Premiere Pro Getting Super Choppy During Cutting and Playback in the Last Week

[jfredrickson01]

I've been editing on this computer for about a year and never had any problems with clean playback and cutting until about a week ago. I usually just edit footage from a single camera (Panasonic G85 4k), but lately I've been adding Zoom recordings and footage from a second camera (Nikon D750 1080p) so I'm not sure if that is what has caused my playback to slow to a 5-10 second delay whenever hitting play or making any cuts.

My computer is running macOS Mojave with the following hardware:

CPU: Intel i9 9700K running at 4.6 Ghz
Memory: 64GB DDR4 3200 Mhz
GPU: Radeon RX580 8GB

Storage: Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD

When I watch Activity Monitor while editing, Premiere Pro is running at around 24GB of memory and 3-4% CPU, but as soon as I hit play it jumps to 110-150% CPU (not even sure what 100%+ means) for 5-10 seconds until playback starts and then the CPU jumps back down until I make an edit or stop and restart playback at which point it jumps back up for another 5-10 seconds before playing again.

Is this normal for a multi-camera edit like this on this level CPU? What speed CPU do you need to be able to edit multi-camera footage smoothly? Or is there something else I can change in Premiere Pro to make my playback smoother while editing?

Edit: I've tried turning off Global Effects and turning playback down to 1/4 and 1/8 resolution with no effect. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[jfredrickson01]

After a bit of googling about potential audio issues, I came across this post that suggested that different audio bitrates could cause playback issues so I checked my audio and discovered the following:

I have 3 tracks recorded on a Tascam DR-70 at 48 KHz 24-bit Mono. The Nikon D750 audio is recorded at 48KHz 16-bit Stereo and the G85 audio is recorded at 48KHz Compressed Stereo. Since I’m creating the sequence by dragging the G85 footage to the timeline I’m assuming my sequence has those settings.

Could the different bit rate on my external audio be causing these problems? How would I go about fixing that?

[jfredrickson01]

After a bit more testing with my audio files, I found that if I delete the audio tracks from the Tascam DR70 from the timeline my playback goes back to buttery smooth, so the camera audio tracks seem to be working fine.

What could I do to fix the lag issues with my Tascam DR70 audio files?

[Ann Bens]

Convert with Audition to wav.

[jfredrickson01 · Accepted solution]

I ended up just rightclicking all of the lagging audio clips on the timeline and hitting "Render and Replace" and that seemed to fix the lag issue. Is this an acceptable way to fix this issue going forward or should I be converting these audio tracks in Audition before editing in the future? Do you have any guidance on how to do the conversion? The tracks are already wav files. It appears that Premiere converts them to 32-bit float wav files when I "Render and Replace" and those play back perfectly smoothly.