Video Playback - Stop, stutters and anything but smooth!

[JayZ_WA]

I recently upgraded my iMac hoping this might bring some incremental performance increases to my video playback but no such luck ... at all.

iMac details:

Rentina 5K, 27-inch Late 2015

3.3GHz Intel Core i5

32GB Memory

2TB Fusion Drive

AMD Radeon R9 M395 2GB

macOS Sierra

Lightroom CC

If I try to playback 4k video (shot with my DJI Phantom 4 Pro - .mov files) - I can't watch even a 5 second clip without it hanging or stuttering.

Looking at the activity monitor, it looks like I am using only about 1GB of memory when this is 'playing' but the CPU usage (from dynamiclinkmediaserver) is 300-400%. I've tried with/without the use of the GPU Processor - similarly poor results. I restart and don't open any other applications. I've tried changing monitor resolutions as low as possible. I purged cache, increased cache size to 25GB ... anything I do makes no improvement. It just will not play any piece of footage smoothly - if it does start to play, it stops and hangs after the first 3 (or so) seconds, then will start playing once again for a second or two but it has jumped ahead 5-10 seconds.

Any suggestions or tips on improving this so I can review footage in Lightroom? Just tried to watch through this and select the usable parts of the clips - most of these are 10 sec to 1 min in length (about 100-800MB in size).

I'd greatly appreciate any ideas to increase my frustrating playback performance!

[Baspard · Accepted solution]

Hello,

It seems normal to me that Lightroom is struggling to play your video files.

Lightroom has not been designed to work with movie clips and is not optimized as Premiere Pro may be. Furthermore, it's DJI's 4k footage, wich is heavy (hear: good quality and not that much compressed).

Maybe you could find a workaround thanks to Adobe's documentation:

• How to work with video in Lightroom
• https://helpx.adobe.com/archive/lightroom/lightroom-5-troubleshooting.pdf
• Adobe Lightroom supported file formats

Or maybe this video:

• 4k Performance Issue In Adobe Lightroom CC with and without GPU Acceleration - YouTube

I have not read everything, so I hope that I helped you a bit