Premiere Pro and After Effects Slow Performance and Responsiveness

Report · Apr 03, 2017

Hello Adobe CC Community,

For the past few months my video team and I have been experiencing rather odd behavior from both Premiere Pro and After Effects. There is a huge lag between the time when we make a change to a clip on our timeline and the change actually taking effect. We figured at first that this might have been due to server connectivity and copied all of the clips locally to try to eliminate any bottleneck there. While performance seemed to improve very little, there is still a long 5 or so second waiting period for changes to take place. This makes it difficult to achieve good frame accuracy and slows down our work flow immensely. To add on to the slowdown, render times have increased dramatically. For anything other than a simple 30 second video without any graphics, rendering can take multiple hours to complete and generally experience errors along the way. For instance, a recent 2 minute video render took nearly 3 hours to finish rendering once we were able to get it to complete without error. We are all very confused as to what may be causing these giant slowdowns and rendering errors. Looking at the resources being used on the machine during render, we have a lot of headroom and aren't using total available processing capacity.

System Configuration:

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2620 6-core CPUs @ 2.4GHz

96gb DDR4 Memory @ 2400MHz

480gb Sata III SSD

2TB Mechanical Hard Drive

2 x Nvidia Quadro K4200 Video Cards

Windows 8.1 Pro

System is on the latest Adobe CC version and has all Windows updates. The Adobe suite is installed on the local SSD, with the 2TB hard drive being used in conjunction with a large file server on an internal gigabit fiber network. Screenshot for system usage is below.

We appreciate any help on this issue!

Best,

Kyle

[Moderator note: moved to best forum]

Report · Apr 03, 2017

if the screenshot was taken during a slowdown, it shows no cpu, ram or hd problem. was it taken during a slowdown?

and what about your graphics card performance?

have you tried updating your video cards drivers? have you tried with and without video card acceleration?

Report · Apr 05, 2017

Hi kglad, we appreciate the response.

The screenshot showing resource use was mid-render. The video card use is represented by the red graph, showing fairly minimal use during the render. All of the video card drivers are up to date and running on their latest drivers which were released December 2016. Video acceleration was not enabled within the applications, but enabling it and re-rendering showed no real gain in performance. Looking through the spec requirements provided by Adobe for both Premiere and After Effects, it lists our video cards as being supported for acceleration. Regarding editing performance, changing between video acceleration and no acceleration also does not seem to improve scrubbing and playback performance, either. However, as expected, looking at resource use during a render with acceleration enabled does show higher GPU usage (see below). I have also included a screenshot of the errors that continue to occur, and even cause crashing. Doing a little research, it appears that the error talks about issues with video card compatibility.

Thanks again for the assistance!

Kyle

Report · Apr 05, 2017

PrPro doesn't use the GPU for "general" work very much. Exporting, for example ... unless there's a frame-size change, isn't something that uses much GPU. Frame-size changes, Lumetri, some of the other "GPU accelerated effects" are the ones that are helped by the GPU, and there's a list of them.

Bill Gehrke and several others here on the Hardware forum can give great assist on this sort of issue.

Neil

Report · Apr 05, 2017

Moving to Premiere Pro