Dual Xeon and Premiere Pro

[RichmondJoe]

I'm having major playback issues with premiere pro and my system. I purchased this system for 3D animation but thought that it should run premiere just fine. When I play any video files I get stuttering playback. I've tried placing the footage on thunderbolt drives/local storage and USB3 but to no avail. I tried changing the settings in premiere but no luck. Below are my specs. The only thing that I can think of is the the individual processor is slow. To note both 4k files and hd or lower resolutions all play at the same lagging rate. The playback even stutters with rendering the sequence. Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

Dual Xeon E5-2630 v4 @2.20ghz (2 processors at 40 total cores)

64GB of RAM

Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Geforce GTX 1080 Ti

Already tried:

Lower preview settings

proxy files

Turn off high quality playback

Sequence setting: Turned off Composite in linear color/max bit depth/max render quality

Tried switching between cuda and cpu

Memory switched between performance and memory

Lowering reserved RAM

Enable mercury Transmit

Toggled accelerated h.264 decoding

[Peru Bob]

Moved to the Hardware forum.

[RichmondJoe]

I'm surprised that I haven't even received a single reply. The only promising thing so far is changing my video preview settings to QuickTime Animation codec, but this then gives me longer preview render times. This semi-solution produces no dropped frames but this doesn't help me with viewing and pulling from my source monitor.

I have downloaded Davinci Resolve 15 and have zero playback issues so it makes me think that this is a Premiere issue not a hardware issue.

[MarkWeiss]

I have basically the same problems. I have a dual Xeon E5-2667, 128GB RAM, fastest SSDs I could buy, separate SSD for audio, video, O/S and temp drives, nVidia Titan X, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, all running on Supermicro X10DRi motherboard. Every version of Premiere that I have tried has struggled with playing ONE stream of 4K 24p.

I have been playing with the last four versions of Resolve and recently installed the final of version 15. I am blown away by the difference.. I can play a four camera UHD project AND overlay FOUR additional 4K video streams, scaled and rotated ON TOP of the 4 camera multicam project and play it back. CPU=50%, GPU=100% and that's about my limit. All clips have LUTs and sharpening applied. If I put an nVidia RTX2080Ti in there, I'd probably get to double the number of 4K streams I could play at once.

The reason I have not been able to switch to Resolve is it's limited ingest compatibility limits it to Hollywood production formats only. Can't see DJI drone footage or footage from my Sony RX10 MkIII --all display "Media Offline", plus the fact that it can't render output h.264 any higher than 1080p (UHD output results in an error and failed to render), plus you need thousands of dollars in BMD hardware to get full screen output at 4K 60P to drive our 4K production monitor and 4K projector for our screening room. And the titler is still stuck in the year 1999--have to render the titles before they play. But the performance of Resolve 15 is almost too good to believe on a dual Xeon.

[peternelson]

Dual Xeon E5-2630 v4 @2.20ghz (2 processors at 40 total cores)

Just out of curiosity, how do you get 40 cores?  The Intel spec says these are 10 core processors.   Did you mean 40 threads?

I'm also a little unclear when you talk about "playback" do you mean inside Premier Pro or any playback?

Anyway -  What does Task Manager say?   Are all your CPU resources pegged to the max when it's stuttering?     What about your storage -  what does Resource Monitor show for disk-activity when it's stuttering? 

[RichmondJoe]

You are right, my mistake on wording, 10 cores, both hyper-threaded at 20 equaling 40 threads.

For playback, I mean both source and timeline playback in Premiere Pro (12.1.1) is dropping frames at a pretty massive rate. VLC player plays fine, Davinci plays fine.

My Task Manager has CPU utilization around 4%, Speed around 1.46GHz and Memory less than 20%, my disk usage goes up to 100% but than backs down to around 20-ish% after about 5 seconds of playback, my GPU idles around 5% but I'm not using any effects or scaling that would use it anyway.

For the drives I've tried the internal M.2 drive (Main C: Drive), internal spinning drives at 7200 RPM, and external thunderbolt 2.0. I've even tried to slit up the media cache and footage onto different drives but no success. I even still have a lot of extra storage left on the drives.

[RichmondJoe]

Additionally, I tested some 4K files filmed on a Sony FS5 and had the CPU usage go up to 50% and the Speed go up past the 2.20GHz to around 2.26GHz, but in the end it dropped about 80 frames over a 6 second period.

[peternelson]

my disk usage goes up to 100% but than backs down to around 20-ish% after about 5 seconds of playback

I'm assuming the stuttering continues after it's gone back down to 20-ish.   I'm unclear what you mean by "disk usage" - I have Windows 7, is that a Windows 10 thing?  The Resource Monitor (button on Task Manager Performance tab) has two metrics -  KB/sec Disk I/O and % Highest Active Time that might be worth looking at because, on my system, when I've had stuttering problems they've been very high, although I'd be surprised if those show a problem when you're running off an SSD.

[RichmondJoe]

You are correct, the stuttering will continue even after the the disk usage goes back down to 20%. I'm using Disk Usage as the term for the percentage of my disk under the Performance tab on the task manager. In my resource monitor the Disk Activity is around 75 MB/sec Disk I/O and 7% Highest Active time. This is with the footage on a Thunderbolt Drive.

[peternelson]

Unfortunately that's all I got.  You have a more powerful system than I do but I generally have no stuttering problems so I have no idea.    I wish someone else would comment on this thread.   I posted a question about GPU's yesterday that's gotten no responses either, so maybe the Hardware Forum is too low traffic.

[Averdahl]

Short answer: Premiere Pro prefers fast cores since decoding files are done with the CPU. Slower cores such as 2.20 ghz are not as good as faster cores. A slow 8-core processor is not as good as a fast 4-core processor.

Premiere Pro loves fast processors.

[RichmondJoe · Accepted solution]

Thank you to the both of you for trying to help me out with this. I hate to say that I've mostly fixed this problem with a simple fix. I thought that I already did this but I guess I didn't.

     1. I changed my operating systems (Win 10) power settings to "high performance" from "balanced" and the "Processor power management" advanced setting to 100% on everything and changed the registry to make sure that "Processor performance Core parking min core" to 100%.

     2. Changed the Video Previews to Quicktime > animation codec.

Now I can play all my footage at or close to full resolution without dropped frames and renders all play without dropped frames.