Adobe Premiere Pro CC 14.4 Overall Slow Performance

[sssss7008252]

I am experiencing extremely frustrating, slow performance all across the board with the recent updates of Premiere Pro

Latest Premiere Pro : 14.4.

MacOS : 10.15.5

Macbook Pro 16Gb RAM

Quad Core 3.1GHz, Intel i7

Sometimes Premier will crash the O/S, and cause a segfault.  (Which is not a surprise, given the  memory management issues)

Adobe support - please help??

Before the recent updates, Premiere Pro would load up fast, and perform really fast, for any timeline interaction. 

I am rendering 1080p timelines, with the majority of 1080p footage, and occasional 4k clips.  However, no crazy transitions, or rendering artifacts.  

On Startup :

1. seems to be caching EVERYTHING in EVERY TIMELINE - and while building this cache, it exceeds the Memory Allocation too

2. Does NOT respect the Memory Preferences setting, but consumes ALL AVAILABLE SYSTEM RAM (16Gb), forces the O/S into swapping to disk, which ultimately brings the O/S to a crawl.

3. Consumes ALL AVAILABLE SYSTEM CPU.

4. So essentially the Preferences -> Memory setting is IGNORED.

A Adobe Support call has been unable to provide any useful insights.

I performed the following steps already

1. uninstalled

2. re-installed the Application

3. purged my ~Documents/Adobe folders, (and essentially starting with a fresh), also getting rid of any unwanted Custom presets

4. Cleared Preview cache, and file caches

5. tried a test project to contain only ONE timeline sequencem with a few clips - and the problems remain.

Still the same results.

Not only does it hang up to minutes to open a project, anything todo with timeline scrubbing, adding/removing clips (drag/drop) clips to the timeline, takes forever.  Cursor stops moving, and just overall poor system performance.

Timeline /Preview Playback  (1080p ) stalls...on playing - and takes forever to respond to the "play/stop" instructions.  Sometimes the lag is so long, it mis-interprets instructions, well longer than 10 secs after issueing the command.   It's just unworkable.

My Workspace has these panels open.  An honestly I need them open all the time, for the product to be functional - it's a key part of my workflow.

1. Essential Graphics

2. Lumetri color

3. Effects browser

Essentially the product is USELESS at this time.

Oh - and Premiere Pro and associated CEPH processes will consume all available CPU (in my case up to 700%) according to the system monitor.  (Quad core)  

Here's a hint perhaps?

My typical application start process is : 

1.  Double click on a project file.

What does seem to provide a bit of startup performance increase is.

1.  Start Premiere from the App Browser - and DO NOT OPEN ANY PROJECT.   

2. Leave it for 5 mins to do it's thing.

3.  Then Load A project - and go from there. (and then it will do the same, try and cache everything, and go into all the spikes of CPU and RAM), after which it still accrued 14GB of RAM, despite my setting of 12GB to the application. 

[sssss7008252]

A bit more information about the test timeline:

1. 1080p, 

 2. 120 secs

3.  Contains 40 cuts

[Michael Grenadier]

try creating a new user with administrative privileges in system preferences:  users and groups and log in as the new user.  See if that makes any difference

[sssss7008252]

Thanks for the suggestions.

During the test, after a clean O/S reboot, no other applications running: 

A new administrative user exhibits much the same issues, so I suspect it has to do with either

1. A default Premiere Pro setting, eg, timeline performance setting, or render engine (I'm using Mercury GPU)

and/or some of the other timeline settings, which I'm using incorrectly, or which has changed recently, causing my projects to all run really slow.

Maybe eg: Sequence settings :

Max Bit Depth = OFF,

Max Render Quality = OFF,

Composite in Linear Color = ON

OR, perhaps,

Some of the 3rd party Audio/VSTs  plug-ins. even though they might not be in use. 

During the <new user> first time Premiere startup, the "Scan Audio Plug-Ins" took a long time.

[Michael Grenadier]

try moving the audio plug-ins so they don't load. Digital rebellion has a
great plug in manager in one of their suites. Think there's a free trial
so worth a shot.

[sssss7008252]

I will give it a try .... thank you 

[sssss7008252]

No Change

[sssss7008252]

Even updated MacOS to the latest 10.15.7 - to ensure I'm not seeing O/S issues.  Hopefully the latest MacOS is stable and performant.

The problem persists.

opening a 6 min timeline, rendering the video thumbs take forever - is caching even used? 

Why do I pay the price for all that disc storage, to store previews, when the app does not seem to respect it?

Also any interaction with the timeline (drag/drop/insert/ and basic edit results in CPU spinning) and then timline play takes about 5 secs to even start playing.

It's surely not usable in this mode.

Adobe support is not making any progress.... 

[sssss7008252]

It seems I might have run into the annoying "warp stabilization data elements, end up in the project file" 

For that reason, the methodology of "duplicating sequences" as a method of version control within the project, (to enable rollback, amongst other things, and all the obvious reasons why one would want to version your work)  is sub optimal, and outright inefficient.

So the only real way to version one's work, is to do it at the project file level, but thats really inefficient, because the only way to roll-back, would be to close/open an old project file.  What if a lot has changed?   The only way now, to revert back to the old /previous sequence, would be via the "import" feature - alsoo a very expensive and disruptive process.

So Adobe :   What is your recommended best practice for versioning sequences within a single project?

[moniquec95866436]

sssss7008252, I realize that thanking you doesn't resolve our problems but I seriously and sincerely thank you for taking the time to post everything. 

All work on my project has come to a halt because everything is so slow. My anxiety level is HIGH.

[sssss7008252]

Sure - let's hope to get a good answer, and ultimately a workable product - My work has pretty much halted as well.   

I'm waiting on Adobe support - Any support - for a while now - no meaningful responses yet.  It seems the customer support personnel can't really debug anything beyond a standard recipe which is not helpful when dealing with complex performance issues - of out-of-the-box features.  I'll keep posting updates, as much as it's feasible.