Premiere Pro lags when switching/tabbing between tools
Good day all!
This is my first post in a forum, otherwise I do not know how I could solve the problem yet because I could only find 3 other forum posts that deal with this issue. They were posted a long time ago without a proper answer so I'm trying a new one here, hopefully someone here can help me or at least has some ideas to work with!
I'm using Premiere Pro 2023 to edit videos, so far I've had video/audio footage of about 5min and cut it down to a 60s video without the program lagging somehow. Now I wanted to dare to longer videos for the first time and have significantly longer video material of about 1-3h what I want to edit. In Premiere itself everything runs smoothly, but as soon as I actively use another window on the PC and then return to Premiere, I have to wait 20-30s each time until the program has loaded properly again. I tried the same thing in an older version of Premiere (2020 version) with the same result.
Here is a concrete example if this could be helpful:
1) I edit in Premiere and everything runs smoothly.
2) I switch to my browser to continue writing a sentence on my script in Google Docs.
3) I switch back to Premiere and press the play button to continue playing my footage.
4) PC fan spins faster, CPU utilization jumps from 3% to 16%, remaining components remain the same in their utilization
5) 30s later video material plays, fans calm down, CPU load goes back to 11% and GPU load increases by 15% while video material runs
Instead of clicking on the play button I have also tried just clicking on a different place in the video footage but there the result is the same and the program takes 30s to load the new place.
My PC:
- GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080
- CPU: Intel i9-11900K 3.50 GHz 11th Generation
- RAM: 32GB
- Operating system: Windows 11
- SSD: 2TB
- HDD: 2TB
What I've already tried in Windows:
- Hardware accelerated GPU scheduling (On/Off)
- Optimizations for fixed games (On/Off)
- Start Premiere as administrator
- Set Premiere process priority to high
What I already tried in Premiere:
- Playback resolution set to 1/4
- Pause resolution set to 1/4
- Playback with high quality off
- Disable FX globally
- Project settings -> Video rendering and playback settings: (Mercury Playback Engine - GPU acceleration (CUDA) / Mercury Playback Engine (software only))
- Create completely new project and start editing there from scratch
- Empty media cache in Premiere
- C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common -> Delete folder: Media Cache, Media Cache Files, Peak Files, Team Projects Cache
- Audio preferences: Automatic audio waveform creation Off
- Preferences Audio Devices: Default Input -> No Input
- Media preferences: H264/HEVC hardware accelerated decoding (On/Off)
- Memory preferences: Reserved ram for other applications 6GB + Premiere ram 26GB / Reserved ram for other applications 12GB + Premiere ram 20GB
- Preferences Playback: Pause Media Encoder queue during playback (On/Off)
- Preferences Playback: Enable Mercury Transmit (On/Off)
Ideas on what else to try:
- Custom 3D settings in NVidia Control Panel but no idea what I should set there.
My PC is powerful, that can't be the problem. The load is not too high while I am using Premiere. It just seems that the program goes into standby mode as soon as I focus on another application and as soon as I switch back Premiere has to load again. Of course this disturbs the workflow a lot and I don't have another computer to write the script on and I wouldn't want that anyway. Interesting to mention is that if I play the video in Premiere and then switch the application, the video continues to play smoothly and I can switch back to Premiere at any time without having to load anything, as if the program would not switch to a "standby mode". So far this is a small workaround that works, but it's not pretty and I often forget to let the video run, stop it and then I have the fun with the 30-second loading again. Definitely not a workaround for the future. And let pre-render individual parts or work with proxies does not solve the problem according to other users and I would also be stupid. The problem is not solved by unloading my PC, because it runs smoothly while working. It is only this presumed "standby mode" of Premiere that causes me problems. In Sony Vegas there is a program setting where you can choose if the media files should be closed when Vegas is not the active application at the moment, i.e. when switching to another application or just to continue writing the script, the program loads the same way as I do in Premiere, only that in Vegas you can deactivate this setting and the problem is solved. I haven't found anything like that in Premiere. I know that most Premiere users don't have this loading problem but there are still enough people who have to deal with it and don't know what to do.
I've written down all the knowledge and experience I could gather here and hope that someone can do something with it. There are certainly many other people who have the same problem and ideally this forum post will be useful to them in the future.
Thank you very much for any help!
