Hi Neil, The 'eternal' complaints of people not getting what they expect from their software...  In our business we make long form documentary films. Over  the years of using FCP7 Avid and now Premiere Pro we have encountered many periods where the 'performance' of our systems has left me scratching my head ... why? After spending hours researching and $$'s upgrading and building up a typically 'grunty' systems are we still being plagued by these performance issues... I will pass on a bit of sage advice from a salesman at the retailer that sells us our equipment.... '99.9 times out of a 100 there is a snag somewhere in the chain  - of preferences - corrupted workspaces after upgrade - hardware tx speeds - corrupted project files - ONE! corrupted jpeg - the list goes on and on and on... I have had to eat humble pie time and time again when I have had professional troubleshooting done by adobe/apple/avid technicians usually by remote access to my machine, solve these horrible nagging creative roadblocks. The one and ONLY time that I was actually RIGHT was the recent data loss associated with the PP 2017 upgrade for which Adobe acquitted themselves brilliantly albeit after some fairly aggressive nudging from the many users on this forum that had lost data. I guess my point here is - if you have a typically recent and fast machine/raids etc PC or MAC ...then it is more often than not something relating to the operators and their particular systems and not the software engineers... Touch wood   We have three longform films in our editing facility at the present time ... all with big long heavily populated timelines with 4K, titles, animated HD clips, etc etc and premiere pro is running smooth as silk... having said that we do not load up the CPU/GPU un-necessarily with a lot of Lumetri processing etc and our broadcaster roughcut screenings are usually prefaced by 'this is mostly ungraded 'flat' log footage.... most of them are fine with that nowadays. We then output files for color and sound post either here on Resolve or depending on budget to another facility... I do get a bit annoyed at people that blame the tools - I used to be one of them and it is the easiest first response to a problem but not always the right one... ... View more

Hi Carol, Have you had an Adobe support engineer do a troubleshoot on your system... you allow them access to your machine and they do a little poking around your troublesome project - I was having an issue with slow horrible responses while editing, I had virtually given up. Then I was blown away by what the technician did in a matter of minutes to tune up my system... Like having a virtual home visit from the doctor ǝuoɥdı ʎɯ ɯoɹɟ ʇuǝs ... View more

Hi there again, yes the iMac i5 is not really up to the job if she is going to start adding multiple fx etc... I recently had to help friends with finishing a long form docu project - they had an iMac as well with thunderbolt raid... long story short a lot of 4k GoPro files in sequences with HD material... it got very tedious ...but managed to get it done by transferring it to my home studio... A lot of friends & colleagues are going back to 2010 12core Macpros upgraded to 3.46ghz processors... I have 2 of these in our studio facility with 48gb of ram in each - they are reliable - fast and with a USB 3 card pretty much all you need for most tasks that we encounter ie 4k films - fx heavy TVC's - long form documentary etc etc .... I think I would find switching to PC a bit too daunting after years in macland... anyway had a very happy ending to the 2017 PP lost data issues we had ... Adobe were very accommodating with their resolutions cheers steve ... View more