Poor Editing Performance on New M1 Mac Studio

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
April 1, 2022
3 replies
14126 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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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 ...

A

Afterglow

Known Participant

Hi Afterglow,

Sorry for the frustration. The OP switched to another platform. Posts are closed after the OP leaves the conversation. This one hasn't been locked yet, but I may do so shortly because of the protocol. Feel free to open your own thread any time.

I may have written this before, but Premiere Pro might not support Long GOP 10-bit, 4:2:2 high frame rate footage in specific computers. Other NLE platforms may be more performant for particular formats and your computer. Sorry about that. In that case, you can file a bug here. I would be happy to advocate for a performance enhancement on your behalf.

I would try to place your media files on a high-speed SSD connected via a high-speed connection like Thunderbolt or USB 3. This rule of thumb can help reduce the overhead triggering these performance warnings. Another thing to try is to close all projects from the Home screen and then delete the media cache from Preferences > Media cache. Media cache from previous versions referencing your media can cause issues in the current version.

Thanks,
Kevin

Thanks for your reply. I'll file a bug/request and if you're able to support it that's terrific, given how many FX6s are out there. One thing, I'm pretty conservative with frame rates and mostly stick to 25fps and still get problems and the media being edited is stored on the Mac Studio's super-fast internal SSD. I tried clearing the cache yesterday again and the error messages above were logged after that. Thanks again!