Premiere Pro CC 2019 Lag - choppy timeline playback

[kre57]

I've seen quite a few threads on poor playback performance for those using Premier Pro CC 2019. I have experienced this as well. After giving up I installed CC 2018 and everything is working fairly well now.

I have read a few comments that blame the problem on the rift between Apple and Nvidia (Apple not approving any new drivers for Nvidia GPUs) but since I do not have the same issues using CC 2018 I do not understand how that could be. My particular GPU is also one of the Nvidia cards that is still supported in Mojave. One issue I did notice in CC 2018 is that using Metal as the renderer DOES cause lag/choppy playback. OpenCL does not. I am not using CUDA, gave up on that years ago after constant issues with PP updates.

So, my question is, why do I have the playback issues with CC 2019 and not 2018?

My rig:

Editing 1080p .mov from Canon 5D MKIII & MKIV and UHD .mov from Panasonic DVX200

FX - Lumetri color, and common stock transitions

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi kre57,

Sorry to hear about this. The CPU in your system might not be the best to handle 4K media streams but 1080p streams should be manageable. The strange thing is that you are getting better performance in the previous version of Premiere Pro. This is something we would surely like to check. Could you please confirm if the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal/OpenCL) is available as Renderer and is selected in the 2019 version of Premiere Pro. Also, what is the color of the render line on the timeline (red/yellow/green)? In case if it's red/yellow, have you tried rendering the timeline (Sequence > Render In to Out) and checked if the playback is improved?

Thanks,

Sumeet

[kre57]

It seems that installing CC2018 somehow fixed the playback issue in CC2019. Performance is now similar to what I have using 2017 and 2018 (UHD included). Thanks for responding.

[kre57]

So, I jumped the gun when I said CC 2019 seemed to be okay now. There is a definite difference in performance between CC2018 and CC2019. My CPU usage has huge spikes when trying to use CC 2019. The video below shows the playhead movement from one version to the other. I first noticed the issue when using a .psd file with a lot of layers; something that has never given me much trouble in the past. It plays back fine in CC2018 but stutters badly in CC2019. This is after using the Adobe cleaner tool and starting with fresh installs of each version.

[kre57 · Accepted solution]

I ended up using the Adobe cleaner tool a 2nd time and starting with a fresh install. This seems to have fixed the issue. Also note if you have the same problem on a Mac that the default renderer will be Metal on a new install. Change this in project settings to OpenCL.