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Have I hit the limit of what Premiere can handle? Cutting a 4k doc, I don’t think a new $40k 2019 Mac Pro would even improve things…
Hi all,
Cutting a feature doc in Premiere in a 4k timeline. It’s TRT is only around one hour. It’s a coming of age surfing doc with a ton of footage and it’s mainly 4k RED, GoPro, DJI, and A7s with some archival MPG stuff (so all over the map). I’ve tried to keep my project size at a minimum by duping projects for new cut versions instead of sequences, and selects are all their own separate projects (we’ve been copying and pasting into our master project / sequence as we pull in footage) so my project size isn’t too crazy at 19mb.
I had gotten through the first cut without too much issue, some lagging and crashing but it was still serviceable. All of a sudden when I was addressing notes, I needed to pull in 2 additional shots for a scene, when I pulled in those two A7s shots it feels like I hit an upper limit of what Premiere could handle in a single sequence and it started to either take 5-10 seconds to play when I hit the spacebar, stop showing picture, render issues when I try to render new footage I would pull in or beach ball with almost any edit I made. And not just on those two new shots, I eventually was able to render those, it was anything in my entire timeline. Granted, my timeline looks very messy with stair steps all over the place up to V5 or V6 but the crazy thing is that it’s all been rendered (set to 4k Prores 422) and shows green bars. I tried everything in the book – most footage was already proxied to 1280 prores proxy, 1/4 playback, 1/8 playback, media cache files are on their own separate ssd, I reset prefs, I tried jumping between CUDA, OpenCL, METAL and software only, I trashed and rebuilt cache files, I reinstalled Premiere. Nothing ever worked, nothing helped. Mind you, with a more simple sequence of say an hour long with a stringout of selects even while my problematic master project was open, played like butter on a 4k timeline. I also had to pop into another project to address notes – it’s a season of a show with 5 episodes each around 12 minutes long, 4k footage etc. with a project size around 30mb and it played everything fine.
It took me chunking the film into 4 parts, each around 15 minutes to allow me to even work on the film again. I tried halfs at 30 minutes but that didn’t work. So is this just a limit of Premiere? I feel like it’s not a hardware issue, that no amount of upgrading would even help much until Adobe makes Premiere better at handling long form 4k timelines and utilize hardware properly. It’s frustrating that apparently FCPx, is so much better written to handle long form projects and utilize hardware available for speed and stability while Premiere seems like it’s only built for short form work. I love working in Premiere, with short form work like commercials or 10 minute projects it’s amazing, but man this project turned into a nightmare the past 2 days. My only other upgrade I could think of would be to get an AMD card like a Vega 64 with external PSU so I could go to Mojave (as most know, Apple brilliantly decided not to allow Nvidia to release GPU drivers for any of their cards in Mojave). MAYBE the latest Premiere was better written to work in Mojave? I’m thinking I’ve simply hit the limit of what Premiere is capable of in a single 4k sequence.
Here are my system specs:
Latest version of High Sierra
Premiere 13.1.22009 Mac Pro
3.46 GHz 12 Core
64gb ram
1080ti gpu
x2 1080p monitors
Sonnet Tech USB C 3.1 gen2 card
Lacie 60tb Big6 raid 5 tower USBcEDITOR
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22 Replies
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You have NOT hit the limit of Premiere, you’ve hit the limit of your 10-year old Mac Pro.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy forum.
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It may be too late now, but given that old of a machine, a couple of suggestions going forward.
1. Transcode all oddball media to ProRes or DNxHD. This would be RED, A7S, DJI, etc.
2. Use the Adobe proxy workflow.
3. Work in a 1080 timeline and then send to Resolve for relinking, color correction, 4K mastering.
4. Upgrade your hardware.Premiere doesn’t do particularly well above 1080 with mixed codecs and frame rates on these old machines. Newer Premiere versions are improving in that area, but some codecs, like the DJI and A7S are a disaster to work with.
What sort of storage? Your profile says LaCie RAID. Have you run any speed tests? How full? Are you using effects? If so, which ones? Have you tried rendering timeline sections as you go?
Edit: I reread you post and I see you’ve tried some of this. I would not upgrade this old machine to Mojave. I’m not even sure you can without a terminal hack. Sometimes Premiere projects get corrupt. Try copy and pasting your current timeline clips into a new sequence in a fresh, blank project and see if this improves anything. You mentioned proxies. Have you toggled proxies “on” so that you are actually linking to the proxy files and not the originals?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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Except… that with the upgrade to 3.46ghz 12 core chips, I have a machine that is the 3rd fastest Mac Pro configuration ever (compared to all other stock options apple has sold). The only thing the 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pros don’t have is Thunderbolt and it seems drive speed is not my issue. When I was cutting on location for a few weeks, they had 2013 mac pros, middle of the road configurations. Those were really chugging. When I got home to my 3.46 with 1080ti, it was night and day faster.
