I'm running a single apple 27" LED display @ 2560x1440

Reducing the screen res was one of the first things I tried, I didn't make any difference at all, although it was still with the same monitor connected.

This video from that other thread is very interesting as both macs are configured the same but one is a 3,1 with 22 gigs of Ram, the other is a 4,1 with 16 gigs.

The 4,1 is the laggy one, again it's the newer mac that's suffering. Although the fact that the clips are not displaying properly on the older mac when dragging does complicate matters. It's probably a driver or display issue but maybe that's part of the reason why it is so responsive, it's not having to render the opacity and details.

I'm running a older 30" cinema display (2560 x 1600) and a 1920x1080 second display having the timeline on either display I find my performance starts to improve if my timeline uses less than 400px in height

I can't take credit for the find, Butch2oc found that one, and it really helped me out, so cheers to him.  Just wanted to chime in and see if we can get this sorted out.

Good stuff Wil.

Although it's a bit of an anti-climax to discover that the issue was discussed and reported back in April.  I hope we helped in some way to strengthen the case anyway.

Yes, same here. Also the clips then become solid greys as in the video posted above. Good find, certainly appears to be some kind of display bug.

Paul Joy (UK) wrote:

 

Yes, same here. Also the clips then become solid greys as in the video posted above. Good find, certainly appears to be some kind of display bug.

OK, ignore my last post re: CPUs.  Cool, sounds like a potential win here.

Can someone make a quick clip showing how you're changing the timeline resolution and whatnot?  I'll be happy to test the lag out on my old 3,1 and post a response later.

jas

I think I've found the culprit, at least for me. The workaround is not the greatest but it's a clue for Adobe. It also doesn't match Paul's video #4, but it's another solution. In any sequence, if the the sequence timeline is smaller than a certain percentage of the whole screen, Premiere Pro will draw a reduced opacity version of the clip when dragging. This seems to cause the lag. If the timeline is made larger, maybe 60% or larger of the screen real estate, I can drag around with no delay. This includes not only dragging stuff within the sequence, but dragging clips back and forth from the project pane to the timeline. Everything is snappy and immediate. The reason is that when dragging, on this no-lag version, there is no drawing of a reduced opacity representation of the clip, it's just a gray outline. The dragging is without any lag. In the code, Adobe probably just 'gives up' at some number of total pixels needing to be redrawn and just says, "I'm just going to draw the outline, forget about the reduced opacity version of the clip.' However this results in snappy performance.

It's an example of a 'feature' that actually detrimental. If anybody knows of a way to 'turn this off' without having to manipulate the size of the sequence panel, please let me know. I don't necessarily like to have the sequence panel taking 60% of my 30" cinema display.

This doesn't match Paul's 'no lag' experience because I see in his screen recording part 4 that there is still a reduced opacity version of the clip when dragged, but perhaps this is due to other factors.

Also, for me it's 'total number of pixels', not percentage of screen, if I drag the sequence panel to my second, smaller monitor, I cannot get a 'non-lag version of the sequence, it always tries to render out the reduced opacity version of the clips and induces the drag.

However obviously there is something in the Premier Pro clip drawing code that is slow on Macs, and perhaps looking at the power of the hardware makes some decisions about how much to draw the reduced opacity version, making more powerful hardware actually seem slower. Having an Adobe software engineer repro this problem with some new Mac Hardware, 30" large screen would probably be able to solve it in a few hours.

Another poster who I private messaged with who had reported this problem to Adobe earlier this year and posted to another thread told me he just gave up and went to a Windows PC because it was much more responsive. I myself am tempted to do this, but I really, really don't want to go Windows / PC if I can at all help it. I'm sure that thousands of other former Final Cut 7 users are in the same boat so I think it behooves Adobe to fix this issue on Macs and make the choice easy for Mac users.

Another thing to note is that you can also speed up the performance by reducing the width of the timeline, it seems to be that the smaller the area in general the faster it runs, that is until you hit the sounds barrier and get to turbo mode!

