Super laggy playback despite good PC specs

[albert29032792vpln]

Hi

My specs are as follows:

ryzen 9 3900x

32gb ddr4 ram

nvidia 4070

The clips I am trying to edit are 1080p 60fps footage in the h.264 codec.

I make sure to set playback to 1/4 quality to try to help my playback issues, but this seems to have very little effect.

Despite these specs however, I am having an insane amount of playback lag. I will skip 2 or 3 minutes forward in a project and have to wait 30 seconds to a minute before premiere will start playing it.

Other times I will try to pause premiere and the video will lock up but the audio will keep playing for about 20 seconds.

One of the things about my clips is that they will have about 6 audio tracks and I believe these may be causing the issue, however I see no way to solve this short of just recording in 1 audio track, which is not possible with what I am trying to make.

Do you guys have any reccomndations for what I could do?

I have found guides online that suggest converting videos to prores, but my video clips are 5 or 6 hours each(of which a project may use around 10), and the files sizes would then be multiple TBs

[John V Knowles]

What version of Premiere? Adobe jsut improved H.264 playback on Mac and Windows.

I'm afraid the issue is that compressed footage like H.264 isn't great to edit with, and this is compounded by the lack of QuickSync on the Ryzen processors. So your PC is struggling to decode it and play it back. What drive is the footage on? If it's not on an SSD separate from the main boot drive that could also be affecting playback.

[albert29032792vpln]

I have it on a seperate nvme ssd from the drive premiere is installed on.

Regarding the codec, do you know any codecs that might work better? Or potentially if there is a way to reduce playback audio quality as can be done with video?

[albert29032792vpln]

Apologies should have said, I am on version 25.1

[Unknown Arthur]

Just to add to this discussion. I have been editing all my 4k h.264 footage fine (actually XAVC codec, which I beleive is h264 based) up until I updated Premiere to v25.1 this weekend, no proxies needed (Threadripper 3960x, RTX 4090, 128GB RAM).

I immediately noticed scrubbing and playback were significantly worse and my PC was really struggling to edit smooothly. Clearing the caches and allowing it ro recreate the cache files etc didn't help.

I rolled back to Premiere v25.0 this morning as a test, and my projects are now running smooth as butter in the editor again.

Not sure what they did to "improve H.264 playback on Mac and Windows" but it had the exact opposite effect on my setup.

Thanksfully rolling back to v25 makes everything work as expected.

[John V Knowles]

How many of the six audio channels do you actually need to cut with? You could right-click on your clips in the bin and select Modify>Audio Channels and uncheck the ones you don't need before you cut them into a sequence.

I suspect though that your CPU just isn't handling that compressed footage well. It's 6 years old and it lacks QuickSync for proper H.264 acceleration. If you look at the benchmarks from this Puget Systems article you can see it falls below the performance of Intel i7s and i9s from the same year:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/premiere-pro-cpu-roundup-amd-ryzen-3rd-gen-amd-threadripp...

Transcoding to ProRes LT would be the best move here, but you said the files are 5-6 hours long which will take a long time to transcode (and take up more space). Can you handle that type of workflow? Are you able to record these videos in a different codec?

[Peru Bob]

Try proxies:

https://www.adobe.com/learn/premiere-pro/web/proxy-media?locale=en&learnIn=1