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Question

Premier Pro - Stutters on 4K GH5 and 4K DJI Video

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
May 7, 2018
3 replies
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I cannot figure out why my video editing workstation still stutters on GH5 4K 8bit content and DJI P4Pro 4K H.264 content. I have read every Adobe Premier Pro performance tuning guide I can get my hands on and I still cannot smoothly playback and edit 4K content from these two sources.I keep throwing more hardware at the problem and it's not improving. Below is my hardware platform:

Dell 7910 Rackmount Workstation

2 x Xeon 6 core processors

16GB DDR4 memory

NVIDIA GTX 980ti Video Card

RAID 5 NVME PCIe RAID array

NVME PCIe card for the OS

For my workflow I always color grade and add transitions last yet I still have to create proxy files sometimes when I need to view some of the clips in realtime because the stuttering is completely unworkable. I just ordered 80GB more DDR4 memory but I doubt it will help anything.

The problem is, I have no problems throwing more hardware at the problem if I could just figure out where the problem is. I watch GPU, CPU, disk, and RAM performance when it is stuttering and everything is below 5% utilized. The one thing I have seen is memory utilization sometimes hits 80% which is why I am upgrading the memory. I don't understand how the software can stutter when nothing is being heavily utilized. The CPU usually hovers around 5%, the GPU around 2-7%, the disk less than 1% and memory usually around 30-60%. This is with a clean install of Windows 10 64bit, and with playback set to 1/8 quality. I have seen users online get better results with way less hardware.

Yes I know I could create proxy files, and yes sometimes I do create proxy files because I don't have a choice, but with my hardware specs I feel I should not need proxy files. All of my content is 4K H.264 and mostly GH5 8bit footage or DJI Phantom P4 footage stored in an MOV container. Output renders are fast but editing is completely frustrating.

[Moderator note: moved to best forum for technical help.]

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MarkWeiss

Inspiring

I stumbled into this thread while researching DJI Phantom 4 footage playback issues, and I can report the same problems on a dual Xeon E5-2667v3 with 128GB RAM and all SSD drives.

There must be a difference between compressed formats like XAVC and ProRes422 and what the drone records, because the other formats play with no issues, but the drone footage is hit and miss. Sometimes it will play smooth until the CTI hits a dissolve and then Premiere will lose it's composure and play a slideshow of the rest of the timeline.

The sickening thing is I have a recently built backup machine with a i7 processor, built for 1/10th the cost of the "monster" and it plays video without and dropped frames, despite much higher CPU utilization.

I refuse to believe there's not enough CPU when you're at 11% utilization and dropping frames. There's got to a pipeline issue related to NUMA or QPI links between processor sockets, that's all I can think of. Single processor machines run circles around duals in Premiere. Duals excel in Maya, by a long margin though. Except if you're running DaVinci Resolve. That just blows me away with it's ability to handle FIVE 4K video streams, picture in picture on the same timeline with only 53% CPU usage. At the time I did that test, my GPU was an old Titan X and it was about 90% utilized, so that was likely what limited me to five 4K streams. Now I have the 1080Ti and have not yet installed Resolve, so that remains to be tested.

Oddly, Phantom 4 H.264 footage is harder to play than HEVC 4K footage. HEVC takes about 2% CPU and 30% GPU. Go figure.

I'm considering a new system build. i9-9980XE, 128GB RAM, Intel Optane PCIe X16 bus SSD drive (3500MB/sec sustained and nearly as fast at 4K blocks, which is where SATA SSDs fall flat) and a pair of RTX2080Ti GPUs. If that doesn't run well, then I'll sell everything and move to Japan and become a rice farmer.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

I doubt that i9-9980XE CPU is something that say Puget Systems or Safeharbor Computing use in their specialized builds for video post work. Why? A lot of slow to middling cores ... about reversed from what's needed.

You want FAST cores for video post. Much of it is sequential processing, not lending itself well to being split among cores. So having a decent amount of cores ... 8-10, really ... but those being at or above 3.8Ghz and supported by up to 10GB of very fast RAM each is a huge consideration.

And for Pr, two 2080 Titans may be overkill ... But check with Safeharbor, Puget Systems, maybe ADK, see what they would suggest. They do not find most even spendy CPUs as sensible for video-post work, and even fewer mobos ... and often, the mobo is the problem: the lanes are setup in such a way there are internal bottlenecks for data given the number of drives and cards video post folk typically use in their rigs.

Drones ... pump up the compression to the limits of format standards. One user here ran some drone media through a structure analyzation app, and found that it used partial i-frames every 30 or so frames in one section, and complete i-frames only about every 120 frames! Yea, it put the media on card in an amazingly small space, BUT ... that media would require massive work of the CPU/RAM to process for editing.

Standard ProRes is of course a full intra-frame codec: every frame is complete, just compressed. Bigger files but a TON less work on the computer for playback.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

MarkWeiss

Inspiring

I've been around fascinating discussions about GPU use in Resolve, Pr, and Ae.

Depending on the tools one uses in each, there are very divergent ideas on what GPU uses they want in any app, and ... what they DON'T want it used for. "You put more effects through the GPU it will slow down what I do with X" sort of thing.

And it always intrigues when some middling old computer is a screamer and a new loaded rig .. chokes.

Neil

I was reading a lot of discussion about GPU use in Maya's Arnold renderer and people were saying "why don't they use the GPU for everything?" and the answer was that not that many graphics processes can be paralleled. Many instructions are too complex and unavailable on a GPU, so the CPU is what works. Gradually, the world IS moving toward GPU and with nVidia's Turing GPUs with Tensor processors on the market, application devs are going to be busy writing code that can exploit those powerful features.