Paul Joy (UK) wrote:

 

Thanks Jas, as requested.

 

I can reproduce this on my Mac Pro 3,1, all except for the last bit where you blow the timeline up to full screen and the video clip turns grey.  That doesn't actually happen for me.  The only thing that happens is: the larger I make the timeline window, the worse the lag gets.  Conversely the smaller I make the timeline window, the less lag there is.

Hope this helps.

jas

Hey guys this is great news. A big thanks to all who have contributed. I am at home for the weekend so will try it out at work on Monday.

If this really is the source of the problem then I can't see why the talented guys at Adobe won't be able to find a permanent solution.

Great stuff. The thought of maybe going back to PC's did not really fill me pleasure.

Now I'm excited!

Alex

Hi Paul

I realized that I posted pretty much exactly what you posted a few minutes earlier about the threshold, but didn't see your post while I was investigating and posting mine, there is some synchronicity going on here.

I did some further tests, and for me, in the laggy mode, there is pretty high CPU, in fact for me it easily pegs 100% on one CPU when dragging moderate to fast. When in the 'gray box' responsive mode, the CPU usage is quite a bit less, 25% to 50%. I didn't measure whether more lag equals more CPU, but I would suspect this might be the case, and if that Premiere Pro is using only 1 CPU thread, then it can only use up to 100% of one CPU, and when more is needed things just get slower. It just can't go faster than 100% usage.

It's also pretty easy to make a code sample in the Activity monitor of what Premiere Pro is doing, and there is seems that a lot of stuff is going on during a drag. An Adobe engineer could do this (they have better tools as well to analyze it) to find out what routine might be causing the high CPU usage. I don't think that a simple drag should take that much CPU.

I'm hoping that all this work on finding exact use cases will help Adobe determine the problem, I really want my Premiere on the Mac to be snappy!

Thanks to you and everybody for all the information and cooperation on this thread. I think the formula is lag = timelinepixels * motion

-Keith

LFedit wrote:

 

Was just able to test this on a MacPro 3.1 and experience the same as Jason Van Patten.   No matter how the timeline is displayed I do not get the gray clip when dragging, and the larger the timeline window, including fullscreen the worse the lag. However, the lag on the Macpro 3.1 system is nowhere near as slow as it is on the 4.1.

Hi....

as said earlier I am experiencing the lag and that extremely.

Here are my system specs which are corresponding to what you are seeing on the 4.1 Model.

I am using PPRO on a 30" Inch Cinema Display... Perhaps that is worse that on a 15" inch LCD.

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name: Mac Pro

  Model Identifier: MacPro4,1

  Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon

  Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz

  Number Of Processors: 2

  Total Number Of Cores: 8

  L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB

  L3 Cache (per processor): 8 MB

  Memory: 32 GB

  Processor Interconnect Speed: 5.86 GT/s

  Boot ROM Version: MP41.0081.B07

  SMC Version (system): 1.39f5

  SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f5

2010 Mac Pro, 12 GB of RAM, SSD HD, and I have the same problem as well. Clips seem to take a loong moment to move with the cursor.

Hi all,

Just to let you know that since I originally posted this issue (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/785985) I had a few people respond with similar problems.

I went down the "Adobe Support Road" with Americas T2, I managed to get them to recreate issue and they have come back to me

saying that it's a bug and my lengthy customer support portal has been labeled withdrawn.

Don't know if anyone can access it but the case number is 0182049590.

I have received a message from Keith requesting me to provide any feedback I may have on offer... so...

It's good to hear other people are now raising this issue because I hate it, you need a monitor with a res higher that 1920x1080

to get around it by using the fill to screen mode. I am sick of cutting and pasting (as this is much faster than grabbing instances and moving them).

Just in case some of you don't know... if you have a monitor that can give a display res of 2048 x 1152 you will get some joy out of your box.

