Choppy, slow, jerky export

[Peakoverload]

I'm pretty much a total newb and not sure of the correct terminology so apologies in advance.

The other day I got an Insta360 One R 360 camera and I shot some video with it yesterday. The 360 videos playback fine in the Insta360 desktop App but you can't edit clips together in it so I've installed Premier Pro and the GoPro Reframe Plugin. The are however two problems:

1. Preview quality within Premier is awful. It's so jerky and slow and you can't be acurate with cuts. For my needs it's just about usuable. I've set the playback resolution to 1/4 but it's not really made much difference. If this is as good as I can get it, then I can live with it until I can afford to upgrade my iMac.

2. The absolute deal breaker though is that whatever I export from Premier is also really slow and jerky and completely unplayable.

So far I've tried two exports both as Quicktime movie files.

First Export: This was my mistake, I tried to run before I could crawl. When editing I had set the Reframe plugin resolution to 3840x2160 and set the sequence frame size to that too. I also must not have set something correctly in the export window because the resulting file was actually 5760x2880 and was nearly 32GB despite being only 3 mins long. When I attempted to play it back, there were huge black bars all around the video and the playback was slow, jerky and choppy.

Second Export. This time I changed the resolution in the plugin and the Sequence to 1920x1080. In the Export settings I set the Output Scaling to match source and the resulting file was indeed 1920x1080 and a much smaller 5.2GB. However again the playback is really slow, jerky and choppy.

The Export Summary says

Output: Path/filename.mov 1920x1080 (1), 29.97 fps, Progressive, 203 (75% HLG, 58% uncompressed, 48000Hz, Stereo, 16bit

Source: Sequence, VID_372881 Progressive, 00:03:17:05 48000Hz, Stereo

The codec I've used, is just the default one Premier had selected, Apple ProRes 422 HQ

I can't tell if I'm doing something wrong in Premier, or if my computer is just not capable of playing back such files. As I say though, the source files play perfectly in the Insta360 Desktop App. I've also used Final Cut Pro on this Mac to do some basic editing of videos shot on my Canon EOS 5D and that was fine.

My iMac is a 5K 27" Retina Late 2015 3.2Ghz Quad i5 with 24GB RAM running BigSur

[Peakoverload]

Just tried exporting as MP4 H.264 and this works perfectly. So there's something about the Quicktime codec it doesn't like?

[Richard van den Boogaard · Accepted solution]

Indeed. Most likely your (somewhat older) system appears to be choking on Apple ProRes HQ. Perhaps you may try out Apple ProRes 422 (without HQ). But ProRes really is an archive codec or used for further editing in a workflow. If you can live with h.264 (Mp4) as a delivery codec, use that.

Hope this helps.