Speed up responsiveness as sequence/project grows

[Trevor_Asq]

Freelance job:

iMac 5k 32GB ram PP2019.1.3

Sources are AVCI MXF OP1a 1080/25P from Sony F5/FS7 & double system audio. Network shared storage (GB Space)

There’s 2 sound recordings & 3 cams running & both source wav files come along for the ride (on muted tracks A11-20) for the dubbing mixer.

Automatic waveform generation is turned off.

All is fine as chapters are built but, as the show gets stitched together - and so both sequence length & size of project (inc pek cfm etc media files that are being managed) increases - so PP slows down and becomes less responsive.

One way to get the longer sequences (only 30 mins of content though) to improve is to turn off waveforms. But it’s still a lot of spinning beach ball type waiting as ‘something’ is happening.

I’ve also pared down the number of sound tracks ‘coming along for the ride’ on this latest show, hoping that will help too. 

a. Any other ideas for speed improvements as sequence/project grows in size? (already deleted media cache & reset prefs, can’t keep chapters in seperate projects although could break show into two halves with seperate projects).

b. Does my habit of duping cuts at various points to keep a rollback version add to these problems ?(thinking aloud I may just start ‘exporting as pp project’ to keep old versions)

c. It feels like systemic problems with the shared storage may be the issue (eg everything seems to slow down between 2 and 5pm when there’s likely to be more people on the system, all with timelines & projects that are more complex). 

Folks cut features in PP over months so a little 25min show cut in a week shouldn't be so taxing, right? Everywhere else I use PP the storage is either DAS or its Avid Nexis (so if folks are using GB Space with success or problems, please do chime in)

Thanks for any help 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Trevor,

It would be great to get more info about your Mac. Is it this one? 

Shared storage is often a big bottleneck for such projects and is always a suspect when having trouble with performance.

My advice is to dump footage into the shared storage pool and use it for storage and backup, but use your local machine to take advantange of high speed storage and lower latency. You might even leave these original masters on the network and create proxies that live locally. It is interesting to note that a lot of folks are operating with fiber channel and other shared solutions. In fact, Premiere Pro can also utilize Avid Nexis.

I don't want to guess or make any recommendations for you just yet since I don't know the capability of your network at this time. I am working on an internal project at Adobe for my own team, so I'll be sure to pass along any advice. Hope that's OK.

Regards,
Kevin

[Kevin-Monahan]

Trevor,

You might also consider keeping your key projects runnning as lean and mean as possible. To me, this means to keep any unnecessary project items out of my main project. You can now use shared projects in tandem with your main project. Each shared project might have a specific purpose.

One might be for your audio SFX library, another for your stock footage. You could even make projects for tired project assets that you want to keep for posterity's sake, but just don't want hanging around in your main project. Projects with fewer assets in them tend to run better, avoid instability, and have better overall performance than those that are filled with media objects.

There are steps you can also take to avoid duplicate clips, and if you do get too many duplicates, there are ways to thin those out. Anyway, I would also consider the strategy of creating multiple projects for various source items. Let me know if you have any questions around that.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Trevor_Asq]

Hi Kevin

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

The iMac is a 27” i7 5K I think (will check when I’m back in).

Interested on how you recommend breaking projects apart - although this is really not a complicated project. It’s 95% from one days shoot.

The workflow is such that one should be able to pick up the project in any of the attached edit rooms (though we do try & stay in the same room).

May try the local proxies approach going forward, if I get time to generate them.