Playback Issues On 13900k, 64GB DDR5, RTX 4090, 2TB WD Black PC

[Ryan28328492ljvc]

I'm having serious playback issues in Premiere Pro 23.4.0 and I'm hoping for some suggestions. I have a monster of a PC that I built expressly for Premiere Pro editing. It's 13900k, 64GB DDR5, RTX 4090, 2TB WD Black SN850X. Everything is up-to-date drivers and Windows 11 and software. It games without any issues. I've benchmarked everything. The SSD is getting 7000mb reads and writes. It's completely stable with zero crashes ever. I am editing right from the 2TB SSD and not editing from an external drive.

For some reason, when I hit the space bar for playback in Premiere Pro, I often times hear a second or two of audio before the video starts moving. It happens all the time. It's so frustrating. It does it on all playback quality settings of Full/Half/Quarter, doesn't matter. So much so that I'm here asking for suggestions on what settings I could do to fix it. We're recording with Sony ZV-E10 cameras in .mp4, and doing almost nothing that should be tough for this PC to handle. I'm just editing together TikTok videos. I have only a couple of layers of video and a single audio layer and less than a minute of video most of the time. I'm open to any and all settings suggestions to try and solve this.

[MyerPj · Accepted solution]

Your footage is h.264, not ideal for editing. You might consider a proxy workflow, or consider transcoding that footage to say ProRes LT. 

You shouldn't have that much trouble, even with the h.264, but you also could need to optimize that PC. If you are exporting to UHD it adds another layer of intensity to the editing process, try dropping you sequence settings to HD (1080p) and see how that goes. I'm on Win11 with samsung m2's and a meager video card, and I'm getting OK peformance on a very optimized PC.

[Ryan28328492ljvc]

OK. Thank you. I don't know anything about the first two things; a proxy workflow or transcoding. I'll head to over to YouTube for some research.

[MyerPj]

Here's one link for Proxy workflow, if he suggests it's possible to use h.264 for the proxy, ignore that part, it actually defeats the purpose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=993mbUa0h-w

[Ryan28328492ljvc]

Okay! You were absolutely correct in your answer. I transcoded the h.264 to ProRes 422 HQ and WOW! I've been editing for only a few months in Premiere Pro, and I'm glad I posted this here before I spent a few more frustrated years. I'm going to play with my OBS export settings and see how the .mov files are handled in Premiere Pro or else I'll just have to use the media encoder and batch transcode everything after we film. The difference was amazing. I've never actually experienced good timeline scrubbing until just now and I didn't realize it.

Does anyone at Adobe know that millions of people are recording in h.264 everyday? How can Premiere Pro be so bad at handling h.264 when it's the gold standard from everyone's prosumer cameras and phones? Google only recommends h.264 for uploading to YouTube. Am I missing something? I was this close || to trying to switch over to Resolve and learn it. Adobe has to be losing millions of dollars a month to people switching because of poor Premiere Pro performance in h.264.

[Sami Succar]

It's the way H.264 is compressed, and the processing power it takes to decode and play. Such a compression is far from ideal for any NLE, not just Premiere. It's a nice codec for delivery, as it runs smoothly on almost any sort of player, but that doesn't make it any good for editing.

[Ryan28328492ljvc]

Plot Twist. I re-encoded my original h.264 file using the Adobe media encoder in h.264 matching source, and it plays and scrubs the same as the ProRes 422 file. Only at 1% the ProRes 422 file size. So I retract my previous assumption that it was somehow a problem with the Premiere Pro program, and it seems like it's something to do with the encoding that OBS is using to make h.264 files that Premiere Pro isn't playing nice with. No matter what, I have the answers that I needed thanks to you guys here on the forum and a path forward now that I've identified the problem and the solution.

[MyerPj]

Another gotcha is variable frame rate h.264, it just makes editing worse.

Give Shutter Encoder a try to convert the files. ProRes LT or even PROXY format within Shutter Encoder for easy to edit formats.

https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

[Ryan28328492ljvc · Accepted solution]

If anyone else finds this page useful, then here's the resolution I found to my orignal question. I'm editing videos that we're filming from our cameras and recording onto a PC using OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). Then when attempting to edit those videos, the playback and timeline scrubbing was terrible. MyerPj suggested I transcode the file, and that immediately cleaned up my problem. In fact, transcoding the h.264 file from OBS to any format, including re-transcoding it in h.264, fixed the problem and made for beautiful editing and timeline usage in Premiere Pro. My final resolution came today when I changed OBS from recoding in h.264 to Quicktime .mov format, and that .mov file seems to have no issues at all being dropped right into Premiere Pro and getting amazing performance from my PC without any transcoding. So, until I encounter some other issue, I believe this has been completely resolved by changing OBS to .mov format.

