How to make Premiere perform better, use all RAM available?

[TheOriginal150mph]

I'm new to Premiere and still learning. Premiere constantly hangs, drags, virtually freezes up and makes editing somewhat torturous. Even though I have 32 GB of RAM installed, my OS Activity Monitor app shows that Premiere is using only 1.5 GB at any time. How to get Premiere to use all the RAM I have?

More info:

I'm compiling 1280x720 sequences from a wide variety of sources, mp4, wmv's, m4v, avi's. Most of these live on an external drive with USB3 connection.

My projects typically have between 3 or 4 and up to 25 different videos imported, some high-res, others scaled up to fill the frame, edited in to several hundred clips with video and audio tracks.  Also lots of split screens and motion effects.

I understand this kind of project would be processor intensive.  I routinely have to wait between 3-8 minutes while Premiere "does its thing". Each time I move to a different part of the sequence to work -  and most of the time when I push the space bar (play) - nothing happens at all, until I save, which takes 5-10 minutes. Premiere doesn't even give an alert that it's having problems, it just stalls out. When I come back a half hour later, often its ready to go again.

Rendering the entire work area takes all day and then the next time I go to edit, the same delay issue pops up again.

Is this just what Premiere editors have to suffer through? Does Premiere have a cap on how many source movies it can import, or how large the file size? Also, do I need to have a scratch disk?

Tips for optimizing through-put for large projects with all the bells and whistles appreciated.

Mac OS 10.6.8 | 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon | 32GB RAM | Premiere CS6

[RoninEdits]

you can try setting the memory preferences, "optimize rendering for" to "memory". also this Premiere Pro CC, CC 2014, or 2014.1 freezing on startup or crashing while working (Mac OS X 10.9, an...  premiere will mostly uses ram to hold previews of the timeline during playback. so the ram usage will change depending on the timeline media and whats being done.

generic performance guide: optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects | After Effects region of interest

i would say no, this is not what most premiere editors go thru, or premiere wouldn't be around any longer. i also dont know of any limitation to imported clips, size or number of. many do use a dedicated scratch disk, depending on the speeds of disks available, some use scratch on a drive being used for other things as well. having the project file and cache/previews all on a fast internal drive should help premiere not have to transfer as much data over the usb3. it looks like the cpu speed of those xeon's are on the slow side, but if you can check the computers resources while premiere is stalled/hanging, you can see if perhaps the cpu or usb3 drive/transfer is maxed out.

there was a similar post from another user a while ago, that had a very large project on multiple usb3 drives, he noticed a new project with a few files on an internal hdd ran smooth. he was never able to transfer all the media to internal drives, so we don't know if that would have fixed it. he also had a massive project file itself, which seemed to be caused by data from the warp stabilizer effect storing data in the .prproj file. some people doing long timelines, like over an hour, will split up the timeline via sequences or projects, and combine them later in a master timeline, to avoid large project issues with premiere.

[TheOriginal150mph]

Thanks for taking the time to answer Ronin - appreciate it. I'll try setting the Optimize rendering to Memory and see if that helps - although the default Optimize for Performance seems likes the obvious choice. And I will look through those links. My videos are up to 2 hrs long, so I suppose breaking them into parts and reassembling them (somehow) is something I might have to live with...

I have Premiere Pro 6.0.0 - not CC version.

[RoninEdits]

oh, kinda missed you were on cs6. there is a new method in CC to join multiple projects, but i think for cs6 you will have to stay in one project and nest your multiple sequences as the master timeline to reassemble them.

[Ann Bens]

I was always under the impression that changing the setting to Memory was only useful when a Low Memory warning was given after rendering a sequence that had failed.

[TheOriginal150mph]

Ok changing the Optimize Rendering setting offers no improvement.

The program just does not seem to be processing the information correctly for me despite the large amount of RAM available. This  screen cap shows Premiere with the "Rendering Required Files" dialog box open, preventing work from being done, and the Activity Monitor displaying that Premiere is using only a small fraction of the RAM available. This Premiere dialog box pops up every time I move around the timeline to work somewhere else.

Another common instance of malfunction - After "Rendering Required Files" completes,  I press play/spacebar, and the playhead advances and the audio plays, but no video plays, likely because Premiere isn't using the RAM available. After 3-5 minutes, the video resumes.

Can anyone offer add'l insight? thank you!

[cc_merchant]

‌It looks you are using a lot of .MOV formats, that require the QT 32 Server extension. That is a 32 bit extension that can not use more than around 2.5 GB of memory out of the total 4 GB, even if you have 32 or even 64 GB installed.

