High Spec Laptop - TERRIBLE Timeline/Preview Performance

[Dirgenator]

I just don't get it. PRP 2014 was butter smooth even on my older machines. Here is my current setup and issue in more detail.

CURRENT LAPTOP SPECS:

Aorus X5 i7-5700 quad core

3K Laptop Screen

32 GB RAM

965m X2 GPU in SLI

Samsung 850 Pro SSD - 2TB (footage drive)

Samsung 850 Pro 512GB X2 Raid 0 (program and os drive)

... to be clear, that's 3TB of high speed SSD drives in a laptop

2 external 1920 x 1080 Samsung Monitors

FOOTAGE:

GH5 Camera

4K @ 60 FPS

PROJECT SETTINGS:

4K Resolution

23.9 fps

Preview Resolution - 1920 x 1080 (full, 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8 preview quality yeild exact same results)

CUDA acceleration enabled

24GB RAM set in reserve for Premiere Pro use... i mean overkill.

PROBLEM:

The moment I begin to play from the timeline, after about 2 seconds I drop frames to about 1 or 2 frames per second. This then drops even further to around 1 frame every 5 or 6 seconds. This makes any sort of video editing virtually impossible. I never had this problem with 2014. Just upgraded to CC a few months ago and have yet to have a single edit go smoothly. Have checked CPU/GPU usage and temps. No throttling or any other obvious issue. What on Earth is going on?!? With these kind of specs, the timeline should be super smooth. Especially given the annual massive costs. What am I paying for? Also... no 24/7 support? That is just weird.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Move your footage onto the raid0, or at least give it a try.  What CODEC does that camera use?  It has a Panasonic ring to it.

OK, I looked it up:

The resulting images are easier to edit and work better for action sequences, but they tend to be much larger than inter-frame files. So, Panasonic introduced a 400Mbps "All-I," 10bit 4:2:2 codec, doubling the previous data rate. That's a higher throughput than many pro cameras, including Sony's $7,500 4K FS7 XDCAM, even though the GH5 costs less than a quarter the price ($1,700). As mentioned, the new data rate doesn't work yet for 6K anamorphic, and you'll probably need a high-speed UHS-II class SD card.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Your laptop specs are very good (better than mine) but let us see how well your laptop is tuned especially for Premiere Pro by downloading, running and submitting your Premiere Pro BenchMark (PPBM) scores.

Like Trevor indicated I do not see any advantage to have your OS/Application on a RAID 0 array, and as a RAID 0 array is dangerous if one drive fails you loose all the data on that array  I would clone that OS/Applications to a single SSD drive and use those drives individually or RAID 0 for Projects and Media along with a good backup plan.

Another thing to try is to remove the two external monitors and see if that changes your playback

I have a clip GH5 4K 300 Mbits/second (thanks to Ann Bens) that play perfectly in Premiere 12 on this laptop with i7-4700HQ, 24 GB RAM, GTX 765M and just two SATA III SSD's. No editing effects or features just the standard MXF file here is MediaInfo screen grab

[Trevor.Dennis]

Bill I remember when I built my 3930K system five or six years ago, using advice from Harm and yourself, it worked OK but I couldn't scrub the timeline smoothly.  What fixed it was putting the project files on faster drives, and it was early days for SSDs, so I used a pair of early generation Velociraptors in a raid0.  I had a lot of bad luck with motherboard raid0 arrays, and I think I should have done more research because I had more than one array (using various gen Velociraptors) fail. 

Anyway, my thoughts with my quick reply to the OP, was that if he has a similar timeline scrubbing issue, then he might do better with it on the faster (raid0) drives.  400Mbs 4:2:2 'All-I' sounds like a lot of work for the system, and I don't suppose the OP was processing the same footage when using Premiere Pro CC2014.

[Dirgenator]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the feedback, but this is not resolving this question. There is no question about my drives being too slow. Having my OS split between 2 m.2 drives is how the laptop came from the factory, and moving it to one makes little sense as it would cut the speed. RAID 0 across 2X 256 GB lite-on M.2 drives gives me insane speeds for read/write for OS and applications. I am not concerned about data loss as everything is backed up onto an external 20TB RAID 0.

