Issues editing 4K a7sII footage on Premiere on my Macbook

Adobe Premiere Pro

Issues editing 4K a7sII footage on Premiere on my Macbook

Posted by Austin Steele on October 21, 2015 at 3:25 am

A couple disclaimers: I’m a new Premiere user, new to 4K video and new to Sony cameras.

Just got my Sony a7sII and I’m starting to edit the files in Premiere. I shot 4K video and the codec is XAVC-S.

My Macbook is about 5 years old. In Premiere when previewing source video in the viewer, its very choppy. The computer is struggling to play the footage. In my sequence the video is better but not great. The choppiness is so bad Its almost unusable.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? Or is it time to upgrade computers?

Thanks!

Austin Steele replied 10 years, 6 months ago 4 Members · 7 Replies
7 Replies

Austin Steele
October 21, 2015 at 3:29 am

Also I’m editing off a 1TB lacie rugged with a standard firewire cord.
Nathan Mcalpine
October 21, 2015 at 2:36 pm

Lower your playback to 1/4 resolution. It wont look sharp but it should play back smoother. You’ll find it in the drop down on the bottom right of your program monitor.

Nathan McAlpine
Commercial Producer
David Roth weiss
October 23, 2015 at 7:49 pm

[Austin Steele] “Just got my Sony a7sII and I’m starting to edit the files in Premiere. I shot 4K video and the codec is XAVC-S.”

[Austin Steele] “Also I’m editing off a 1TB lacie rugged with a standard firewire cord.”

XAVC is an extremely CPU intensive codec that is not easy to playback seamlessly on older computers, especially laptops. I’ve had issues playing it back even with a huge 8-drive Thunderbolt-2 RAID providing over 1100 MB/sec throughput, which illustrates that it’s the CPU, GPU, and system architecture that are the stumbling blocks.

For the record, your single Firewire drive would only be able to playback a single stream of that codec under the best of circumstances. The bitrate of the that codec is 60MB/sec – a single Firewire drive tops out at approx. 80MB/sec. So, in order to edit that codec effectively you need a RAID – and preferably a 4 or 8-drive RAID with lots of overhead.If you transcode to a hi-performance codec like Pro Res, you will have a lot easier time, even if you transcode to Pro Res 4K.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
Austin Steele
October 24, 2015 at 3:13 pm

David and Nathan thanks very much. Before upgrading my laptop I will try this.

David what program do you recommend transcoding 4k XAVC files with? I tried compressor and mpeg streamclip and neither could open the files.

Thanks again.
Shane Ross
October 24, 2015 at 4:23 pm

EditReady.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
David Roth weiss
October 24, 2015 at 5:01 pm

I would use Adobe Media Encoder.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
Austin Steele
October 24, 2015 at 6:25 pm

Thanks. Conforming with Media Encoder now. Does conforming to Pro Res lower the quality of my footage?

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