PPro CC – zooming out of a timeline kills performance, CPU load skyrockets

[Andrew Kimery]

Rendering the audio didn’t help, playing with the Audio Hardware settings didn’t help, and the audio settings between sources and sequences is consistent.

But, one weird thing did happen. As I mentioned previously, I’m jumping between two machines (same media on both and both machines exhibiting the same slowness) and I took a current cut from Machine A and opened it up on Machine B and all of a sudden it wasn’t running slow anymore. When I opened up an older version of the same cut on Machine B it exhibited the slowness. Same project, just two different sequences.

I’m cleaned the media cache, trashed the preview files and made sure everything is on the fast external RAID and not accidentally on the system drive. Somethings amiss but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

[Andrew Kimery]

Update for anyone still reading this.

I created a new project, imported a ‘slow’ sequence from an existing project into the new project and everything plays back splendidly in the new project. I then created another new project and imported all of an existing project (that contained slow sequences) into the new project. The slow sequences were still slow.

Going back to my original project, I deleted all of my old cuts (8 or 9 sequences) and things sped up considerably so the problem seems to be some sort of bogging down within the project itself.

[Tim Kolb]

So…it seems to get better with fewer sequences in the project?

Are any of the sequences nested? …or are you just versioning?

Sequence settings are all the same I assume?

Interesting issue. (Frustrating when it’s yours of course…I’m just interested in knowing more about it.)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tim Kolb] “So…it seems to get better with fewer sequences in the project?

Are any of the sequences nested? …or are you just versioning?

The only nesting going is just from the multicam source sequences, I’m just versioning by duplicating my sequence (so all settings are the same) and it only gets better if I get rid of my old cuts/versions. If I get rid of other sequences (ex. selects reels, broll string outs, etc.,) that does improve performance (and some of those other sequences are very long).

I wondered if my versioning via duplicating was causing the problem so I tried versioning by creating new sequences then copy and pasting my cut from the original sequence to the new sequence but that resulted in slowdowns as well. The only option seems to be not to let my old cuts build up in the project.

It’s almost like each instance of a mulitcam source sequence that exists in a timeline (even if that timeline is closed) causes additional overhead somehow.

Interesting issue. (Frustrating when it’s yours of course…I’m just interested in knowing more about it.)”

Yeah, the sluggishness was getting maddening, but I’m just glad the work around is pretty straight forward.