Mac Pro issue: Premiere pegs my CPU - EVEN WHEN NOT EVEN PLAYING BACK

[miket46840449]

I'm on a 2019 Mac Pro and Premiere Pro is maxing out the CPU sometimes to +2,000% even when it's idle.  I have audio waveform generation turned off so it's not doing that.

It happens after being in the project for a period of time.  I can restart everything and that fixes it for a while but once I start working I'm right back to the same problem.  Super laggy playback, takes forever to refresh when the playhead is moved, etc.

[Moderator note: title edited for clarity to get quickest response.]

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Mike,

Sorry about this. Have you fixed the issue yet? It sounds like a corrupt sequence or project. Can you try copying and pasting the clips into a new sequence? If that is not working, you can create a new project and import the elements from the previous project into it. Try these things and let us know if it works out.

Thanks,
Kevin

[miket46840449]

Hi Kevin,

So I've tried all those things and I'm still having issues.  It's gotten to the point where I can barely work on this $20K computer.

I've looked on other forums and I've read about other people having the extreme "Idle wakeup counts" and the kernal_task.  It's only premiere pro that I've had the problem with.  Today I uninstalled and reinstalled Premiere + updated OSX and the drivers.  Nothing helps.

[PECourtejoie]

Hi, it is not the same symptop as the jerky playback one could have when there is a faulty Audio Input? 

Did you check this page? https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/premiere-pro/kb/troubleshoot_playback_performance.html

[miket46840449]

Of the 1,000 things I've tried, this has made the most dramatic difference.  Deactivating my scarlett 18i20 USB audio interface has improved playback substatially.  Plus, the idle system CPU% reduced to 40 or so from 70-80.  Thanks man

[Warren Heaton]

Are you working with a camera native format or have you transcoded to ProRes?

[miket46840449]

I'm working with several mixed formats.  Upon launching premiere every clip in the timeline plays great, after a few mintues of work the CPU starts to peg.  I stop for lunch and an hour of idling later I return and the CPU is at 90%.

To your point, it does seem to start slowing down when I playback certain codecs like avc1.  Transcoding everything isn't an option in my workflow unfortuantely. 

[Warren Heaton]

@miket46840449 

A key to a strong workflow is not mixing formats.  Sure, drop clips into your timeline and see what happens, but it's easy to have clips in your Timeline that don't have a yellow line above them until later in your workflow - we just have to make it part of our workflow.  I would guess that your system will transcode an hour of 2160p to ProRes 422 LT in about seven minutes, maybe five.  With 32GB of RAM it may not be effective to work while footage is transcoding, but bump that up to 64GB or more and that should be pretty good.

Here's what's working really well for me:  Mac Pro (2019), 3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Zeon W, 192GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro VEga II 32GB, 4TB Macintosh HD (for applications and scratch disk), 8TB Solid State PCI-Express Drive (for projects, source footage, and exports), macOS 12.6.5, Premiere Pro 22.6.4, Media Encoder  22.6.4, After Effects 22.6.4, Photoshop 23.5.5, Illustrator 26.5.3, InDesign 17.4.1, and Maxon Cinema 4D 2023.1.  While issues come up now and again, things flow smoothly overall and I'm able to deliver marketing content for broadcast tv and social on a regular basis.  I keep the newer versions installed (so Premiere Pro 2023) for testing when time is available and older versions (Premiere Pro 2021) for times when something isn't working as expected in 2022.  Projects are 2160 or 1080 with social media sizes after the 16-by-9 versions are approved.  Project will be either 23.976 or 29.97, but they don't get mixed.

Also, while I have H264 media in my Premiere Pro projects and After Effects projects, it's for rough cut reference only.  Anything for for editing or motion design is ProRes 422 HQ, ProRes 4444, and ProRes 422 Proxy.

[miket46840449]

That makes sense of course, thanks.  Does your system CPU sit at 80% even when not even playing back anything?