Playback gets laggier the more cuts I make CC 2020

[Mikkle Kizzle]

I'm working on some videos that require hundreds of jump cuts, and I've found that Premiere gets laggier the more cuts I make. When I start a timeline, playback will be instantaneous, but the more work I do, the slower to respond it becomes. The entire project becomes sluggish, not just the portion I've edited. If I delete the edited portion, everything becomes perfectly responsive again. I've attached a screenshot of the kind of edits I'm talking about. This problem seems to occur regardless of what kind or quality of footage I'm trying to playback.

Specs:

Intel i9-9980HK 2.4GHz

64GB DDR4 RAM 2666MHz

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070

This has been causing me a tremendous amount of grief and I only just now made this connection. Please help!

[Michael Grenadier]

please tell us your source properties and your sequence settings.   Make sure you have plenty of empty space on your startup drive (at least 20%) and what kind of drive is your media stored on?

[Mikkle Kizzle]

I've been experiencing this issue with all sorts of footage and sequences so it's not specific to this, but currently working with medium res H.264 proxies of 4k video overlayed on 1080p 30fps screen recordings captured with OBS. Sequence settings match the screen capture, i.e. 30fps 1920x1080. My startup drive has 480 gb available and my media is stored on an external SSD via USB C. My media cache and scratch disks are located on a second external SSD with plenty of space left.

[Michael Grenadier]

OBS footage is variable frame rate which does not play well with premiere.  Not positive it's the problem, but it's a good place to start...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/faq-issues-with-screen-recorded-footage-in-premiere-pro/...

use handbrake to convert to constant frame rate

https://handbrake.fr
and here's a tutorial on how to use handbrake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=xlvxgVREX-Y

good luck and let us know if this solves the problem or not...

[Mikkle Kizzle · Accepted solution]

That wasn't the fix, but in the process I finally discovered the culprit and it turned out to be an audio issue.

At the beginning of the edit I put a stock multiband compresser and a parametric EQ effect on the raw dialogue audio track. I think each time I make a cut, those audio plugins are duplicated, and they must run in the background or something because after I removed those effects across the project (hundreds of clips) the lag cleared up immediately. Easy fix would be to just render the compressed/EQed audio before cutting.

Thank you for your help!!