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Media Pending for several minutes after importing/opening project on NAS
We are running two editors off a Synology 3621xs unit with about 80TB of space. The editing systems are Windows 10 on Precision 7920 Rack systems with the latest version of Premiere Pro. They are connected via 1G as they do not need more bandwidth than that for editing operations and we want to limit their overall impact on the NAS when transferring files. The NAS occasionally has writes/reads to it from the tape department (EVS) however I am confident that they are not tying down the system too much. We’ve done multiple speed tests over the months and have metrics galore on how every single piece is performing in the puzzle – the network is solid, as is the shared storage.
What’s our issue? When importing footage or opening projects the ‘Media Pending’ message sits on the screen sometimes in excess of 8 minutes before the edit systems are usable. This is a huge drag and seems like something is amiss. Even after rebooting the systems, clearing the cache, clearing render files, clearing everything you can think of, this rears its head at odd times. I’ve been able to correlate NAS performance at these times and nothing is using the resources unusually high nor are we seeing the Windows systems requesting more than a few kbps while this ‘process’ is occurring.
Let’s forgo the typical checks as we’ve done them all and I have several hundred shared edit systems under my belt AND have had multiple folks look at this setup. Let’s focus on the very unlikely and one-in-a-million ideas please. For example, if there are an inordinately high number of clips on the NAS, could this be the cause when importing more clips?
Also, some additional info: codecs are all over the place as are raster size and frame rates. This is for typical 1080i 59.94 broadcast however between all the roaming ops, it all gets delivered in haphazard ways. Editors are not sharing projects however they are sharing footage. Consequently, opening projects before we even get to the “Media Pending” stage takes forever
There are media managers on-site that use MACs to bring footage in and out. Is it possible that something they are doing is messing up the Windows side? For example, I’m seeing reports online of using something like folder icons being problematic.
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11 Replies
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Hey Ian,
“Sharing Footage” could be a problem, but shouldn’t if it is “only” HD, and the NAS is fast enough.
I would start by investigating:
1) Are you working in Adobe “Teams” or “Productions” when sharing media?
2) Where is your Adobe PPro Project data stored, on local drive, or on the NAS?
3) Same as 2, just for cache and preview folders?
Also, on NAS questions, there are some really clever people hanging around on the COW storage forum:
https://creativecow.net/forums/forum/storage/
Keep in mind that if you are an “freelance” or SME, that Adobe has killed the Cloud in Creative Cloud. So if any of your machines are still wanting to “hook up” with the Adobe Cloud, that might create a bottleneck too.
Atb
Mads
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In my experience, this is a project-media problem, not a bandwidth problem. This can be the project itself—size, corruption, complex elements—or problematic media. Camera audio is a common culprit, particularly long, multi-track camera originals. Adobe is not great at handling compressed audio. It converts everything and it’s shockingly slow at doing this. And sometimes it gets hung up and wants to cache audio or waveforms every time you start up. It even though it acts like it is caching, that’s not necessarily what’s hanging it up. It’s just the process that’s on-screen when the slowdown occurs.
Divide and conquer. Create new projects and bring in material only as needed, bit by bit, and then see if there is a particular point where this happens with the new project. Consider if it only happens with specific source media. You may need to convert.
Good luck. This can be a difficult problem to solve.
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We are using neither Teams nor Productions.
The projects, cache, and preview files are all generated locally.
I will cross-post this in storage as well.
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Hey Ian,
Don’t blame, neither do I.
But I do wonder if Teams is built for sharing media, whether there is something Adobe knows that the rest of us have not been told about?More info on Teams here:
https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/business/teams/premiere-pro.htmlAtb
Mads -
You’d hope they would share however I do see your point. Easier said than done at this point. Also, I feel like this has become a larger issue in the past 12 months so I feel like it’s a performance/setting rather than an outright ‘this scenario doesn’t work’ situation.
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Hey Ian,
Just a thought, how big is your PPro project file?
Atb
Mads -
We’re talking about multiple project files having the same issue however I do not have them in front of me to get you file sizes.
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My thoughts about file-size are that, if you like me, use an old project (“Save as”) with all elements in, to create a new project with. There may be a sizeable amount of data involved, such as Adobe transcriptions and other elements. My projects are basically short-form or just interviews, so not a lot of extra data involved. But have in the past worked on projects where the project itself was 60+ MB.
Just thinking out loud.
Atb
Mads -
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.
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Perhaps this is a CODEC issue? I would try to figure out which timeline items may have originated from cell phones, if any, or similar devices that record in Long GOP (long group of pictures) and export those out first as Apple ProRes 4:4:4 16–bit. Then use those ProRes files on the timeline instead of the Long GOP versions. That would substantially speed things up. But if that is not possible, for whatever reason, please know the issue is probably not your hardware; it’s more than likely CODECS that need to be modified for timeline playback.
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