Typing captions is unbelievably slow

[POwens]

MacStudio M1 32Gb

PP 23.4.0

macOS 12.6.6

Typing a caption is like watching paint dry.   A single short sentence of twelve words, once typed, takes about 5 mins to be reproduced on screen, with at least 20 seconds pause between each character.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @POwens,

Thanks for the report. I read you are having trouble with performance in editing captions that have been transcribed. May I ask how long your sequence is? Longer sequences seem to have similar issues. Let the team know more specifics to have your bug addressed. They would need a reproducible case. As a support tech, I don't see this issue, so more info would be most welcome. Thanks for any more info you can give.

Thanks,
Kevin

[mjshade]

Turning off duplicate clip markers completely solved this issue for me.

[POwens]

Thanks Kevin.   Sometimes they come from transcriptions, but in almost every case I've edited the text.   This is a doc feature, and the timeline has been anywhere between 45mins - 90 mins, but I haven't noticed much difference when the total duration changes.   The project is 100% subtitled, as no subjects speak english.   The challenges that I have had with this project (which have been enormous) all seem to stem from the fact that it is an inherited project which includes phone footage from all over the world, in every frame rate and codec known to man and from every phone model, and not a single attempt at proxying seems to have ever worked, despite reproxying them all into ProRes CFR 23.98 (my timeline format).   The rest of the dailies are from Blackmagic cameras in ProRes and they don't cause any issues.    I've reset all PP settings to factory, I've blown away renders and media cache thousands of times, I've created new empty projects and migrated cuts and dailies into them, and many other options.  But no matter what I've done, the project remains a technical nightmare, crashing constantly, performance generally is terrible, unable to playback simple sections without rendering, video randomly disappearing (i.e. the screen goes black and I have to turn off and on the caption track to see it again) and renders disappearing (which is definitely a connected issue, as the renders for captioned clips disappear first).

All media is on a single Thunderbay 4 RAID.   Project, caches, media databases are on the same RAID, autosaves on system drive.   Just one other Thunderbolt drive attached.  No plugins or 'unusual' Mac software installed, this is a clean and simple 'out of box' install.

[POwens]

I've tried turning off duplicate clip markers, made no difference.

[mjshade]

Sorry the duplicate frame markers change didn't help. Before I discovered that fix I had been hiding the caption tracks, which would improve general timeline performance a lot, though I'd still have the same issue when editing individual captions. Seemed like it'd type one letter per five seconds. 

Last thing I would suggest if you haven't tried it already is to break up the project into a production. I work on features too and honestly I don't know how I ever got a film done before I figured out the productions workflow. Everything improves - performance, loading/saving time, and even some werid ancillary stuff. It's a lot of work on the front end to break up a big project but once you've done it, it ends up saving a lot of time that would have been wasted to crashes and insane load times. 

[Stan Jones]

@mjshade,

Thanks for offering those helpful suggestions, particularly the Show duplicate frame markers.

@POwens,

I'm on Windows 10, and have only been able to replicate this slow performance in one earlier version. Workarounds may be to disable the caption track (when not needed, for example; may allow editing the text, but not moving on timeline), open only one sequence with captions at a time, zoom in so fewer captions show, work in the Program Monitor rather than the Text Panel, or close the Text Panel.

At least two users reported that it helps to open PR before opening a project (e.g. instead of double clicking a project file as some users do).

Stan

[mjshade]

One last suggestion would be to try switching your renderer to software only instead of Metal. There are tradeoffs with this but you can always switch your render back when you're done editing captions. 

[POwens]

Thanks so much for your comments.   This project has from the beginning been set up (properly) as a Production, by the original AE.

[Sami Succar]

Are you trying to edit the captions from the Text panel or directly from the Program monitor?

I have found that changing the captions from the Text panel is EXTREMELY slow, so I revert to completely closing that panel and making the changes in the Program monitor.

Hope it works for you too.

[POwens]

I'm editing them in the Program monitor, directly.