Meanwhile, I hate to admit is, but switching to Windows 10 is the best way to give your system a needed performance boost in Premiere. Still doesn't eliminate long-GOP playback problems (which can be on and off with the same project on different sessions), but cleared up a lot of problems with playing intra-frame video. The biggie for me was the implementation of V-sync, which put an end to screen tearing. That and better management of displays coming on line, such as when the projector in our screening room gets powered on. (Windows 7 would go berserk, rearranging desktops at random, screwing up Wacom tablet mapping, etc).

Another thing I noted about Windows 10 is HEVC playback not only becomes possible, but absurdly easy. The 3.0.4 version of VLC Media Player, on Windows 7, could not play anything h.264 or h.265 at HD or above. It would play a couple frames improperly decoded (looked like grey embossed filter was applied) and freeze. On Windows 10, it not only plays smoothly, it uses between 0 and 1% CPU and about 20% GPU.

Adobe stuff DOES apparently run well on 32 threads and no special tuning is required. In fact, changing things like power profile to "performance" seems to make things worse, not better. Xeons are not dead. Windows 10 gives them new life. That said, I have a love-hate relationship with Win 10. It doesn't play well with Wacom pens, Microsoft Surface tablets, and that other Huwei tablet that some people use. Windows "Ink" is the devil. And 10 seems to have a mind of its own sometimes. I find that 'three times a charm' is the golden rule. Windows will change settings back to some default that many times until it finally 'gets' that you REALLY want that "increase mouse pointer precision" option to remain ON. Between stuff like that and automatic updates,

I spend a lot of time fighting with the OS instead of getting work done. But when it's running, the experience is great. On my cheaper i7-9700K system, I have a ton of processes going on, files downloading in the background, Ubuntu running in a VM, stuff writing to drives, and 4K Prores video will play without dropping a single frame. It's almost laughable about how we sometimes feel that we must shut all non Adobe processes down before we can edit, given the Windows 10 experience.

R

redmodel

Participant

Try this,

it worked for me with 4K prores files on Windows. In task manager, under details, right click on premiere pro.exe and change priority to normal. It will probably be on High Priority by default..

R Neil Haugen

Legend

I saw you posit this on another thread, and I'm hoping a bunch of people test this out, so we get some data on it. It's great to get this sort of thing nailed down.

Also, another user noted their mobo came with a chipset that assumed one wanted to overclock part of it. When he manually set the mobo setting in the BIOS to no overclock, suddenly ... everything was smoother and just worked. One GPU that comes over-clocked has had users saying that by removing the over-clock setting they got better overall performance.

All things nice to hear about.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

R

redmodel

Participant

Yeah I hope the method works for the OP as well. The performance difference for me was just night and day. I'm not overclocked, but I'd be interested in what the common thread of the issue may be. Maybe the High Priority doesn't work on systems like mine because of the high core count, or maybe it's the Nvidia drivers that work against it.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

You're totally ignoring the basics of the media you're using. That's where you're going sideways.

That is all very long-GOP media, which rags the crud out of the CPU/RAM/cores/threads subsystems. So adding in a ton of RAM is actually the best thing you could do. The cameras and their highly specialized chips that create/write that media record on a complete "I" frame every 15 to 30 ... or for some drones ... 120 frames apart. In-between the record a matrix-based dataset of the pixels that have changed since the last I-frame, will change before the next, or ... both. Now there are even partial I-frames. Which is how they extend it up to 120 frames for complete I-frames.

The computer has to create the I-frames & store them, pull up data-sets, recall the I-frames & calculate the in-between p & b frames. Store those as well as pass them onto the video system, create the next frame for the video. On & on. I know colorists with massive rigs who don't even think once about working 6k RED & Arri media. But as soon as they see long-GOP stuff, that gets transcoded to replace the original media on the sequence they're going to work.

Here's a bit from the GoPro folks from the manual for their own editing app:

So ... yea, the RAM's good to get. And you'll probably still want to make proxies if you do much color, Warp Stabilizer, video de-noising, anything like that.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

D

diesel5598Author

Known Participant

Neil, actually I am not ignoring the media at all. I have studied I frames, All-I, compression, bitrates, resolution, DI, etc, etc. I know more about how consumer/prosumer grade cameras record, store, and compress their recorded footage than I ever thought possible. I am fully aware of how this type of media completely trashes CPU, RAM, and GPU; my problem is my system does not SHOW me that any of that is going on. The only place I seem to run low sometimes is RAM which is why I am throwing more of that at the problem.

I have no problem throwing more hardware at the problem, but I need the system performance tools to just tell me what I need more of. I can run 1080P 8bit at 30FPS from these same cameras in real time all day long within AP; warp stabilizer, transitions, adjustment layers, you name it it's buttery smooth; so I feel like I'm close to being able to do the same thing in 4K, I just need to figure out what the weak link is.

I have also not overclocked anything, I have been very careful to not install any additional codecs, this whole workstation was built from the ground up just for video editing. Below you can see what I mean. Task Manager shows that absolutely nothing in the HW is being taxed, CPU, RAM, GPU, and HD IOPS are not even 50%, yet the video at this exact point in time is dropping about 20 frames at a time.

redmodel: I checked the priority of the PP executable and it is set to normal.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

I've had this stuff explained to me by tech wizards. Felt incredibly mentally enlightened for a few minutes, but the extra gray cells didn't seem to stay "full". Ah well.

It has to do with the processing subsystems interactions ... not just the CPU or RAM total usage figures, but how well the data moves in/out/through the CPU, caches, RAM, and the order things get run through various threads. That much I did retain. Oh, and how the software uses the various resources it sees. I've read of those able to work through a system and figure out where the hangup is. But I don't know all that, and wish I could help more.

I do know there's another user who suggested a minimum of 10-12GB of RAM per core for H.264 processing in a different thread.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

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