[MyerPj]

Nice going @Ryan28328492ljvc 🙂

[alextom1]

Is the 2TB also the drive your OS is on? If so, move it off there.While your system has great performance specs, it may be a little weak on the NLE editing specs. I edit with 4K h264 all the time and don't have any problems. I have a 8TB M.2 RAID ARRAY for a footage drive. I have a 2TB M.2 for a Scratch drive and my OS is on a separate drive. Also, amount of RAM is just as a important as speed of RAM. Up that to 128GB. And make sure you have proper cooling inside of your PC. Heat is the performance killer. FYI, I'm on a AMD Threadripper Gen 3 24c CPU with a 2080TI and 256GB of RAM. As you can see, I prioritized storage performance over computational performance and it's works great. 

[NisA268020010w7l]

Click on the desktop, right-click to display settings, then graphics settings, and enable hardware acceleration GPU scheduling. It worked wonders for me. Let us know if it made a difference.

[NisA268020010w7l]

Additionally, in Adobe Premiere Pro, you can go to 'Sequence/Sequence Settings/Video Preview Format' and set the preview to QuickTime, using the 'Apple ProRes 422 LT' codec.

[And-CFD]

I am currently sitting with the same problem roughly same machine and OS (HP OMEN 17 laptop, i9 13900HX, 64GB DDR5, RTX 4080 12GB, 4TB NVME, Win11, PrPro 24). All drivers up to date, it renders 5.8k 360 video with FX like a beast. The machine intermittantly stutters during initial preview playback (sounds like scratched CD skipping tracks - sometimes quickly corrects, other times skips until I hit space bar again), on HD footage, sometimes even when only audio in the timeline. I had the unit 1 week and replaced it for a brand new one, same model - NO improvement. ALL benchmark tests done and constantly monitoring recources - There is NO shortage on system resources.
I have been editing in Premiere Pro for 9 years plus and used a wide veriety of machines (desktops & laptops alike) of which this is by far the highest performing machine yet. We shoot SONY a7S iii and a7iv with mp4 output files - I have NEVER had preview playback issues in PPro with any of the prior machines ranging from i7 to i9 9000 series chpsets ample ram & GPU.
Transcoding ALL of the footage from ALL of my shoots is not an option, especially in the light that it's never been an issue on "weaker" machines.

Is there anyone that has any technical information on why this would even almost be an issue on such a high performance machine.. at all?

Input on this would be greatly appreciated!

[NisA268020010w7l]

Hey And-CFD,

I have enabled hardware acceleration in the Windows settings under "Display." However, I'm not sure if this is possible in Windows 11, as I am using Windows 10. In addition, in Adobe Premiere Pro, under "Sequence" and "Sequence Settings," you can set the format for video preview to QuickTime and adjust the codec to your preferences. On my computer with a 4K monitor, I, for example, use Apple ProRes 422HQ, occasionally LT.

Regarding file and project settings, I don't think I need to mention that "CUDA" is the default setting. Try the other settings and let me know if it's helpful.

[And-CFD]

Hay @NisA268020010w7l  - Thanks for your prompt response on this.

I was able to finally get help from Adobe tech support. Check my response below.

Thanks again for your help - Cheers!

[And-CFD]

Excellent news - NO transcoding required. 

Just got off the phone with Adobe technical support.

Gave me the following items to change:

In PPro go to Edit/Preferences/Playback: Uncheck "Enable Mercury Transmit"

Go to Memory tab: Use 1/4 of your system mem for other applications (In the case of 64GB set it to 16GB)

Go to Audio Hardware tab: set Default Input to "No Input"

Click OK

Open a project and check playback performance.

Additional:

Go to Project Settings\General: make sure "Renderer" is set to the option that gives you CUDA option

Go to Color tab: Set 3D LUT Interpolation: Tetrahedral (Requires GPU acceleration)

These changes sorted out my issue entirely - happy editing in h264!

[Ludvig34265938kq8v]

This worked for me aswell, thanks

[Ida33394140hqh5]

i am also facing the same problem. i try several time but facing the same problem.