Media Pending for several minutes after importing/opening project on NAS

[Mike Janowski]

First and foremost, presenting Premiere with a variety of frame sizes, rates and codecs is a guaranteed way to slow the entire editing process.

Sure, Premiere CAN transcode on the fly, and play back whatever you dump into the timeline…but imagine that Premiere is the United Nations, and your project is a huge meeting about some important worldwide topic, like world peace, and that meeting is being attended by negotiators from all around the world.

Do you think discussions would proceed a bit more quickly if everyone was speaking a different language, or if they all agreed to speak, say, French? That’s why we have the term “lingua franca”…a common manner or speaking for all involved, so that communication is facilitated.

Similarly, best practices in Premiere dictate that, if you have a variety of codecs and frame sizes, you transcode into a common “language” for best performance. If that seems like a timewaster to you, consider:

1) how much time you’re wasting waiting for pending media, and;

2) how much time you’re wasting waiting for Premiere to transcode on the fly so you can watch.

With the ease of invoking Media Encoder, and the ease of setting up transcode presets, this would be the first thing I’d do to get better performance.

[Ian Liuzzi-fedun]

While I agree with you this is easier said-than done when working with workflows that already exist. While this is indeed a consideration I do not believe this is our only source of issues so I’d like to examine what else might be out of sorts.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I don’t have experience with this specific NAS, but I’ve deployed 5 systems on a QNAP NAS, with 3 on 10GigE and 2 on 1 GigE. My systems are Prem Pro and Avid, and one Prem Pro is on 10GigE, the other 1 GigE. These are used for feature and series edits. All the media is either DNxHD 36 for Avid, or Apple ProRes LT or Proxy for Prem Pro. All either 1080p24 or 1080p25. (24 is 24.000, not 23.976, as we are in a PAL country). No raw files, no 4k files.

What I’ve done with the Prem Pro systems, is, to provide each of them with a 2TB USB SSD and set that as preview and cache from within Prem Pro. So that at project open time, the system doesn’t read from NAS for media and write back for cache/preview to NAS. This is one thing you could consider. Preventing large number of simultaneous read-writes to NAS over 1 GigE.

Also, our project files are not stored on NAS, but locally and then backed up to the NAS every night.

Second, if at all possible, as a trial, transfer some or all of the the slow-to-open media from NAS, to a fast hard drive RAID or SSD, then, after reconnecting to that media in PPro, unmount the NAS, and check if project open is faster. With media local.

Basically, by the process of elimination you will need to ascertain whether, your system is slow (probably not), or is the NAS throughput and latency not adequate, or is 1 GigE not high bandwidth enough. Or is there some other issue.

Neil

[Ian Liuzzi-fedun]

Project Files as well as all cache and render files are similarly stored locally on an SSD for our setup as well.

[Ian Liuzzi-fedun]

After timing things, I believe the projects load in a reasonable amount of time. The issue is the intermittent Media Pending pauses which I’m unable to replicate currently (no doubt when the systems will be needed to something time-sensitive it will resume). The projects that were previously used are approaching half a gig in size, again, all stored locally. The projects that I am working on getting the editors to use are less than 100MB.

Any other ideas towards the Media Pending issue would be helpful.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Ian,

I had a nightmare last night, literally not 😀

However, some years back, not too long ago, but long enough for me to happily forget about it.
It is an odd issue, but could apply to you.

I was freelancing for a British Broadcaster.
In the department, that was turning out 3-5 1/2 hour magazine style programs a week + social media clips, international versioning and the rest across 6-8 Apple work-stations and “desk-tops” running FCPX.

We had a shared storage of about 80Tb; I think.

I was working in the building next door, and found my Mac beach-balling more than I would have thought that it should.

Discussed with engineering whether being outside the building impacted speed?
They kindly diagrammed it for me and told me that was no delays.
After a bit of investigation (casually asking around, by the engineers – they are amongst the best), it turned out that all the suites were beach-balling.

This system was not that old, but the software was old enough not to spew out alarms if a drive was on the blink. On scanning the storage, it was found that a drive needed to be replaced.

Then there was a software update…

The software update had a big button saying “press me” for optimizing your something, something. With hindsight, it was like the big red button that Homer Simpson would find in the control room of the Nuclear Power Station saying “PRESS ME”…

It disconnected everything – try watching each editing suite in turn falling over like a row of dominoes, the day before broadcast of 3 of the shows…

Although I touched nothing, I still felt guilty.
Another hour of productivity was added because editors stopped looking at the beach ball. That got me the highest disapproval rating ever…

Just saying it, in case it is something similar happening for you.

Atb
Mads

[Ian Liuzzi-fedun]

While I do not feel we have any bad drives due to the way the NAS is performing I will say that we updated to v24 of Premiere at the beginning of this season and that avenue, trying to see if v23 would be less problematic, has not been explored.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Ian,

Can’t hurt running an overnight scan on the drives, can it?

Adobe is known for making each new version of PPro (and other software) work worse than the previous. I have one industry colleague where they dispatched PPro and replaced it with Davinci.
They haven’t looked back as there is less crashes, faster work-flow and a one off payment.

However, although I have both, I have not killed off PPro yet as all my plug-ins are tied into Adobe – until I upgrade them next time around.

Maybe rolling back to 2023 will work.
Certainly in 2024 Adobe will max out my 128GB Ram on even the simpelst of projects when exporting.

On project size, I prefer mine to max out around the 30MB in size – that is just an old habit that I’ve stuck to.

Atb
Mads

[Ian Liuzzi-fedun]

I agree and I’ve run them. Didn’t mean to be avoidant there. The NAS also does a scrub from time to time. I feel like there is a Windows setting somewhere that we’re missing that would put this workflow upside down as everything just seems RIGHT.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Are you on Windows 10 or 11?
(or earlier…)

I am currently dealing with a vendor where it is a choice of disabbling all security features and/or running third party antivirus software.

I am leaning towards HP Wolf security software getting in the way.

As you suggest, it might just be a box that needs to be ticked.

But finding that one box or software…

Atb
Mads