Terrible performance

Rupert,

this has happened so routinely for the last year or so on so many different project settings and different computers the specifics of the problem are not really relevant.

Sorry you are having that experience. I do not experience the same issues on my Macs, but let's get to the bottom of what might be going on with your projects and how you handle them.

The only Mac I didn't have performance issues with was a base Imac Pro 2019 8 core Macbook pro almost runs as much fan as Late 2013 Macbook Pro retina, on similar projects. A super specced Mac Pro Imac 2017 and 2019 all also ran hot - and were extremely choppy, all clean systems hired from a rental company.

Thank you for that information. When a system "runs hot" it usually means that the GPU is overheating the case. That means too many GPU accelerated processes being called up. In your case, I would guess the scaling from 4K to 3K plus any Lumetri Color effects could be causing these issues.

I've tried all the playback fixes.

• Check out this doc: Basic Troubleshooting & Maintenance for Premiere Pro on macOS
• Have you tried everything listed there?
• I would especially note resetting Adobe folder permissions since you said you have updated the OS to Mojave, which tends to cause permissions to go awry, which make for poorly performing systems on macOS.

My beef is that really Premiere should be able to handle 4K without a problem these days. Although my timeline is only 3.2K

4K footage in a 4K timeline would perform better. 4K in a 3.2 timeline causes your GPU to work overtime because it handles the high quality scaling.

If you want a nice smooth operation from start to finish, start with 3K ProRes 422 files by using the transcode on ingest process, you can even add a LUT to reduce grading on the back end.

By transcoding on ingest, you wouldn't need the GPU to scale every frame, and could harness GPU power to focus on accelerated effects instead.

With footage that matches the Timeline settings, you could further take advantage of smart rendering which would allow fast and smooth exports. I would also create render files which match the 3K footage precisely, for better playback of rendered effects and for smart rendering. Just change them in Sequence Settings after setting the editing mode to custom.

Make sure you put your media cache on a separate high speed drive. It doesn't sound like you have that set up that way. That can help a lot.

Finally, please check system requirements: Adobe Premiere Pro System Requirements

Many of them have been updated for CC2019. A lot of them are much higher than they used to be. For example, a system that has 4GB VRAM/32 GB RAM and a single T3 connected drive would be the very bare minimum setup for any 4K editing. I recommend users around double that spec for smoother editing.

Sorry, I am in support and any YouTuber benchmarking against the competition is a bit out of my wheelhouse. Feel free to let the developers know those findings here: Premiere Pro: Hot (5595 ideas) – Adobe video & audio apps

If you've already moved on to other platforms, then good luck. Please return here any time for questions or support.

Kind Regards,
Kevin