I had major performance issues with my previous editing system (6-core i7-8700, 64GB memory, RTX 2070, SSD/NVMe only drives) so I upgraded to:
- Ryzen 9 3950X 16-core CPU
- 128GB 3200 memory: G.SKILL Trident Z Neo
- Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero
- Kraken Z73 360mm AIO
- Corsair HX850 PSU
- RTX 2070
But it has done little to help.
Simply trying to move the playhead results in a ~27 second delay (like it did on our previous system) whilst Premiere tries to execute the task.
Here's the resource utilization of our 16-core Ryzen rig whilst it tries to do this, hence why I believe the issue is software optimization.
Action #1: Move playhead
... Seconds Premiere Pro took to execute: 27
... CPU load: 6%
... memory load: 31%
... SSD/NVMed load: 2%
... GPU load: 7%
If you want to see this in action, I recorded it and uploaded it to Vimeo:
Premiere Pro performance issues - Ryzen 3950X
https://vimeo.com/446204211/3f4cba5121
[video]
I broke down each action:
Action #1: Move playhead
... Seconds Premiere Pro took to execute: 27
... CPU load: 6%
... memory load: 31%
... SSD/NVMed load: 2%
... GPU load: 7%
Action #2: Move playhead
... Seconds Premiere Pro took to execute: 26
... CPU load: 6-95% (95% was hit very briefly)
... memory load: 34%
... SSD/NVMed load: 2%
... GPU load: 7-21%
Action #3: Move playhead
... Seconds Premiere Pro took to execute: 24
... CPU load: 6-37%
... memory load: 33%
... SSD/NVMed load: 2%
... GPU load: 7-19%
Action #4: Play
... Seconds Premiere Pro took to execute: 1min 44 seconds
... breakdown:
... (a) 1 min 15 secs to render
... CPU load: 5%
... memory load: 33%
... SSD/NVMed load: 1%
... GPU load: 7-19%
... (b) 29 seconds to play
... playback has dropped frames
... CPU load: 6-100% (100% was hit very briefly)
... memory load: 33-45%
... SSD/NVMed load: 2%
... GPU load: 7-29%
The footage we are working with is 1080p Sony A7S footage (XAVC-S H.264 codec). We use some 4K stock footage, not much.
I know few folks edit a feature film on PP but I know some do.
Our timeline is large (feature film) and complex. We have approx 70 layers on our timeline, approx 40 layers for complex visual effects and color grade/correction, approx 30 layers for audio (different actors, score, foley, audio effects).
We don't use Affer Effects so if we want a SFX, we do it in PP.
As a test, we created a copy of our project and deleted half our visual and audio layers (to approx 35 layers), PP immediately started working faster with the delays down to 0 to 5 seconds.
Given our editing rig is saying its significantly under utilised when running PP, the issue appears to be with PP optimisation (or lack of) when dealing with complex projects with a large number of layers and effects.
I have not reached out to Adobe Support yet, I don't want to be told just to re-install everything when that won't make a difference.
Other specs:
- Premier Pro: 14.3.0
- Windows 10: latest update
- GPU drivers: updated monthly
- Memory allocated to PP (PP setting): 118 GB
- Video Rendering and Playback: Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)
- Third-party PP plug-ins: Beauty Box by Digital Anarchy. As a test, we moved it, and the performance issues remained.
- All drives are SSD or NVMe:
- Scratch ... Samsung 970 Evo 1TB NVMe
- Cache ... Samsung 970 Evo 250GB NVMe
- Media source (current project) ... 4x WD Blue 2TB SSD in RAID
- Exports ... SSD Samsung 500GB 850 Evo
Boot/applications ... Samsung 970 Evo 1TB NVMe
No drive is more than 40% full.
The machine is just used for editing.
Did I just waste ~$3K on a new system that brings a lot more power and memory but little benefit given the issues are with PP optimisation (or lack of)? Is the fix that we simply have to forget trying to edit very complex timelines on PP, and say break it down and edit scene by scene then stitch everything together at the end - far from an ideal workflow... I don't think transcoding (H.264 to ProRes) will be a fix given our system is rarely maxing out on CPU/GPU/memory. Ditto for a proxy workflow.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
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