Lagging, choppy playback in PP 13.0.2 (me too)

[Jon Doughtie]

I have routinely waited until at xx.2 or xx.3 update (not xx.0.2 or xx.0.3) before transitioning to a new update. I want to edit, not function as a beta tester.

System:
Dell Precision T7600 (x2)
Win 7 64-bit
32GB RAM
Adobe CC 2017.1 (as of 8/2017)
256GB SSD system drive
4 internal media drives RAID 5
Typically cutting short form from UHD MP4, HD MP4, and HD P2 MXF.

[Merlin Vandenbossche]

Sorry to hear you’re having troubles. I have been cutting UHD ProRes 422 footage easily on the same machine (iMac 2015, 32 GB RAM, i7, M395X GPU). Even just today. I am not on Mojave however. (but High Sierra)

I would first recommend two things to troubleshoot any possible underlying issues with the software:

1/ Clear your preferences and plugin cache on a brand new empty project: do this by holding ALT + SHIFT while double click – opening the project file. It will ask to reset your preferences and then reload all the plugins, effects, decoders etc. Be aware that your preferences have been reset, so you need to run through some of those again if you had changed them from the default. (including re-activating your custom keyboard setting)

2/ Manually delete the cache folders, so PPRO needs to rebuild the library and cache files in your project. Do this manually and not using the preference menu in the application. This way you make sure they are also deleted for your active project and not just for the currently unopened ones. Here you can find the folders: /Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common

Some useful information: https://screenlight.tv/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-adobe-premiere-pros-media-cache

3/ You can also try creating a brand new project and re-importing your old one. If your project ‘survives’ across multiple versions of CC, this is always recommended.

These steps may help to boost your performance again, these things do sometimes get messed up. If it all doesn’t, there may be a lot of other factors at work:

– Are you working with H.264 or H.265 source footage? This will always be ‘more difficult’ to playback and especially to ‘scrub through’ (it is the nature of the codec). Especially at UHD resolutions. And especially if it is in VBR bitrate. Lot’s of folks have wrong expectations about this codec in their workflows.

– Is your storage setup fast enough? Playing back 4K high bitrate UHD ProRes for example from an USB 3.0 external drive may cause hiccups, so can drives formatted in file structures like exFAT. Sometimes you do just need a RAID or SSD.

– Maybe your computer desperately needs that format and fresh install of OS and applications. I do it at least once a year, it helps enormously.

Just a few things and questions for you to go through… I wish you all the good luck!

[David Dean]

Thank you so much for your detailed response, Merlin. Is there any way I can respond to all of your points outside of the forum? What I can immediately tell you is that I am one of two editors on a PBS series, and my partner in Nashville has a brand-new iMac, more powerful than mine, and he has been having exactly the same problems with PP2019. I can also tell you that I got so frustrated with the two-year-old 1080 project I had recently opened with 2019 and had the same lagging issues, that I exported the re-edited sequence as an XML file, opened up the last saved version of the project that was cut using 2018, imported the new sequence, linked the video, and it played absolutely flawlessly. I’ll be very happy to answer all your other queries, but I’m convinced that v.13 is a serious factor in this consistent problem.
Again, sincere thanks for your time and expertise.
David

[Merlin Vandenbossche]

Knowing what type of footage (resolution, codec) you are cutting and what storage you use, could tell me more. But since you seem to still have decent playback using CC 2018 on your setup (this is what I understand?), it’s not likely to be a problem in this area.

The change to CC 2019 did involve a number of performance related updates, so you could also try disabling those again to see if it helps to behave more like CC 18 again. These include:

– Disabling ‘Enable Display Color Management’ under Preferences – General
– Disabling ‘Enable Accelerated H.264 decoding’ under Preferences – Media
– Try switching back to OpenCL under the ‘Renderer’ setting found in your project settings (since CC 19 it is generally recommended to use ‘Metal’ as a renderer on Macs)

But also again: make sure to also try the preferences reset and cache delete I mentioned in my previous post.

On a closing note, there are two more things that tend to cause trouble after updates: Third-Party plugins and GPU drivers. Make sure to update any third party plugins to their latest versions as well (stuff like Red Giant plugins, etc.) and I assume you are not using an Nvidia GPU. Nvidia and CUDA drivers always need to be updated manually, but won’t work on Mojave anymore, since Apple no longer supports it.