Laggy, slow response when scrubbing audio in Source Monitor

[benwinter]

When scrubbing and previewing audio clips in the source monitor, the interface response is horribly slow and laggy. Play/pause is delayed by at least a second, the playhead skips along every second or so, I can't really drag the playhead around, because I have to wait so long for it to respond—it's almost unusable.

But! The problem resolves when I shrink the source monitor window, so it's clearly something to do with Premiere drawing the audio waveform in a large source monitor. But there is no workaround to this—I can't be shrinking my source monitor window every time I want to scrub and preview audio tracks. My computer is a brand new Mac Pro tower so it can't be a hardware horsepower issue. Does anyone else experience this? It seems like I have a setting wrong. I have been using Premiere for many years and I don't remember it struggling to render audio waveforms like this before.

I can also say it's not an audio hardware issue. I've tried both external and internal audio devices, and changing buffer sizes, and it makes no difference.

2020 Mac Pro Tower

24-core Intel

256 GB RAM

Vega II Duo

running latest Big Sur

Premiere Pro 2021.

[benwinter]

Does anyone else have this problem? Premiere becomes unresponsive and borderline unusable while I have audio files in the source monitor.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey Ben,

Kinda strange. Try this: choose the Editing Workspace. Choose Workspaces > Reset to Saved Layout. Check playback. Still bad?

Get Info on the Adobe Documents folder and make sure R/W permissions is set correctly on the folder. Click the gear icon and set the same for all enclosed folders (Important). Still bad?

With all projects closed, delete media cache from Preferences > Media Cache. Restart Premiere Pro, trashing preferences by pressing Option when starting. Start a new project. Import sample media and place on a timeline that matches sequence settings precisely. How are things behaving now?

Thanks,
Kevin 

[benwinter]

Thanks for the response Kevin. I tried all that, no dice. 

I think the key to this lies in the fact that the problem gets worse the larger I make the Source Monitor displaying the waveform. I made a video to demonstrate.

[video]

You can see when the window is large the playhead is very unresponsive and skips around; when I shrink it (which I struggle doing because the interface is so unresponsive), it behaves as expected and is very snappy and responsive. The problem is that this performance is mimicked in the timeline too, so when a waveform is open in the source monitor, I basically can't use Premiere (unless the source monitor is tiny).

What could be causing that?

[Jeff Bugbee]

Are you running in a scaled resolution on your Mac display? System Prefs - Display

[benwinter]

No, running full res on a 5K monitor via SwitchResX. 5120 x 2160

[Jeff Bugbee]

Doesn't SwitchResX force scaling on? I haven't used it so I'm not sure. Can you try setting your display to the default/native (your icons/UI will be tiny) but see if Premiere scrubs smoothly in that mode.

[benwinter]

So I prefer it with the tiny icons/UI and that's what SwitchResX does. Everything is small, displayed pixel for pixel. If I switch to "Default" under Display control panel, everything gets large.

[benwinter]

I just tried it with scaled resolution, meaning things appear bigger—the problem is lessened overall, but it still gets slower the larger I make the source monitor.

[benwinter]

So I guess no solution to this at the moment? Should I file a bug report?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Oh yes, definitely file a bug. There seems to be a UI lag. I would test with a new timeline.

Thanks,
Kevin

[R2 Muslu]

Hi, I have been having the exact same problem for a long time and just decided to do something about it but no luck! Do you still have the same issue or did you manage to solve it?
Thanks!

[matthiass95901485]

Hi, I'm having  the same problem since Premiere 2019 (at least). The only fix for me ist to make the source-window with the waveform smaller. I would be happy if someone else has a beeter solution for this.

[benwinter]

Still having this issue in the latest Premiere update. Amazing that this bug has not been fixed.