Codec is standard GH5 .mov file. I am using the 8Bit 3840 x 2160 @ 60 fps codec. I am not converting before importing into premiere pro. I think my computer should be able to handle it, yet I am having this laggy playback even with 1080p footage.

Have tried with 1 screen, 2 screens, 3 screens and even 4 screens (i know, its overkill, but I love multi-monitor workflows). No change in performance. Preview is set to 1920 x 1080. Changing from full to half to quarter etc has no effect. Im so annoyed.

Still wondering what could be wrong.

Ideas? Anyone from Adobe want to help with this?

-DRJ

[Bill_Gehrke]

I have a GH5 4K 10-bit file that Someone let me download for this kind of purpose.  I just opened the file in Premiere 12 and the first play of the 1 minute long file it dropped 3 frames on the first play thru but none the second time.  This file is not your 400 Mbs file here is a copy of the InfoMedia info.

This was on my 3-year old i7-4700HQ, 24GB RAM, nVidia GTX 765m GPU with 2 SATA III SSD;s and windows 8.1 at 1/2 resolution.

I assume you are with Win 10 on that much newer laptop.  Have you tuned that laptop?  Look at Task Manager Performance Tab how many processes do you have running before you even start anything Adobe.  Also go to Startup and disable everything, if the process/program is necessary it still will startup when required.

[Dirgenator]

Yep I'm running windows 10. Legit versions all around.

Just tried to see if I had any different results with some phantom 4 pro footage. .mov files at 4K @60fps. Exactly the same. Hundreds of dropped frames. I always close all programs in the background... but again. I have 32GB of RAM. I have even set a system reserve of 12gb of ram. That means PRP has access to 20GB of RAM..... That's nearly triple what my old laptop had and that machine had no problem with footage of any kind.

So I may have found the bottleneck, but I still don't understand why it's causing a slow down. On half quality preview, during timeline playback, all of my drives hover at 1%-5% usage. Ram is around 25%. However CPU jumpsup to 90%, or even 95% when it gets real slow. On simple titles it drops back down to around 50%. With footage its jumps back up to 90%, then hovers around 85%.

I'm going to contact their support and see if they can walk me through my troubles. There is no reason this should not be butter smooth.

[Bill_Gehrke]

If (as I suggested earlier you run my Premiere Pro BenchMark we can tell if you are tuned properly, it tests CPU, GPU, and your storage disk.  Submit the results and I will try to give you some help.  You have a better laptop than I and I see no reason why it cannot provide you better results.  The other way to try to help you is for you to make one of your problem clips for us to test.

I just noticed your SLI connected GPU's is there any way to remove the SLI connection it is not recommended.

[R Neil Haugen]

Your media is "standard" GH5 mov and not All-I you say? "All-Intraframe" would be the mov near-equivalent of say ProRes 422, an intraframe format. The standard GH3/4/5 media in mov is definitely long-GOP stuff. Which by it's very nature is nasty on cores/threads/RAM communication and processing speeds. (I've got a '3', would like to get the '5', and have worked media from all three cameras.)

4k long-GOP at 60fps is a ton of load on the CPU & it's subsystems right there. It was particularly telling when you compared it to Phantom 4 4k/60fps files ... also very long-GOP material. Yea, the Phantom is the same but even a bit worse as far as settings for decoding/decompressing go.

The colorists I know have monster desktops built to run Resolve with multiple monitors ... we're talking massive computing capability in their suites. They don't like to mess with 'native' long-GOP in 4k or frequently even in 1080, as it screws up playback on machines that churn through 6k RED files with ease.

The All-I files from that GH5 would be much larger on disc but would play back much smoother. Transcoding your current files for editing (then dumping the t-codes after editing 'cause they're big & you can always replace them from the originals) would undoubtedly give better performance.

And further, the PrPro built-in proxy setup should work well. Use the included Cineform 960x540 option (think that's the frame-size) and it works pretty good. Toggle the icon to use proxies for playback, toggle again for viewing full quality.

Neil

[Dirgenator]

Hi All,

Here's an update. After disassembly and re-pasting of the thermal compound on GPUs and CPU, no change whatsoever in any usage or temps. So I spent 2 days backing up 3TB of footage and files, formatted my c: drive and reset windows. After reinstalling all my programs (headach) I load my PRP timeline. During playback CPU usage is now maxing out around 80% - 85%! WOOHOO! I suppose some hacker had CPU jacked my PC for mining. Now it runs so much cooler, and never comes near the previous 99%... and yet.

