Performance Disappointment with HEVC 10-bit and Premiere 23.1 & Gen 10 Intel CPUs

[Julanka]

Even with the very latest update of Premiere version 23.1, the playback for my XAVC HS 10bit is still unusable.

However, the XAVC S format plays just fine on the timeline.

I suspect that Premiere struggles a lot with the more efficient HEVC codec. But none of this was an issue in the older Premiere versions.

All of this happens on my iMac 2020, 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9 with AMD Radeon Pro 5700.

I'd like to know if anybody has the same problem.

Thanks.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello, Julio,

Sorry for the frustration.

XAVC HS 10bit is still unusable.

iMac 2020, 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9 with AMD Radeon Pro 5700.

That format is not supported for hardware decoding with your CPU; sorry about that. See this article by Puget Systems. I recommend transcoding or using proxies for this format when paired with that iMac.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Julanka]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for sharing the article. But about two versions ago, Premiere had no problem whatsoever handling XAVC HS files.

The latest Premiere updates made my two-year old iMac almost obsolete! This is not fair and definitely will look into NLE alternatives. I guess that would be my challenge for 2023.

Thanks anyway.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey Julio,

Sorry for the experience. I'm in support and just showing you an article that I thought might help you understand what's currently being seen by other professional users. My advice is as an editor and what I would do to workaround the issue (I am a big fan of editing codecs). I am not on the dev team and can only make them aware of your issue.

I hope the team can restore this ability for you and others trying to use this format, which is difficult for any computer to handle. Right now, as you can see from the matrix, only the very latest Intel CPUs support it.

I understand your frustration and would be happy to advocate for this capability to be available in Premiere Pro.

Cheers,
Kevin