Premiere Pro 22.2.0 laggy playback with three mp4s on top of each other, M1 Max 64GB

[Timm Voelkner]

Dear community,

the subject line basically gave it all away already.
I'm a little disappointed by my MacBook Pro M1 Max 64 GB (MacOS 12.0.1). 
I kept hearing how fast and amazing it is, especially within Photoshop and Premiere.

While I keep having interesting graphical issues in Photoshop sometimes (story for a different post),

the Premiere performance really bums me out on this one:

I put three Mp4s (H264 Codec, 1080p, nothing too fancy) on top of each other (three 9:16 next to each other in the frame, no FX) within my edit and everytime the playhead passes the playback gets laggy. All the files are on the internal MB's SSD. I updated Premiere due to this issue (22.2.0) and nothing changed. Performance doesn't increase changing from Intel to the Silicon version. The issue remains equally.

I know I could prerender the timeline and that's a step I would have understood with my old MBP 2015, but not with a brand new 5000€ MacBookPro M1 MAX.
Is anyone experiencing the same issues? Anyone has any tips how to improve the performance? Maybe I need to change a preference?

Thanks in advance and have a wonderful weekend everyone!

Timm

[Jeff Bellune]

Would you try the Pr Beta, please? There have been some performance optimizations for Apple silicon.

[R Neil Haugen]

H.264 is way past "nothing fancy". Most people seem to think H.264 should be "easier" than those big ProRes files for the NLE ... and it's the exact opposite. You'd probably playback 3 ProRes without issue.

H.264 playback is SO dependent on the specific ability of gear to handle the long-GOP encoding process. I've seen comparisons of the new Mac laptops and desktops on LGG where some are quite good with H.264, and another new machine sucks with it.

Yea, the specific hardware bits of your computer matter for things like this. It's the same for PCs. We've had a ton of posts where someone bought a PC with a super expensive multi-core CPU that they assumed would kill H.264. But the playback is worse than their old 6-core CPU was, and they're mad.

Well ... that old 6-core had the bit to work H.264 encoding built into the chip. The fancy spendy one had everything but the built-in H.264 encode/decode bit.

Neil

[Timm Voelkner]

Thank you for your reply Neil,

you are absolutely right and I'm fully aware of the long GOP structure within h264 compression.
Back in the days I always used to convert highly compressed files to ProRes or DNX (or any other intermediate format) to ensure a nice editing flow. But sometimes it's just a setting or a specific driver that needs to be installed, that's why I asked. Also, I was looking forward a lot to this MacBook and probably got a little lost in Apple's culty marketing magic.
In fact it remains an amazing laptop and I have no regrets whatsoever, but while it's performing so impressively on many levels you'd assume that three h264 files of 3 seconds shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Anyway, if you're right about the built-in h.264 bit, I wonder why Apple is not aware of it and if they are why they didn't "put it in". For sure it's not as easy as that, still h264 is around for almost 18ys, so someone must have thought it about it by now?

@Jeff Bellune Thanks for the tip, at first it seemed to have done a slightly better job than the current official version, but in the second playback the issue was similar to the one before.

For now I will simply keep on converting my files before editing y ya está. 🙂

Thanks for your replies and have a nice day!

Timm

[R Neil Haugen]

I've seen some notes on another forum where three owners of new Mac kit ... three different computers ... had very different times for H.264/5 timelines. So I suppose like anything else, you really have to see full test specs before knowing what any one computer from anyone will do real-world.

That said, you're right, the general performance specs of those are quite charming ...  😉

Neil

[jamesdrakefilms]

I agree. I am very unhappy about the general lag of the software. Some edits, with just prores files, still seem to lag as I try and drag and drop things. I believe it to be a software issue as it seems Resolve and especially Final Cut feel much much snappier.