SAME. EXACT. PROBLEM. (face-palm).

So now with all hardware running at very very very reasonable usages (CPU around 80% during playback, disks, RAM, and GPUs also barely touching 40% usage and staying well cooled... I am left with the conclusion that the new CC simply is much worse at handling this footage, as PRP 2014 was butter smooth on this exact same machine.

I am going to experiment with this proxy footage (why do I have to bother wasting even more storage space with this. Surely this $650/y annual fees should be enough to get me a pro editing program that can handle GH5 and Phantom 4 footage smoothly with my overkill hardware.... especially given that the old PRP 2014 handled this perfectly....)

I will also look over all your suggestions and see what else can be done. In the meantime.... also reinstalling PRP 2014 and canceling my annual subscription. Paying for what...? THANKS ADOBE!

[exile1972]

I too think your main problem isn't your computer specs or Adobe CC 2018. It's the GH5 and Phantom 4 formats. Transcode that material and your issues will disappear. I never edit with any H.264 footage because the processing power required is way too high and will clog the system. Likewise with Long-GOP.

[R Neil Haugen]

Most colorists I know transcode any long-GOP media that comes in from clients before they even start working ... and this is on massive desktop setups far more expensive and hardware-rich than any laptop. They have no problem whatever with 8k RED or Arri files, but that's because those are all in formats that are intraframe ... every frame is there, just compressed. MUCH easier for the CPU than long-GOP, where only every 9-30 frames is there a complete frame ... the rest are datasets of changed pixels to compute in comparision with the  previous, next ... or both! ... complete or "I" frames.

And now, some of the drones are using partial I-frames, so the complete I frames are up to 120 frames apart. Here's what GoPro had to say in their manual for their sadly discontinued GoPro Studio app for editing GoPro media:

Cineform and DNxHR are very good intermediate codecs to edit in. And after you finish your project, you can dump the transcodes and archive your project only with the original media as you can of course re-create the transcodes at any time.

Neil

[RjL190365]

Unfortunately, if you have not saved or archived the installation files for Premiere Pro CC 2014, you cannot obtain that version anymore from any legitimate venue. As of late 2017, the only versions that remain available through the Creative Cloud desktop app are the CS6 (2012), CC 7.0 (2013) and the CC 2017 11.1.4 version (which is the 11.1.2 version with the Dolby AC3 codec removed). And the CC 2018 version, as well. This is due to the conflicts involving the use of Dolby's intellectual property. CC 2013 and CS6 remain available, as is Encore CS6, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for those two versions.

[Dirgenator]

Hi All,

So after trying on cc 2014 I have better results, but still enough of the same problems to determine that you are all probably correct (no surprise there) and that these issues are likely NOT related to my hardware or Adobe, but simply the format of my original footage. As I am NOT a professional film-maker, my understanding of these details are fairly limited, and I have never transcoded or proxied anything. Don't really understand what that means or how to do it. Anyone have a good video link to a tutorial on the best settings for transcoding or working with proxies with 4k60 fps footage, specifically from GH5 or Phantom 4 Pro?

Or someone want to hold my hand and walk me through it? I am willing to try your suggestions, just not sure how to do it or where on earth to begin.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could just edit off my original files? Why not? Ugh.

[exile1972]

transcoding is easy peasy. Use adobe media encoder and transcode that GH5 or Phantom 4 footage to an edit friendly codec like Pro-res or DnxHD and you'll eliminate any and all laggy playback.

How to Use Adobe Media Encoder CC - YouTube

[R Neil Haugen]

There are both FAQ files for this forum on the FAQ page off the Overview page of this forum and tutorials in the PrPro online help files on proxy use.

Basically you start with the Media Browser and click the wrench setup icon. Set that to Create Proxies on ingestion, selecting the small Cineform preset and don't worry about frame size.

Navigate to and select some holes to import via ingest, and it will create the proxies for you.

While it does that, go to the program monitor and click the + icon far lower right. Find the Toggle Proxies icon to drag it onto the control block.

To use proxies click to toggle it blue, off (grey) to see original media.

That's it. Very easy.

Neil