Large MP4 Imports Cause a "Not Responding" Error

[Guest]

A few months ago, I used Premiere Pro 2019 to import, edit and export large MP4 files (averaging 30 GBs per file) without any issues with importing, editing and exporting. I mainly edit gameplay clips with an average bitrate of 94kpbs at 60 FPS. Importing a file of 30 GBs used to only take a few moments and I was able to begin editing almost immediately; the only thing that took time was the export, naturally. In the last month after Premiere's last few updates, these large files are now causing the program to freeze and using up 80% of my Memory. I have 16GB of Memory and an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB GPU. My system exceeds the requirements to run this program appropriately, and I've had no issues with importing and editing until this last month.

If I wait for nearly 10 minutes, the program eventually imports the file once it's done being "Non responsive," but why is it suddenly taking so long to import large files when I was able to do so in much less time before? Furthermore, once the file is imported, and I drag it onto the Timeline, it takes even longer to load the previews and remains stuck on the horrid "Media Pending" screen. Smaller MP4s are quicker, it's just these larger ones, but again, I had no issues before with the larger ones, and now I do.

I've done nothing different. Except for the Adobe and horrible Windows updates, nothing else stands out to me as to why now this program is throwing tantrums at large MP4 files. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the program with no success in improving its performance. I run no other programs while importing and editing. I simply do what I've done before and now it's just slower at importing these larger files. Almost as if it's trying to make a copy of the video file itself in the project, which can't be possible considering the project file size remains in the KBs.

[R Neil Haugen]

There hasn't been an update for Premiere released in the last month. You may have updated to the version released a few months back, but there's been no updates released in several months.

I'm wondering if this is an issue caused by an OS update ... I know several things have been problematic for both sides of the canyon, Macs and PCs of recent OS updates. The newest Mac OS, Catalina, has been ok for some and a right pain for others. Same with a couple of the recent Windows OS updates.

I'm hoping some other person will pop in with some useful ideas.

Neil

[jasonvp]

I wish I could offer some useful bits of help or information; all I can say is, "Me too."  I seem to recall this not being an issue for Pr.  I've not been editing in quite some time and just got back into it recently.  And: I've run into this same issue every time I edit.  My 4K/60 h.264 75Mbit/sec files are about 5.7G in size, and each one locks Pr up solid for a few minutes while it imports it.  During said, one of the CPU cores on my 7900X gets pinned to 100%; one other core is at around 50-70%, and the rest of them are sleeping.

This smells like the h.264 import is suddenly single-threaded, and very inefficient.  Formerly, Pr would just snorfle the large h.264 files in and go.

Windows 10 Pro, fully updated

Pr, fully updated

OC'd 7900X that can easily chew on 4K h.264 files and spit them out like they're nothing.

[R Neil Haugen]

Of course ... or I wouldn't have said so.  😉

One of the things that is very common ... is the assumption that if X program does this on my machine, it's doing it on everyones machine. It is often not the case. In fact, more often not the case. Far more often.

So a large part of troubleshooting involves figuring out why something is happening "here" but not "there". And of course, people get mad because the engineers should just FIX! something that clearly (to that user) must be common. Yet ... with a vast array of hardware "in shop", the engineers can't replicate, so they have to ask questions. "Why are they wasting my time asking questions, they should just FIX this issue!" ... Well, they can't fix what they can't "see" or replicate, until they get enough data to either be able to create the situation in-house to trigger the behavior or someone on staff goes ... "I wonder ... if this could be something in Y part of the code?" and starts digging into that area.

For us fellow users trying to do "help" around here, it's the same thing. Often we don't have the issue, but have enough experience to be able to ask questions leading towards fixing someone's nasty ills.

And sometimes ... it's way beyond us. That ... is frustrating for everyone.

Something I'm wondering about ... how much free space is available on the drives you have the project file, and cache files on?

Neil

[Guest]

What really baffles me is that just a couple of months ago, I'd import those 30GB file sizes easy-peasy. Now all of a sudden it's an issue. I'm believing that it is indeed more an OS issue than Premiere's... hopefully. It'd be really bad if I'm getting kicked from both sides. I'll likely reach out to CyberPower PC (the brand of computer I have) to see if they're aware of any optimization methods I can do for my computer since my other apps are now suffering as well after the last OS update I downloaded. I'm not impressed with their AMD StoreMI technology that's supposed to "efficiently move most-used files to the SSD portion of your storage space." Yeah. Sure. Seriously... this thing's supposed to be a decent rig and yet it's acting slower than my 6 year-old Mac. That Mac has half the memory of my current PC. Still, I wanted to see if any other users may be experiencing this same anomaly.

I save all my recordings onto an external 4TB drive so there's still a good amount of space left on it. I even tried moving the video files to my main C Drive on the computer that has well over 80% free space from its 1TB size. The import issues persist. There's just something that happens during the import that causes Premier to freeze up for a solid 5-10 minutes, use up all my RAM and CPU resources, and then randomly be like OK DONE... until you try to then move the imported file onto the Timeline. Then the vicious cycle continues.

[jasonvp]

Neil -

I know you didn't mean any offense with your reply and are just trying to be helpful.  I do appreciate that.  Just beware: some of us have been doing this "building systems" things for decades.  Literally: decades.  I understand that systems can react differently, as can software on said systems.  🙂  As the phrase goes: This ain't my first rodeo.

• Project files sit on a striped pair of SATA3 SSDs
• Scratch space is all on a single 512GB M.2 (not an NVME) drive
• Some of the footage is on a striped pair of SATA3 7200RPM spinners.  Other footage on a stiped pair of SATA3 SSDs.

Storage space and speed isn't a concern.  The free drive space is measured in hundreds of gigabytes, sometimes a few terabytes; I'm clear there.  No problem.

There is a very specific "thing" happening with Premier, or with Premiere's interaction with Windows 10, that is causing only one of the cores on my 20 vcore rig to hit 100%.  And the moment that happens, Premiere goes unresponsive.  If I let it go for several minutes, it will eventually import the file.  But I have to go through this same crud the moment I try to place that file/clip onto a timeline.  Sit, wait, and wait, and wait, and waaaaaait.  This after all of the PEAK files have been created, etc.

[R Neil Haugen]

The puzzling thing about this is ... Premiere hasn't had an update for several months. And the last couple were virtually only bug-fix patches.

Weird.

Neil

[jasonvp]

Right Neil, I believe it.  I've simply not been using Pr for some time, so I have no idea when it began.

[jasonvp]

A further follow-up: it seems placing one of these files on the timeline is also a painfully slow, single-threaded operation.  Yes, I know long-GOP formats are less than ideal, but I have the CPU to handle it, along with a lot of available cores.  Is there no way to multithread the placing of the file on the timeline?  Like the import: one core goes straight to 100% and the rest are basically idling.

[R Neil Haugen]

That's not at all the behavior I'm getting ... really weird. My 6 core i7-6800 runs pretty evenly on that task.

Huh.

Neil

[jasonvp]

Are you certain of that?  You have Resource Monitor up and watching all 6 cores during an h.264 import?

[R Neil Haugen]

Jason,

You've got a system that it seems shouldn't behave the way it is. And it's to the point that it seems a look at this might be useful for the engineers.

So ... post this with the full data you've put through this thread over on the UserVoice system. That goes directly to the engineer's system, and then via collated form to the upper managers who decide budgets.

They will at least see all this internally then ... they do look through all those bug filings.

Adobe UserVoice Bug /Feature form: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro

And sometimes, they do contact people and ask questions or other things. NOT like it used to be ... bug reports were just a black hole.

Neil