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
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Hi Oliver,
Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I’m very well versed in the Proxy workflow and my proxies are turned on – however it doesn’t really matter as my entire timeline has been rendered to ProRes 422 4k and all the bars are green so Premiere should be pointing to those render files. I also tried creating a new blank project and dragging and dropping my sequence into it to pare down the project as much as possible but it didn’t help either (I actually already did this once when we finished the first cut and I had lots of footage in the project in bins that weren’t going to be used).
I have 14.85TB free so I don’t think drive performance will be an issue…
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[Bryan Roberts] “Yes, I’m very well versed in the Proxy workflow and my proxies are turned on…”
It pretty much sounds like you are doing all the usual things, so I’m at a loss. If Premiere had been handling it fine up to the point of adding the additional files, then I’m not sure what is wrong. Possibly some sort of hardware issue. Is there any way to try this on a different machine?
I do know that Premiere (in my experience) has a tough time with 4K media in a 4K timeline, but there’s not much predictability to it. I presume you are running macOS 10.13.6 and the latest Premiere Pro CC version.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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You’re overlooking the fact that processor speeds and thunderbolt capabilities are not the only thing that’s changed in the last ten years inside Apple computers, bus speed, RAM speeds, etc have all become much faster. The issue you’re facing is that you’re stuck in an Apple-centric environment that has fallen way behind on the hardware front, plus you’ve stuck with ten year old technology too. I’d suspect a moderately beefy new laptop with a thunderbolt 3 raid would run circles around your old cheese grater.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy forum.
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The 2019 Mac Pro hasn’t been released yet so what we’re really talking about when comparing any mac computer that doesn’t include a monitor permanently attached to it, is my 2009 mac pro vs. the trash can 2013 Mac Pro which was never updated since 2013. Considering the 2012 Mac Pro was only a processor bump from the 2009 mac pro (now that mine is also running memory at 1333mhz) then we’re only discussing the change from 2012 Mac Pro to the 2013 Mac Pro trash can. Really not much advanced other than a smaller form factor. So in this vein, yeah, on paper my mac tower is 10 years old. In actuality, it’s faster than all but two trash can Mac Pros in every way (save for Thunderbolt) that Apple still sells as new today (which is highway robbery). So while I can agree with you that apple has hardware starved the market for a while, a 2009/10/12 mac pro maxed out is surprisingly up to date and cutting edge with any of apple’s current offerings.
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[Bryan Roberts] “it’s faster than all but two trash can Mac Pros in every way (save for Thunderbolt) that Apple still sells as new today (which is highway robbery”
Well, FYI, I work at a shop with 1 2013 Mac Pro, 3 Retina iMacs and 5 iMac Pros. We cut a lot of 4K source, various codecs, shared storage, all Premiere. Side-by-side the newer machines (top end iMacs and iMac Pros) do outperform with trash can Mac in direct comparison. And all outperform the 12-core MP towers that we used to have.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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So you are using 1280×720 ProRes Proxies in a 4K timeline and when you added in a couple of A7s shots (which are also 1280×720 ProRes Proxies) things ground to a halt. So you rendered the entire timeline in 4K ProRes 422 and that did’t help at all. It sounds like something is corrupt somewhere (the project, the timelines, a piece of media, etc.,) because I can’t imagine another reason why the machine would be having trouble playing back 1280×720 ProRes Proxy files.
It my experience w/PPro it’s not the the size of the project that slows things down, or even the length of the timeline, but the complexity/number of cuts ing the timeline. I’ve had broll selects timelines that are 12 or 13 hours long and playback fine (1080p, camera native media), but an edited timeline that’s 2-3 hours long will start to lag. Maybe your performance would improve if you stripped out extraneous footage from V2, V3, V4, V5 and V6?
Currently I’m working on a historical doc that’s about an hour long and all the interviews were shot 4K (I’m using 1080p ProRes Proxy proxies) and everything is hunky dory, but my timeline is pretty clean. I’m using a pretty stock 2009 Mac Pro (USB 3.0 card, GTX 660Ti and boot SSD are the only major upgrades).
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Ah, this is an interesting angle. So, full disclosure, I keep a very messy timeline. I always have since FCP days almost 2 decades ago. I cut almost 20 features, some that went theatrical, in my FCP days and never had any performance issues with messy timelines. I use clip enable / disable all over the place to give myself easy option choices so when I go back to a scene, I can see my alt shots I had in my head etc. It never hurt short form stuff like commercials but maybe on longer form work, it has a greater effect. I’ll have to try flattening my timeline since we’re getting closer and closer to locking picture. Thanks for this info.
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