AMD/RTX 3060 laptop struggles with 10 bit HEVC

[MerslD]

Hey,
I am wondering if there is a difference in handling HEVC (10 bit) and H.264 on timeline with intel and AMD....as far as I know, if you have nvidia GPU then it is the fastest encoder and decoder so it shouldnt matter if you have intel or amd. But now with legion 5p I am struggling with my HEVC timeline. I have checked NVIDIA decoding and encoding acceleration for those codecs in preferencies. HEVC is the main issue:

1. Thumbnails are loading awfully slow
2. Timeline is jittery when zooming and scrolling in out, sometimes even shows premiere pro not responding
3. My CPU and RAM are often max out at 100% for no reason for example when loading thumbnails
4. Sometimes my playback screen goes pure black and when I try to play, my CPU is 100% with black playback window. I have to restart premiere pro....I have found that disabling NVIDIA acceleration for HEVC and h.264 helps also with the black screen but its not a solution right, you dont buy powerful laptop to reduce his potential intentionally.
5. BONUS ISSUE: VFR HEVC from iphone, some clips are jittery in premiere while on GPU acceleration, totally random. Some clips are just distorted with jitter I have to transcode it to h.264 without on software only...

And there is the question. On adobe website is a note, that you should consider buying Intel CPU if you are editing HEVC or h.264 because of quick synch. But is quick synch better for timeline performance ? Or does it work with nvidia together ? Because for exporting is obviously the fastest way using nvidia for export since there is a major time difference.

I had small 14inch laptop with mx150 and intel i5 and older premiere version obviously and it loaded thumbnails immediately. Of course there was timeline issue because of the slow hardware but only in playback, everything else was much smoother....I am pretty f*cked up now because I thought nvidia takes care of everything so I can have AMD CPU...

I am on studio driver, tried game one also but same results.
My legion 5 pro specs:
CPU: AMD ryzen 7 5800h
GPU: nvidia RTX 3060 130w
RAM: 16gb 3200mhz
SSD: 3500mb/s write/read

And please, do not bother typing about transcoding to prores, I do it when I need it, but I did not buy expensive hardware to transcode HEVC and kill 3 times more space just because I need to do cuts, speed adjustments, some warps and color grade.

[Andy 1968]

Some variations of H.264 will bring a 12 core CPU to it's knees. That is because Nvenc and Quick Sync cannot playback all variations of H.264/265. That being said your Intel i5 laptop might have been using Quick Sync instead of Nvenc. Is Intel's Quick Sync better than Nvidia's Nvenc for your video codec? Maybe it is. You can monitor the performance (link below).

[MerslD]

My Nvenc definitely works with this codec. Tried monitoring different scenarios. It shows video decode....and my CPU is between 20-100% and RAM around 80% during playback. But if I start zoom in or out my timeline during playback everything starts being choppy jittery and eventually put black playback screen on me. During thumbnails loading my RAM is peaking to 100%. I watched your videos and if Nvidia can work with quick synch simultaneously as you showed that both GPUs were working and CPU was at his minimum, then intel CPU seems better solution to me for those codecs. I will try my old laptop with the same test...those thumbnails and everything loading is killing me. 

[Andy 1968]

The system in my prior video cannot make use of Intel's Quick Sync. The Haswell CPU is to old.

Your system might have something wrong with it if the CPU is being used more than 20% when using Nvenc. Is CUDA enabled? If you dissable Nvenc does the system work better? Are all other apps closed and your network device dissabled? If you watch the prior video BRAW made the RAM ramp up but not H.264. Your stats are very important. It might be an odd variation of H.264 causing problems. The video below does show my i9 9900K/RTX 2070 system making use of Quick Sync. It is more on par with your system. For some people selecting no input for audio has helped. Test out your Intel system with Quick Sync and let us know the results.

[Phillip Harvey]

HEVC is one of the most difficult codecs you can try to edit with. It's very efficient (high quality packed into a small file size), but it takes a lot of processing power to unpack that (play it) in editing software. Combine that with Variable Framerate, which you will get from phones, and you have a very bad combination.  

The type of media you work with has a huge impact on performance. There are lots of people that don't realize how big of an impact it is, but you could build a computer beyond what you have that can still be crippled by some HEVC/VFR stuff. In that case there are multiple issues to fix. But you can't ignore video codecs. That's why people recommend ProRes or other codecs that are good for editing (intraframe, easier for your computer to process). You don't necessarily need to transcode your footage into a super high quality version of ProRes, you can make low bitrate proxies that you can delete when you are done with the project. (You would probably need to correct variable framerate issues first in the case of phone media.)  

Some more info on VFR:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/wiki/faq/vfr

[Andy 1968]

Phillip,

It all comes down to hardware. Nvnec VS Quick Sync VS the M1 chip. While some variations of H.264/265 can bring a 12 core CPU to it's knees the M1 Mac Mini can play it back with ease. That is the power of hardware accelerated encoding and decoding. All Intel chips with IGPU are suposed to have a revamped version of Quick Sync in 2021. MerlsD stated his one laptop does better than the other. That is where the stats come into play. Is Quick Snyc better than Nvenc for the codecs MerlsD uses? We will soon find out.

Keep in mind Nvenc is allowing my old Haswell CPU to edit 4K H.264 with ease.