Serious Performance Issues with Premiere Pro (14.0)

Tobiq,

It would be great if you could return to this discussion and let us know if you're still having trouble. Hardware decoding harnessing your GPU now exists since your original post. Has that boosted performance? Please let us know.

For others having the same trouble, please create your own thread rather than adding onto this one. 

Thanks,
Kevin

I am curious about this as well. I bought PP only a few months ago and it seems CRAZY to me that my 1080p, low bitrate footage stutters during playback before I even add any effects. I have a Ryzen 9 3050x, 32gb of Ram, a 2tb M.2 SSD and a RTX 2080ti. I have purused all the basic suggestions such as making sure Mercury CUDA is being used and other sequence settings matching my sources. 

I'm going to try proxies bext, but it seems insane to have to utilze proxies for footage that isbt even 2k, let alone 4k. By some of the replies hear, it might not even work?! 

To everyone else that has posted here already, I might still be learning, but I'd be pretty PO'd too if anyone so much as suggested that its my "machines fault."

Nath... did you ever work this issue out? I am experiencing the same thing...lag on basic playback. This started since i upgraded to Mojave (though i may have upgraded PP around the same time). I have created proxies in four different and smaller and smaller formats (H.264, cineform QT, etc etc)... same issue. If i quit PP and restart it works for five minutes then same deal. Please tell me you found a fix. ; )

i have exactly the same problem .. with i9 9900 gtx 2080ti and 64gb ddr4. the play in the timeline has become really frustrating. This did not happen with the 2019. I have the same cams and therefore the same movies as last year.

Good to see it's not only me. - Has anyone tried to go back to PP2019 on OSX 10.15.5, will that work?

Azzie,

Yea, that is a pain. Big one. Of course, neither I nor anyone else just seeing a post from someone can know the history of the contacts they've had about it with staffers ... or even if they have. So we start from basic troubleshooting 101.

I've heard a comment that the only thing worse than Adobe's tech support is their manuals. Can't disagree. Product Support manager Kevin Monahan always tells people to ask for the Video Que as soon as you get to a live body whether on chat or phone support, as otherwise, you get the generalists ... been there done that. Someone just going down a prepared sheet is a bit different from someone with some actual knowledge of the specific program.

And I've often wondered how much communication there is between tech support and the development teams. I know product support for the video apps (Kevin) is in pretty constant contact with the teams, but ... dunno about the tech support staff.

At Adobe MAX, I and a number of the other ACPs got to visit with Patrick Palmer (head of Adobe video apps), a couple engineers, and Ivo ... who Patrick brought in last summer to re-build the Premiere team to work better and faster at bug/stability prevention, testing, and fixing. Ivo was pleased with the massive list of bugs they'd knocked off already, some going back several versions. The engineers were thrilled with the new system and methods as they were knocking stuff out left and right that used to take a lot more time.

And ... Ivo also made it clear, they've a long, long list yet to go through. With most of the easier to diagnose ones already handled. There are several issues they have to deal with to get through the rest of the bug/stability problems and you're probably very aware of all of them. First, some of the code is rather antiquated, some new, and ... that doesn't always work so well together. Second ... some of the code is old enough no one really remembers the details as it was hashed through. So sorting out that stuff ... what does it specifically do, and how? ... even just to replace it ... is a right royal pain. But they're going after the old stuff.

Which leads right to another issue. They've a lot of ancient effects that some section of the user base is still using. But it's ancient code, effects used by a small percentage of the user base, and ... it seems ridiculous to rebuild that section when there's already newer and (for the vast majority of users) better tools to do that with. So they're slowly going through and ... some will get rebuilt. Some ... will simply get dumped. They have to modernize that code. (And yea, that's gonna tick off some users.)

And Premiere works on the widest base of gear, media, and workflows out there. Which is another issue. Adobe has a fair number of computers of both major persuasions in-house, and they've got a beta program of unspecified numbers which they do use. But ... that's still only a very, very small subset of the full range of gear, media, and workflows that are used with the app. So, many of the bugs and stability issues hitting users they simply can't replicate in-house.

And for those, they need the most detailed reports filed on the UserVoice system as possible. Those reports are read by an engineer ... every one. One of those guys was also there at the discussion. His biggest problem? Way too many UserVoice reports are simply "X ain't working fix it" sort of reports. Pretty useless other than for the metadata that X is having a problem. But nothing he can even try to sort out for troubleshooting purposes.

He did remember a couple of mine. It probably won't shock you that my bug reports are rather detailed. But he said, those were very useful ... he could know exactly what I was doing, on what gear, and ... what went bonzo. Because there's so many things that are just nuts about this software on gear mess ... like a couple versions back, all of a sudden a decent chunk of users were having about four different issues. It got sorted that this subset was mostly on Windows. But it was driving the engineers nuts. They couldn't replicate and they couldn't see any commonality that would typically lead to the problems. Especially ... all four (or whatever number it was) very different issues at once.

