Premiere not playing well with Sony A7sIII footage

[Andy Turner]

I have having trouble editing A7siii footage.  I have the latest version of PP loaded (because I was having issues with the previous version 🙂 I did not have this issue prior to that version (22.1.2?). I am using a Macbook Pro 2021, M1 Pro, 16gb RAM.  The footage is 24p 4:2:0 8bit XAVCS 4K. It will play fine for a few minutes but then stop playing video altogether,  cant scrub through footage, audio stops playing, dropped frames.  Inconsistent.  I actually can edit and just got through an edit, but it was painful.  This machine is fast and was plowing through stuff a month ago...what happened?

I have reduced the video quality, cleared unused media cache, cleared all media cache, restarted several times.  Help if you can! :). Thanks!

[Joëlle Bh]

Hello Andy,

I advise you to work with proxies 

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/proxy-media.html

[Andy Turner]

??

It worked before. I am using 4:2:0 8 bit footage, this is not a proxy situation.

[R Neil Haugen]

That rig has an actually low amount of RAM  for current Pr2022, first thing. Second is I that AVCHD is actually an H.264/long-GOP encoded format. With the de-encoding process that is harder on the computer than an all-intraframe codec.

You note a difference in performance over time, I'm assuming that is with the new version compared to the previous one. Each new series of Premiere seems to require more hardware to get the same performance, sadly. And between versions, one may have a different method of working with the computer's hardware for H.264 encode/decode work, which could also be an issue here.

Joelle's suggestion to try proxy workflows may actually be appropriate here if the proxy is an all-intraframe like say ProRes proxy. It might be much easier for your computer to process on the fly than the AVCHD long-GOP stuff.

Neil