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…

[Greg Janza]

and you ‘ve done a speed test on the La Cie raid to make sure you’re getting proper thruput?

Also, the spinning beachball issue with delayed playback is almost always a communication issue with the media source (i.e., raid).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net

[Tod Hopkins]

I also edit on a CPU upgraded 2009 12-core with Radeon card. While it’s a screamer as far as benchmarks are concerned, it was immediately clear to me that this power upgrade did not improve Premiere timeline performance as I expected. Very disappointing and cautionary if you are considering this upgrade. Changing from nVidia to Radeon RX580 helped, but not as much as I had hoped. On the upside, it is faster than my stock 2010 Mac Pro 12-core.

I’ve already seen a lot of good advice most of which I can second. Avoid MP4 formats because the old Xeon architecture is not optimized for MP4 the way Adobe expects. Cut on 1080p timeline. But also…

Audio can definitely be a major problem. I don’t know why. Multi-track original slows work way down, even if you only have one track in your timeline. I’ve found that converting my eight-track originals to stereo proxies helped more than anything else. More than down-rezing even. In fact, I recently tried to work with some AVCHD home video that had been recorded with surround tracks (not me!) that choked Premiere on an older Xeon Quad. The quad could barely play it even though it was merely 1080p AVCHD! The 12-core could handle it, but it was clearly a drag. I converted to ProRes stereo and the problem was solved.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC