2 Pinned Replies
Why is PPro using so much RAM? Because the user asked it to do something demanding.
PPro will gladly consume any/all resources available, in such situations.
How much RAM are you reserving for other applications, in PPro's memory preferences?
One counter-intuitive thing that might help: In the PPro prefs, make PPro leave MORE memory to other processes.
Motivation: Lots of processes triggered by PPro, are not owned by PPro; leaving too little RAM for these processes can make PPro fight with itself.
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Replies
If premiere is using some of the storage data as ram, is it then possible to use a ssd that premier/mac can use as ram memory so that it doesn't use the internal storage?
By @ocloop14453207
Under automatic macOS memory management, there is no way to make macOS use external storage to help RAM. Also, Premiere Pro itself has no “scratch disk” feature like Photoshop does to use external storage to help RAM, but that isn’t the same thing anyway. In short, it isn’t an option, and I’ll bet no other video editor you can find has that option either. Partly because, with modern memory management, it shouldn’t be necessary.
When macOS displays the Force Quit Applications window (the screen shot you attached), that means that even though macOS has the ability to handle larger and larger memory requests by automatically using RAM compression and virtual memory on your SSD, the memory requests have gotten so extreme that even the extended memory system is saturated and the OS gives up. If the project isn’t an especially demanding one, this implies that something is going on that is outside the control of the user, whether in the OS or in the application.
If I understand it correctly, Apple is able to use the memory space as ram when things get crazy. So for instance, Premiere will be using 55 GB of memory, while the Mac Book Pro i'm using has 16 gb of ram (memory).
By @ocloop14453207
The understanding is 2/3 correct. It’s not just RAM and virtual memory on storage. There’s also compressed RAM.
When RAM gets tight, macOS takes the steps below (and I won’t be surprised if Windows does something similar these days):
1. First, macOS will attempt to compress lower priority data in RAM to free up some RAM. This is a viable option because on modern CPUs, compressing/decompressing RAM is a lot faster than using storage as virtual memory.
2. If memory demands are so high that RAM compression isn’t enough to meet the demand, then macOS starts swapping RAM data to storage in virtual memory files.
Don’t be misled by Activity Monitor, Memory tab. Most people look at the Memory column and think that is the amount. But the Memory column is a total of all of the different forms that memory can be stored, so total Memory can exceed installed RAM. The RealMem column is a better look at how much real RAM is being used, and VM Compressed shows how much data is compressed in RAM. And of course the Swap Used number at the bottom is about virtual memory on storage.
What I don't understand is, why does Premiere need more than 55 Gb to render while Resolve never goes above 7 GB of ram (memory).
By @ocloop14453207
That is a puzzle and I have no answer for that. I can only say that in the past year, I have seen cases where macOS was reporting an unusually high amount of total memory used by Premiere Pro (and Media Encoder if those sequences were sent to it), from 50 to 150GB, on my Mac that has only 32GB of real RAM installed. It persisted after I tried to “clean out” a project by saving it to XML. I concluded that there was a memory management bug somewhere because that kind of memory consumption is not normal. That was a few months ago, so I was hoping that they fixed it by now. I don’t see the same memory problems with Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, InDesign, etc. which all operate quite nicely within 32GB.
so actually, when i upgrade the mac, its better to upgrade to 64 gb? to avoid this bug problem
By @ocloop14453207
64GB is much, much better than 16GB, because 16GB today would be considered too low for professional work. Personally I will never buy another work Mac that has less than 32GB; I’ll probably aim for 48GB–64GB next time.
To better understand how much memory your Mac needs for your work, one important thing you should do is keep macOS Activity Monitor open in the background, click its Memory tab, and keep an eye on the Memory Pressure graph as you work. If Memory Pressure is usually green, the Mac doesn’t need more memory. If Memory Pressure spends a lot of time being orange or red, your workload needs a Mac with more memory. In the screen shot below, I know Memory Pressure is usually green but I see it went orange for a while during certain tasks, then when I finished those the memory got released, and Memory Pressure went back down to green. From this I can conclude that my 32GB is usually enough, but having 48GB or more wouldn’t hurt.
As far as what you call the "bug problem," there is no guarantee that a similar problem won’t happen again because if it’s really a bug, it can still cause a bad memory leak exceeding what your Mac has. In the example I mentioned earlier from almost a year ago (so it probably doesn’t apply to the current version), macOS reported that during an edit/render session, Premiere Pro and Media Encoder eventually ended up asking for more than 180GB of memory on my 32GB Mac and it was causing the system to lock up. I was sending Media Encoder projects that were simple cuts-only edits with almost nothing on other tracks, no effects, no plug-ins, and less than 5 minutes each (they were software tutorials, just screen recordings, nothing fancy). I concluded this had to be somebody’s bug due to the extremely simple nature of the projects, and because Premiere Pro memory usage for me is often under 10GB. I posted about it here back then, and I never did find out if it was a bug in macOS memory allocation or Premiere Pro, but obviously there was a memory leak bug somewhere because in no way could this be “expected behavior” for such simple projects. Below is a screen shot of that situation a year ago.
Regarding Premiere Pro vs Resolve, I just watched a video where a YouTuber who edits in Resolve is now happily using an M4 MacBook Pro, and she edits frequently in Resolve. She said that she now orders her Mac with no less than 48GB of Unified Memory to take full advantage of the current Resolve feature set.
So this got kind of long but to answer your question:
- Yes, a Mac with much more than 16GB of Unified Memory is recommended. 32GB is probably a realistic minimum for pro work today, so if you can budget for more, that would have a higher chance of avoiding memory problems, especially if you like to keep multiple major apps open.
- Although a Mac with more memory should avoid most memory issues, it’s always possible for a memory problem to come up no matter how much money you spend, either from bugs or from workign on a project that’s a lot more complex and demanding than what you usually work on.
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