Timeline performance....

[avkills]

Anyone else having major issues with timeline playback/scrubbing with the latest version of Premiere on the Mac.  Hard to say if it just the crappy footage I am dealing with, but I have to say that even on my new 16-core MacPro 7,1; the performance of premiere sucks.  Using the internal SSD for the source footage as well.  Going to software only video processing mode actually seemed to help which is crazy.  

Adobe, I hope you read this, I am downloading a trial copy of FCP X to see if there is any difference.  Perhaps it is the footage, we will see.

[avkills]

Source footage works absolutely fine in FCP X.

This is unacceptable. [abuse removed by moderator]

[Michael Grenadier]

it might help if you tell us the specs of the problematic footage and if the problem is just in the timeline or also in playing the source file.  MediaInfo will be able to tell you the specs of the source footage 

https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download

but you might also tell us what the source of the footage is (a specific camera, iphone, screen capture, etc).

[R Neil Haugen]

This forum is primarily user-to-user with some oversight/assistance by the product support team.

If you want to send a message directly to the engineers/development team, that is their UserVoice system, where every post is viewed by at least one engineer ... and yes, I've talked with one of the engineers who does that task.

His biggest complaint ... the vast majority of bugs and performance problems are things they cannot replicate in-house or through their beta program. As an engineer, what you can't see, what you can't replicate, you can't know how to fix.

So ... they need data. And the majority of the posts they get are something like yours, which ... aren 't helpful.

Which specific hardware are you using with what OS? Which specific media? How are you importing/ingesting that media? What sort of drive and connections are in use? What effects are you using? What network servers if any are involved? Any third-party plugins like Sapphire or Red Giant?

They have to get enough data to start sorting out what is causing the specific problems you're having. I'm PC based, but I have several close acquaintances on various Macs including $20G or so of hot new Mac. And for the most part, they're blasting away. A couple are having a couple minor issues, but no one I know is hammered.

So ... please give the engineers the precise data as to what you're running and the issues you're facing.

And yes, these are all tools ... fancy hammers. Use what works.

Neil

[avkills]

Neil you are corrrect so I will give some more info here; but I have read about lots of people being unhappy with the GUI performance of Premiere on both platforms; but you know how these things go, you are trying to get something done and get frustrated and post in the heat of the moment...so here goes....

Machine specs are Mac Pro 7,1 tower OS 10.15.4; 16-core, 32GB RAM, 580X GPU (yes I know not the best), 2GB SSD (actually 2 1TB Raided).  All of the source footage was being stored on the internal SSD, no network drives or anything like that.  I opted for the 580X because I am waiting to see how the WX5700 is going to fair in encoding against the VegaII; but it also looks like bigger and better in the AMD pipeline as well.

Premiere version 14.04; only plugin is Trapcode Shine, which I would not use in Premiere; pretty much have that for AfterEffects (which actually runs very very well).  Using Mercury Metal for playback.  But I tried all of the options.

Footage in question was H.264 (MP4) recordings made by Zoom and it is really weird because it bases the resolution off of whatever the resolution of the "shared" screen was it looks like.  This was a instance where there was powerpoint and the client pretty much just wanted the powerpoint and audio for the end product. Resolutions range anywhere from 1920x1080, 1920x1200 and I had 2 that are 2736x1824, all were 25fps and had 32Khz mono audio encoded AAC.

Perhaps the best thing to do with this type of footage in the future is just transcode it to ProRes and go from there.  I understand that H.264 footage isn't meant to be edited.  I am sure this is not encoded with real editing in mind, probably tons of "P" and "B" frames.

I will say at first I did not like FCP X, but once I got used to how it worked it actually worked quite well for this particular project, but I doubt I will use it for my main editing app.

Moderators I apologize for my heated post.  This is actually the first time I have had issues in Premiere where it was just super frustrating; and this was the first edit project on the new tower so you can imagine the frustration after spending that much on it.

[Jeff Bugbee]

As mgrenadier said, can you use Mediainfo to give us the technical details of the Zoom video files?

[avkills]

Here is some info from one of the 1920x1200 ones.

[Jeff Bugbee]

You need to use the link and download the MediaInfo app in order to get the information we need to help you troubleshoot.