Poor Editing Performance on New M1 Mac Studio

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
April 1, 2022
3 replies
14125 views

I just set up Premiere on a clean M1 Mac Studio.

Editing lightly-compressed h.264 footage in a timline lags 3-5 seconds scrubbing and hitting play.

Here is a video of clicking around the timeline in Premire Pro showing a significan lag

Here is me skipping around inside the same video on the same M1 Mac, this time in QuickTime Player. Skipping through the file to access random frames is instantaneous:

Here I am skipping around the same file in KDENlive on generic Linux hardware. Performance is also near-instantaneous:

Why is Adobe performance on the latest Mac harware inferior to free/Linux software on old hardware?

Will this be fixed soon?

Is this better on Wintel? I have 10 days to return my hardware purchase.

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Correct answer default227758084w7ctw

Holy smokes!

Can confirm this appears to be fixed in the Beta. So much better.

With the Beta version of Premiere, I'm seeing performance much more in line with what I expected.

Thanks for the tip!

W

Will..

Inspiring

I just setup a brand new M1 Ultra Mac Studio running OS 12.5 with Premiere Pro 22.6.2 and I'm getting laggy playback performance. Footage is 4k h.265 10bit 420 from Sony A7siii. 2 layers of footage with a simple title. Running off of a Crucial 4TB SSD connected via USB-C on the back of the Mac Studio with one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports. Pretty frustrating that it's lagging considering that on my 2018 PC with a GTX 1080 and I9 processor with the same footage using a spinning HDD with USB3, it doesn't lag. There is obviously an issue with Premiere Pro not tapping into the power of the M1 Ultra chip.... I do not want to transcade to ProRes. I spent the extra money and upgraded to the top of the line Mac to avoid spending the time making proxies or transcoding. This is a light edit I'm doing, and as mentioned, something like this works fine on my PC. When will Premiere put stability and performance first? I can guarantee you if I drop this exact same footage in DaVinci, it'll run like butter.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Running multiple tracks of long-GOP 4k 10 bit is by no means "light" editing. Long-GOP media is the nastiest crap for editing made, period. Amazing for data compression and speed when used with the specialized in-camera chips. Lousy for playback in an editor.

Remember, for both those tracks, your machine has to decode up to 30 frames or more to display the 'current' frame on the timeline.

A couple tracks of 6k RED would probably be easier on the machine.

H.264/5 work depends heavily on the inherent capabilities of the underlying hardware to process the specific forms of H.264/5 compression you are working with. I don't know the particulars like say @RjL190365 does, but I know enough that the hardware matters. And is often not what one expects.

And some people get better results when they turn on the prefs for H.264/5 encoding and decoding, some better when they turn them off. Why? I don't have a clue.

So if you haven't messed with the prefs for H.264/5, try that. And we'll see if someone can give a tech description based on the specific hardware you're running.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

W

Will..

Inspiring

I understand, but my point was that this exact footage is working pretty well on my 4+year old PC that's significantly worse, but this brand new M1 Ultra Mac Studio (Fastest chip ever made in a personal computer) that has twice the ram and is editing on a hard drive that's 6-7 times faster (SSD) is choking up and lagging randomly, yet 92% of the computer is showing as idle in Activity Monitor during playback. So it's not an issue with h.265 being tough on the system it seems; its Premiere hasn't been optimized to utilize the Mac Studio's capabilities. it's not tapping into it.