sure why I can't do the same on newer software.

-Intel i9-10850k @ 3.6

-32gb Ram

-RTX3080 10gb

-two 1tb nvme SSDs and one 1tb SATA SSD (each of which have over 100gb of free space)

-Windows 10 latest build

-PP 22.6.2 build 2

Here's some of what I've tried so far with no luck:

-lowering preview playback quality-creating proxies (doesn't work since it removes the animation transparency)

-clearing cache, moving the location of cache to another drive

-turning on and off GPU utilization

-optimizing everything i could find in the Preferences menu with an eye to performance (program memory, etc) and making sure the preview framerate matches the clips

-reducing the sequence preview to 1080p or 720p

Basically I've spent the last 5-6 hours watching troubleshooting vids and tweaking settings, wondering if there's something simple I've overlooked, or if Premiere 2022 is just THAT much crap over a 5 yo editing program. Seems like PP is the industry standard and there's a lot of plugins and resources for it. I'd really like to use it for gaming vids as well as live actions stuff due to this, but I'm not about to shell out $600/year if it can't do the basic things creaky Vegas 15 can. HELP 😞

[Michael Grenadier]

Not sure I understand.  You're mpeg4 quicktimes with transparency of animation to be supered over video?  I'd try using an all i-frame format which supports transparency like prores 4444 rather than an mpeg4...  Hard to know why these files worked better in vegas, but choices have been made over the years as these softwares have been developed that make things work better in different software.

You mention that these are gaming videos.  Screen recordings are often variable frame rate which can cause issues in Premiere...  Here's how to confirm the diagnosis and work around the problem

use mediainfo to determine whether your source is variable or constant frame rate
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download
if it's variable use handbrake to convert to constant frame rate setting the quality slider in the video panel to maximum
https://handbrake.fr
and here's a tutorial on how to use handbrake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=xlvxgVREX-Y

[chandon26420137e3cj]

Hey! Thanks for weighing in @Michael Grenadier - Yep you got it exactly right, re: the animations that will be supered over gaming footage. To clarify, no gaming footage had been added underneath the animation layers at the time of the post- the slowness and crashes are happening even with just the animations in the sequence. I tested it with some clips underneath after you posted this and the result was the same when the animations were visible, however the clips seemed to be fine viewed on their own. 

Vegas 15 had some limitations in creating transparent video clips so ancient QT format was the best I could do at the time I created the stock animations. Don't think that version of QT was designed with 4K in mind but I need the higher resolution for zooms and so forth. I managed to figure out (after much fluffing around) that I can create 720p proxies with transparency for the animations by making a new ingest preset (eesh, what a workaround). Maybe this will help someone else having a similar issue: 

Proxies with Alpha
https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/proxies-with-alpha/m-p/10864230

Also found a decent (if slightly dated) tutorial on making ingest presets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLn4gzcM3no

From your response it seems the best way to go about this is to rerender all the stock animations to prores 4444 with alpha for future projects, but I gotta say that all these extra steps don't make me super confident in using CC suite as a platform going forward. 😕

Thanks for the info regarding variable frame rate anyhow though, that's really helpful! I capture most everything at 2k/60 unless it's retro games, but I've gotten some artifacting with more graphically intensive games and I think this might be the cause. 

[Michael Grenadier]

well video files with transparency can choke a system, but prores4444 usually plays pretty smoothly.  But before going to far down the rabbit hole, do some testing.