Poor Playback Performance Despite Powerful Hardware

[Ninbura]

Hey,

I've recently started editing 4k60 footage and 3440x1400 100fps footage on my computer, no matter what I do play back is extremely choppy in Premiere Pro despite my system specs.

Specs:
7900X

GTX 1080

64GB DDR4

Intel 600p m.2

Seems like I shouldn't have any issues with this hardware but play back stutters so much premiere is basically unusable. I have GPU acceleration on but even when I turn it off and render out the files the problem persists, sometimes it'll hang on one frame for multiple seconds. File sizes are around a gigabyte a minute, any ideas?

[Jim_Simon]

Use Cineform proxies for that media.

Work offline using proxy media |

[Ninbura]

Thank you for the reply,

I was hoping I wouldn't have to go down that road. Is it possible to proxy multiple aspect ratios in one project? My 3440x1440 footage is 21:9 while the rest of my footage is 16:9. What I don't understand is even when I turn off GPU acceleration and render these files they still playback with endless stutters in Premiere Pro. When I do the same thing in After Effects I get perfect playback. These same files play just fine in windows media player or FFplay, is Premiere's playback performance just that much worse?

I see people on Youtube editing raw 8k Red footage on PC's with 16-core Threadrippers and GTX 1080's but somehow I can't manage 4k footage with a 10-core i9 and a GTX 1080? Just seems odd... I thought proxies were for low power machines.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Well let measure the power of your machine with Premiere Pro.  I have a BenchMark using Premiere Pro (PPBM) that will test the CPU, GPU and storage to see how well your components work together while you are running Premiere.  Download, unzip, run the project file that corresponds to your current Premiere version with your GTX 1080 enabled.  After running the four timeline exports SUBMIT them back to me and we will respond with feedback on how well you are tuned for Premiere.  I do have a very good test score from an i9-7900X

MOD'S, I believe this really should be in the Premiere Hardware forum

[jeffp68340199]

Make sure to copy entire contents of SD card to hard drive - do not pick and choose video clips - copy the whole works, folders and all, to a New Folder on your drive. Sometimes there is stuff in those folders that helps Premiere properly manage the media being used. Then in Premiere, import using Media Browser.

Where are the video clips stored? You should have fast, dedicated storage for video clips. Don't use the System drive, regardless of how fast it may be.

If you follow those steps, and playback is still poor, then you may need to work with Proxies as Jim stated. I edit Sony 4K 30p .mxf media on my PC with good results, but not using 60p myself and don't know what codecs you are working with - I hear some of the footage from drone cameras can be tricky to play back smoothly.

Thanks

Jeff

[Ninbura]

The footage I'm working with is actually screen capture, not from a camera.

Most of my footage is 3440x1440 @ 100FPS captured from my main display at a 250mb bitrate using FFmpeg.

I've seen the suggestion to not use my boot drive to store footage a couple times now, is this just a common known problem? Shouldn't a PCIe SSD like mine have plenty of bandwidth despite? Been looking to get another PCIe SSD, but someone also mentioned that they had problems with NVME M.2 drives in the past which seems weird to me as they are much faster than standard sata SSDs. Think storing footage seperately on this would help me?:HP EX920 M.2 1TB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 3D TLC NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 2YY47AA#ABC - Newegg....

Thank you for the suggestions.

[SAFEHARBOR11 · Accepted solution]

Most video is 30 or 60fps, while you are pushing nearly 4K resolution at 100fps so that's a lot to ask of any computer for smooth playback, if you understand how Long-GOP formats get decoded.

It has always been suggested since NLE began that you should use fast, dedicated media drives for video content. The System drive is being accessed constantly by the operating system and by programs that are running. Premiere may also have temp and cache files being accessed from system drive as well. You want a drive that can focus on one thing, which is delivering frames of video without interruption.

Forget the m.2 business for video storage. If your case has room, install two high-performance 7200rpm SATA drives and set them up as RAID 0. Or get an external RAID 0 solution, using USB 3.0 or USB-C for example. Minimum. Think Seagate Barracuda or Western Digital Black. Times two.

Thanks

Jeff

[Ninbura]

Thank you for the reply,

I'm not entirely sure it's a hardware issue, may be my codecs or something, I will run these benchmarks when I get home.