Finally, a user posted on here that he'd sat down and one by one removed every running app from his machine, rebooted and launched Premiere ... no change. Then went through removing related files by those apps, incuding DLLs. You know how many freaking files that is, remove one, reboot, test? Sheesh, that guy was dedicated.

When he removed the Microsoft dll for their OneDrive applet/system, voila, Premiere suddenly worked like a charm. Replaced the onedrive.dll file, dog ... remove, run like a champ. So he posted here, several others with that subset of issues tested and voila! ... they were working again. So we ACPs were posting to everyone with about any issue, try removing that onedrive.dll file. It was amazing how many users got better performance.

And the engineers were then able to figure out what the interference between onedrive.dll and Premeire was. But ... I'm still curious about that one. I'm on PC, and had none of those issues. With onedrive.dll on my machine, it wasn't a problem, while on many others, it was a major pain. Crazy.

So ... please ... post your troubles in detail on the UserVoice system so the engineers get them directly. (This forum is primarily user-to-user, not a 'tech support' system.) And even better, come back here and post a basic explanation of the troubles you are having and a link to the UserVoice post you made so anyone else can go over there and upvote.

That would accomplish two very worthwhile things ... first, the engineers get better data (and they do occasionally get back to people posting good reports asking for further comments) ... and second ... all UserVoice reports are collated and delivered to the upper managers who decide budgets. Those folk live by metrics. Give them some metrics.

Neil

I'm posting this to hopefully show everyone that is coming back with speed/hardware/codec feedback to see the actual issues we're dealing with...

https://we.tl/t-0Cicg5QqeI

I've included 1 sample clip. The type of clip is irreleveant as all clips arent' working.... however i've created a PP2019 project and a PP2020 project. The 2019 project runs perfectly while the Timeline monitor in the 2020 project is the one having issues.

I've also included another screen capture showing you the 2019 project working (both source and timeline) and the 2020 (source working, timeline stuttering).

Most of the replies are valid advice, if not always the complete truth. This stuttering and instability are, in general, caused by someone who is trying to support both outdated and modern hardware, and is also trying to support both legacy and newer codecs - all at once. And as it turns out, one can't have everything.

And just to let you know, there is absolutely NO Windows-compatible version at all whatsoever of Final Cut. That program is MacOS only, and will thus require a Mac just to even use at all.

Thom,

Premiere Pro has many thousands of users. Even for most of the "major" bugs, they don't always affect everyone. So most users are doing fine. Which is great for them.

For those who are getting buggy/unstable behavior, yea, it can range from an annoyance to a nightmare. And it's the same for any of the major NLE software. I know shops that never ever used a single 15.x version or Resolve as in their shop, on their machines, none were stable. They have mostly moved to a 16.x version now, but not all have. I never had an issue on my rig with R15.x.

It's thankfully a lot easier to test new versions of Premiere than Resolve. As you can have multiple versions of Premiere installed at the same time. You can quickly, easily, and safely test your work in a new version. If it works, great, but if not ... don't update that project yet.

And of course, you can start new projects and work them in the newer version while still working projects in the old version.

With Premiere, the biggest problems with 'updating' come from two things. First, not using the safest way to migrate project forward, and second, not clearing the cache for any project brought forward.

"Don't ever update a project file" is sound advice but in reality, it ain't always workable. So ... to test whether a project can upgrade successfully to a new version ...

• Install the new verision (and don't uninstall/remove the prior version!)
• Create a new project file in the new version.
• From that project file in the new version, navigate to and select the old version project file.
• Import/ingest that project file's contents into the new version.
• Test the operation of that new project.

This is by far the safest way to update a project. It leaves the original project file untouched, the version of Premiere it was worked in still on the machine, and at the same time does a vastly more reliable job of getting all the metadata of the previous project file properly ensconced in the new version.

The last bit is crucial ... as simply "opening" an old project file in a new version and allowing Premiere to "update" it often doesn't work well. So many of us recommend to never update a project file. As above, create a new project file and import the old one's contents. Different process, and frequently a very different result.

Either way you migrate a project forward, always completely delete everything in the cache files for Premiere before beginning work in it in the new version. The cache/media cache database files will be rebuilt as needed, but carrying forward things there can cause issues.

Neil

All of which makes me wonder why _anyone_ is using PP2020 ... it sounds like a nightmare ... my pp2019 (13.1.5) installation on Mojave seems relatively stable <crossed fingers> for now ...