Kevin, Appreciate the video, BUT I did NOT have to do any...

[Rob Ainscough]

Kevin,

Appreciate the video, BUT I did NOT have to do any of this in Adobe Premiere CC 2017.  Adobe can't honestly say they are making progress in 2018, 2019 when their 2017 product performs better with MP4 files.

More things to note, media encoder frequently doesn't complete ... gets to 99% and just stops.  Incredibly annoying when working processing has been going for 5 hrs ... only way out is to end task via Task Manager, not acceptable for a product claiming to be "professional".  Adobe's stop button does NOTHING, bring up a message of "are you sure" and then nothing, eventually get a "Not responding" ... what's the point in having a cancel/stop button if it actually doesn't work?

ProRes, GoPro Cineform, DNxHD/HR (which is 1080p only) generate files that are 20X to 30X larger than my source MP4 file, so a 2GB MP4 gets converted to 40-60GB MOV ... is Adobe honestly trying to suggest this is acceptable for professional workflow?

Proxy, like you say, requires management, again, time I don't have ... I get paid to produce content NOT to work around problems in editing software ... problems that don't exist in CC 2017.  Sooooo ...

I know you are just trying to help people out, but we professionals really want to know WHY?  What did Adobe do to CC 2018 and CC 2019 that broke it performance?  These issues don't exist in CC 2017 using the EXACT same MP4 files, I mean exactly the same, so clearly some development decision was made that IS/WAS a bad for performance ... it baffles me that Adove refuse to address the problem.

These work arounds ARE NOT solutions.  I expect more for my years of paying monthly fees for software that keeps getting worse on the performance front.  So what's the real problem Adobe?  Stop the insanity and please be transparent, MP4 used to work just fine in CC 2017, now they don't.

Rob.

[jasonvp]

I have to agree with Rob.  Using Pr 2019 with 4K MP4 files is just obnoxious now and it didn't used to be on my same rig.  Clearly something has changed; be it with Windows 10 or with Pr.

[Warren Heaton]

Yes, ProRes or DNxHD are professional workflows.

No, MP4 is not a professional workflow.

[Rob Ainscough]

Warraen,

I'll have to disagree with how you "define professional workflow" ... I can name about 1000 professionals that use MP4 from the Survivor Man Discovery Show to professional YouTubers to News networks.  It's just a widely used container format for a variety of CODECs ... but surely as a professional you would know that.

What appears to be a coding issue with how Premiere operates on compressed data in some MP4 contents, it calculates the frame and audio reference from the beginning (of the RAW video file) ALWAYS and decodes the compression.  That's why longer clips are more problematic as the code is always using the start of clip to uncompress to determine the frame/audio point and then display an image in the viewer.  It's a brute force way to determine a position so as to render a view ... rather than process the clip in the background and caching decompression results so that shorter relative positions can be used as a "starting point" to determine the frame/audio position to display, it always goes back to the very beginning (not the edit start point, but the very beginning of the raw footage).  

If anyone wants to validate, it's easy enough to do, record a set of MP4 video files (CODEC of your choice) with 1 min duration, 5 min duration, 10 min duration, 30 min duration, 60 min duration.  Add the clips to Pr, create a sequence for each clip.  In the 1 min clip do some rapid head placement and hit play in the sequence and note the time it takes to display the image in viewer.  Repeat the this for each clip (1min, 5min, 10min, 30min, 60min) and time how long it takes for Pr to display and play forward from you head position.  You'll see what I discovered.

The way to work around Adobe's performance/coding issues is to work with Proxies ... not ideal but seems to work "ok" even if wasteful use of time and resources for what IMHO is a simple coding inefficiency. 

Cheers, Rob. 

[Warren Heaton]

Hi Rob:

Have you found a professional video editing application that uses H264/H265/MP4 compression in any container (MOV, MXF, MP4, etc.) for Sequence and/or render settings?

- Warren

[bolshev]

I agree. I don't need evidence of tinkering by ADOBE for my monthly subscription fee. If it ain't broke... (SHEESH)