These are some things to look for when you experience slow performance.
• Slow hard drive. Put media on an SSD or faster HHD. Internal M.2 drives and SSD are optimal.
• Full hard drive. Try clearing out your hard drive if it is full.
• Bad editing codec. H.265 "HVEC". H.264. These codecs are not editing-friendly. Transcode your media to Apple ProRes. This is a much friendlier editing codec. Transcode if you need to. Most of the time my machine edits these codecs fine. But if you are running on a less beefy setup, then this will help.
• This goes for audio as well. Instead of a compressed format such as .mp3, use .wav. If you have .mp3, transcode to .wav. This will alleviate audio dropout.
• Often looked over is having many web browser tabs open. If you use your editing station as a general workstation that you access the internet through, then this can be a big performance hindrance. There will be times when people have 15 browser tabs open. Open task manager and look at how much memory, and CPU usage this is eating up. It's shocking. Closeout web browsers before editing. Even if you close the browser, go to Task Manager and end the process there. Often times I'll notice that it is still running in the background.
• Large video files should be proxied. Apple ProRes Proxy works fine in most cases. It is still a high bit rate of "45mbps" for most videos. This solves most playback issues.
*Warning* Adobe does not support its own proxy workflow with some Premiere Pro functions.
"If your workflow relies on modifying the source clips using any of the following commands [Modify Audio Channels, Interpret Footage, Modify Timecode, Modify Captions], do not use proxies in Premiere Pro. Doing so will result in unexpected behavior."
• If you are editing with many photos, resize them before importing. Ex.) If you have a 4000x4000 image that is 30mb, resize it down to 1000x1000 or even 500x500 if you don't need to zoom/crop in. You can batch-resize images and import them instead of doing them one by one.
• One small change can mean a world of difference. Check to see if any logos or images on your timeline have large dimensions. Sometimes you will import a 6,000 x 6,000 logo by accident, and this could be the only thing on your timeline that is causing your edit/export to be extremely long. Same advice as before, reduce the image size.
• Check to see if the sequence settings match your media. Adjust accordingly.
• Update your drivers, and see if the Game Ready driver or Studio Driver works best for you. This is for NVIDIA GPUs.
• Motion graphics templates in Premiere. I have had a rough time using these, especially with complex templates. I never use them anymore unless they are very simple, like a simple lower third. I always do my motion graphics in After Effects, then import them into Premiere. Unless it's a very simple motion graphic template. But these can add up. If there are lots of them, it will certainly take a toll.
Of course, this all depends on your machine. I recently had a project that was a 4-minute video and I used one motion graphic template in it. "It was a fairly complex template". I exported the sequence and it took 45 minutes.
I found the same template, but for After Effects. Did the export in AE.. took about 5 minutes to edit, export, and then import it into Premiere. I exported the same sequence, and the time went down to 3 minutes.
• Smart Render.
Pre-render you're sequence whenever you can.
Set you're pre-rendered settings to an appropriate format for your needs. Ie,) if you don't need extremely high video quality, then don't choose Apple ProRes 422 HQ or 4444. Set it to something else like ProRes Proxy. This one still has about 45mbps. Which is still higher than the normal 15-40mbps video.
This will allow you to use the high-quality previews when exporting. Your machine will not have to render everything again the next time you export with slight changes. Only slight changes will need to render. This is a huge performance hack.
check mark the "use previews" box when exporting. But Pre-render before doing so.
• Cleaning your computer hardware components. I have known people who have never cleaned the inside of their machines. Dust builds up on everything in your machine. YouTube how to clean the inside, and get all the dust out of your components. This can help a lot. You will be surprised. Dust can cause bad connections between hardware. So definitely want that gone.
• If you have done all of this, you can turn off all your FX by toggling the FX button in and off on your sequence. Turning them off will enable you to playback your footage without FX applied.
for example, if you color-graded Sony FX3 SLog 3 footage that is 4k 10bit and you have 6 adjustment layers for a beautiful look, then use the FX button to turn off all FX while editing so playback is ever smoother. This combined with proxies will make anything playable.
• If you have a mountain of external hard drives hooked up to your system try to make a workflow where you can turn off some of these when editing. Try putting all of your design materials, templates, and such on one drive then having access to it whenever but also being able to unplug client hat drives when they don't need to be worked on.
• If you have a server then you will probably know about mounting and unmounting drives, so I'll leave that info out.
• Check the ports on your system to see if you are hooking up your hard drives with the fastest port on your system. You could be hooking up a USB 3/4 compatible drive into a USB 2 port.
• if you can, invest in a NAS system for storing your media, this will allow you to hook up a 10gbps Ethernet, or Thunderbolt/USB C connection to edit your media much quicker and not have to mount and unmount drives continually. Just one of the benefits of a NAS.
These are some general things that are easily overlooked. Hope this helps!!
1 Correct answer
11
Replies
AdChoices