If you display your timeline in a window at full screen then the instances turn grey (i.e. do not show clip name etc) and can move around very quickly.

I still believe it is purley a display resolution thing... Adobe knows about it.

I was asked by adobe to upgrade to 5.5 to see if this fixed the issue, I suggested they did this to the system they had replicating the problem. I have not heard back but I now have 5.5 and will upgrade my system soon (when not so busy) and let you know.

I would also like to ad that I have found installing adobe clean is the way to go and not upgrading on top of the previous version as this avoids other issues.

When I rebuilt previously I produced a clone with just the OS + mail & net settings etc.

I then added adobe ONLY and produced another clone.

I then added all other software/plugins etc and produced another clone.

All great for finding faults quickly and for doing clean installs when needed.

I really hope adobe gets onto this because they are going to get a lot more macs using adobe now that final cut has lowered it's guard, it would be a shame

for people to be turned off adobe because of 1 bug/fault/??????.

Maybe if ALL (not just a few) of us put in a bug report again this issue may get looked at with a little more intent.

Are we in?

Thanks Butch2oc for reporting this. For me the lag problem is identical with Pro 5. and 5.5. So I don't think you'll see a difference. So it too how long to have Adobe admit and repro the problem, haven't you been dealing with this since last year? Wow. What display do you have?

Not to hijack the thread, but what issues have you seen with having 5.0 and 5.5 on the same machine, because I want to have both at the same time and I haven't noticed anything bad having both.

It looks like something to do with the architecture of the new mac pros, as we have multiple reports of Macpro3.1 systems not being plagued with this slow GUI.  Having edited on both a 3.1 and 4.1 system, the 3.1 system without CUDA is SO much easier to edit H.264 material than the 4.1 system with a Nvidia 4000 card. Hopefully this can help adobe find a solution.  Also, I just got a support case opened and will update anything that comes of that.

Just to let you know, I placed this issue with Adobe sometime ago, and sure, it would be great to see this issue fixed but I would like to say that

Adobe tech support have been very keen to get on top of it. All in all, their support has been great and they always respond.

I emailed the person who handled my case and got a response back straight away.

The response:

"The bug is being looked upon by the engineering team.  You can keep the bug number handy. It’s “Bug # 2881825” .

I don’t have details about when will it get fixed as it’s a higher level decision"

I can only imagine what may be involved in solving the issue from an engineering sense, but at least they are on to it.

Even with this issue (and it's workaround) I still think Premiere is far superior to FCP.

Have faith, it's a great product and will only get better.

Cheers

I agree, it would be nice to have some kind of update as to the progress of this. For me the laggy timeline thing is just a small part of the general lack in performance that premiere achieves on the mac. Adobe have taken such huge strides forwards with CUDA enhancement and realtime playback etc but there's some very basic GUI issues on the mac version that PC users are not experiencing.

I'm working on a project today that envolves a lot of DSLR footage and the way Premiere takes ages to display thumbnails in the project window is driving me nuts. It's not using the CPU, the memory or the hard drives so what exactly is it busy doing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzbJ_CcHN4o

I'm striving forward through the pain in hope that someone at Adobe can help us but the lack of responce about all the mac performance issues on the forum isn't exactly filling me with confidense at the moment.

Message was edited by: Paul Joy (UK)

Thanks Todd.

1.) Check Multi Camera Editing.

2.) Check Mouse Click Double Click Drag Etc ..

3.) Watch Activity Monitor ( Especially the Multi-Processor Option ) to see what processors are being used and what are not during intensive tasks .. such as Stabilizing and other effects.

4.) Check I/ O drive performance.

5.) Check Audio playback while starting / stopping video clips in single sequence / dynamic linked sequence / multi camera edits ... sound sometimes does not

6.) WARNING: I have found a bug in using dynamic link between PP and AE. Most other Mac users have yet to discover it. If you do not address this there will be major problems down the road.

Good Luck