Why does Pr have such a hard time playing Long-GOP?

[Jim Curtis]

This problem has gone back several versions.  Pr works fine with intraframe and MPEG-2 footage, but drops frames like crazy or won't even play 4K AVCHD, DJI, and other Long-GOP footage WITHOUT ANY EFFECTS OR SCALING applied, even at 1/4 or 1/8 resolution that plays smoothly in VLC and QT player outside of Premiere.

And this is intermittent.  Some times it plays, some times it doesn't.  When it doesn't, quitting and relaunching helps for a while, but it inevitably stops playing again. 

I've been deleting my prefs several times a day, which also helps briefly, but that may be because quitting and relaunching is required to do that.

I have to render most of this type of footage to get it to play reliably.  Time killer.

I'm not maxing out my 2GB/s RAID, 6-core (12 thread) 3.06 GHz CPU or Titan GPU and 128GB RAM.  Not even close.  I have iStat Menus installed, and can monitor my system resources in real-time by looking at my menu bar.

This certainly suggests the problem is in the way Pr is built.  But, if I'm wrong and there's a fix for this, I'd be grateful to learn how.

System described above is on a MacPro5,1 running 10.13.6 with latest GPU and CUDA drivers installed.

[R Neil Haugen]

You might be able to ingest via Prelude, mark in/out, and have Prelude make the t-codes from the marks.

Neil

[Stan Jones]

Jim's last comment about VLC got me wondering about Prelude. I have assumed that the PR approach to working natively is part of why it would be a more difficult job to allow real time playback of difficult formats. Prelude might be the easier platform for such an undertaking. It never got me interested enough for my projects, but real time playback for selecting and marking footage would be a winner.

[R Neil Haugen]

It's not really better about real-time playback, but ... you can work directly from camera cards and preview material, mark your cuts, and have it rename according to your presets, then t-code to several different places, creating "instant" backup files. Which can be handy. So it can work before you even upload to your computer.

Neil

[Stan Jones]

Yes, that's my understanding of its current functioning. I'm wondering about Prelude for a feature request rather than Premiere. It is possible that the underlying issues would make no difference. But I believe there are a lot of editors that see Jim Curtis' point.

[R Neil Haugen]

As to rebuilding the playback code for PrPro? Yea, that would be good ... there's clearly some work there to be done. They've improved certain parts of the system in that last build or two, but there's a lot better playback to be had.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

tit_toinou  wrote

Jim it's definitely doable to have a media encoder software that would trim/transcode your sequences before you import them into PPro but wouldn't that be a bad workflow ?

It wouldn't be ideal, but might be an improvement.  We need to be able to PLAY the footage to trim it before transcoding (by the Collect process), and currently, some Long-GOP just refuses to play in Pr.

Neal Haugen and Stan Jones suggested Prelude.  I just installed the CC 2017 and 2019 versions.  2019 isn't very smooth, but 2017 is at least playing my footage without dropping frames.  I still can't shuttle/scan/skim, but I'm not expecting miracles.  Looks like this may be a workaround that doesn't involve another product like Resolve. 

[Stan Jones]

Thanks for reporting on Prelude. As noted, I assumed that Prelude operates much the same as PR, but that it might be the better option for a feature request.  But maybe it is less stressed and even now runs better.

[Jim Curtis]

I just looked at some tutorials on Prelude and you can only trim heads and tails.  So, Prelude will be worthless for takes where the shooter keeps the camera running, and does multiple moves in one long clip, which is what many shooters with OSMOs or GoPros do.  Drat.

I searched and learned that Resolve will do XML exports.  If I have time, I'll install the free version, and see if it does any better with these problem codecs.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Jim,

Could you (and everyone on this thread) please upvote this feature request on user voice: Better Support For LongGOP – Adobe video & audio apps

I also filed an internal bug on this issue on behalf of customers like you. I added this particular forum post to the bug for emphasis and to add to the story.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Jim Curtis]

Done and done, Kevin.  Thank you!

[getho]

My DJI workflow:

I shoot as MOVS. I transcode EVERYTHING to cineform mov into a proxies folder. I dont use premiere's proxies because I pan and scan everything, I want native res. Edit as usual, then I can delete the proxies and relink media to the original movs. Everything including warp stabilization is preserved, and I do the final render from this.

[getho]

getho  wrote

My DJI workflow:

I shoot as MOVS. I transcode EVERYTHING to cineform mov into a proxies folder. I dont use premiere's proxies because I pan and scan everything, I want native res. Edit as usual, then I can delete the proxies and relink media to the original movs. Everything including warp stabilization is preserved, and I do the final render from this.

I should also say that this was my DJI workflow using CC2017:

Edit, export. 

[getho]

Depends how you define fine. It was still pretty crap, but usably so. In fact even my laptop could handle it. Now it just laughs at me before heading to a corner to weep.

[R Neil Haugen]

Ouch.

Neil