[RoninEdits]

what are the system resources doing for the 3-5 minutes when premiere is malfunctioning, playing audio but not video? is the cpu maxed or disk activity?

found this thread about problems with the rendering pop-up "Rendering Required Files" - huh?

and this one Premiere CC slowed down - Non responsive. HELP!?

[R Neil Haugen]

Your projects ... having so many mixed codecs (and processor-intensive ones also) in so many clips "living" on a USB3.0 drive has a built-in slow-down. USB3.0 can be utilized for footage on projects particularly with either a high-speed flash drive or an SSD that has a fast cache/write/read system. It is pretty much a one-way trip for the drive. But it is certainly not optimal ... and I know as I have worked with that as the best available method at times to split disc activity up.

What I didn't see (may have missed of course) is ... how is the REST of your project material arranged on disc? For doing any real editing, it's highly recommended to have 4-5 different full-speed internal drives to spread the read/write processes out as much as possible, or a high-speed hardware stripped RAID 0/5 sytem to replace the 4/5 separate drives. So unless running that hardware RAID, system & program files are on one drive, cache & database files another, project files & graphic assets a third, footage a fourth, and exports a fifth.

Yes, you can collapse the above at need ... but will always slow some things down. If you're running everything but the footage on say one internal drive, and the footage on a USB3 ... you've got so many disc read/write bottlenecks happening that it's gonna be slow.

So ... how do you have things laid out? And of course, the answers to RoninEdit's questions will be very useful ...

Neil

[TheOriginal150mph]

@cc_merchant I'm not using any .mov's, but plenty of .mpgs

@RoninEdits  I'm not sure how to check "system resources" but Activity Monitor displays pretty much the same pie chart stats during almost all Premiere action- it doesn't jump to say, half memory usage or 3/4 , which I believe means there is plenty of RAM for everything. Thanks for finding the links - seems obvious this is going to be an intensively involved fix if it can be fixed.

@R Neil Haugen  Although I'm just a video hobbyist, I  just spent $300+ on RAM that's not helping at all, an extravagant expenditure for me. So purchasing another internal drive isn't an option at the moment. Besides, this Mac Pro at going-on-five-years old is already considered obsolete by Apple. I do have other USB external drives but that wouldn't help would it? Anyway, I don't want to spread my projects all over like that. A Thunderbolt drive would be nice but a 2 or 4TB is too pricey for me right now.

Thanks for trying to help.

[RoninEdits]

"system resources" is the computers hardware. so the cpu, ram, disk, etc. that picture shows alot of cpu usage for "adobe qt32 server", which should only be used for quicktime files, but doesn't sound like you are using any...   there were some performance bugs in cs6, are you running the last update, 6.0.5? Adobe - Premiere Pro : For Macintosh  and is premiere using nvidia/cuda or is the renderer set to software only? that setting is in project settings.

[cc_merchant]

Your activity monitor says different. 33.7% CPU load and 42 threads used by QT 32 Server. If you don't use .MOV files, try killing QT 32 Server.

[TheOriginal150mph]

I installed the 6.0.5 update, so far no noticeable improvement. The renderer is set to Software only, greyed out. The QT32 Servers - Googled what/where this is and how to turn off - unsuccessfully... Little help?

Quicktime is how Macs play mp4's by default. I'm using a lot of mp4's in my projects but whether Premiere Pro is tapping this qt32 "server?"for that IDK, or if it's not related to PP at all...

Started watching Activity monitor more, but don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for. In the %CPU column for Premiere, during rendering, the % jumps all over the place. 30%, 80%, 120%, 210%. So IDK what it means or if it just isn't working correctly. How can it be 210%?

After 8 minutes of Rendering Required Files, I press Play and immediately Premiere starts Rendering Required Files again.

Since the upgrade to 6.0.5, it's just thrown up this bizarre error:

then this one too:

Unknown? thats really #@! helpful.

So I restarted, saved the project as a copy and trying again. As I'm experimenting with this re-saved version now, I see some improvement in being able to move the playhead anywhere and not get the Rendering dialog. will report back more later.

thanks for trying to help me!

[RoninEdits]

the only thing i found on the first error (macfile.cpp-1104) was it may be related to quicktime. do you have the latest version of quicktime installed?

unknown error is kinda a bad one, it can be one of many different things. maybe its related to the constant "Rendering Required Files" too. did you try and of the solutions from the link i posted earlier for that? sounds like its still happening...

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