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Premiere unusable whilst creating Proxies
Hi,
This might be for an apple/macbook pro forum, but basically I bought a new Macbook Pro a month ago, 2018, 16gb ram, 2.6ghz i7, Radeon Pro 560X 4096 MB Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB, 514 ssd. I’m editing from a LAcie rugged using a USB-c connection (One thing I noticed: I did a speed test and it came up as a read of 30mbps which seems mega slow?)
Anyway, I have 4k footage, shot on a sony ar7ii, creating proxies to cut with. It feels like it should be a simple task to transcode proxies in the background (I’m even using davinci for this to free up premiere) and be able to edit the footage I already have transcoded. But no, PP is so slow it’s not possible to edit on whilst this is happening. It seems absolutely crazy to spend almost $3000 on a new computer but essentially it can’t perform a simple function like this.
Are there settings in PP I’m missing here to make things faster? Is it the Hard drive? Is it my new MBP (Should I take it back and get an iMac)? Any help would be much appreciated as I’m tearing my hair out trying to understand what the problem is,
Thanks.
If you aren’t willing to change you shouldn’t be editing” – Richard Marks
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7 Replies
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Transcoding or creating proxies might seem like a simple computer task to you, but to your computer it’s far from simple, requiring lots of computational and processing power, and lots of hard drive throughout, so you’re doing double duty with your processors and hard drives, have the minimum amount of RAM installed, a single hard drive ( no raid), and yet you’re expecting to be able to do everything at once. Simply stated, your expectations are way too high.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I had Premiere slow to a crawl on a Mac Pro transcoding (in Media Encoder) in the background. After some experimentation, I determined the graphics card was being overloaded. In Media Encoder, I selected Mercury Engine Software Only instead of Open CL. The encodes went a bit slower, but now Premiere was fully functional again.
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Make sure “PPro –> Preferences –> Playback –> “Pause Media Encoder queue during playback” is checked.
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Open up your activity monitor while encoding one of your proxy files and you’ll see that the encoding process takes up nearly 100% of your CPU’s power and much of your GPU power as well.
If you’re going to be using the proxy workflow, plan ahead and batch create proxies overnight. Also, temper your expectations since you’re on a laptop and you’re working with 4k media from a single spinning drive. Premiere works optimally when you have a dedicated cache/render drive separate from your OS drive and a fast raid for media.
Windows 10 Pro | i7-5820k CPU | 64 gigs RAM | NvidiaGeForceGTX970 | Blackmagic Decklink 4k Mini Monitor |
Adobe CC 2018 12.1.2 | Renders/cache: Samsung SSD 950 Pro x2 in Raid 0 | Media: Samsung SSD 960 PRO PCIe NVMe M.2 2280 x 2 | Media: OWC Thunderbay 4 x 2 Raid 0 mirrored with Resilio -
I do appreciate this, I spent the last 18 months working on a feature doc shot in old fashioned 1080p so perhaps I’m a little behind the times with how 4k works and the amount of power needed.
I would just say however that it seems like a huge amount of extra expenditure for a process (transcoding rushes in the background) that I used to be able to do incredibly simply with high quality 1080 material in a relatively inexpensive mbp machine.If you aren’t willing to change you shouldn’t be editing” – Richard Marks
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Thanks for all these replies, they’ve been really helpful.
I did weigh up getting the mbp v an imac and I’m reconsidering my purchase now!If you aren’t willing to change you shouldn’t be editing” – Richard Marks
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For $3000 you should have gone the Windows route with i7 CPU and 32Gb of ram. Converting A7 compressed files to an editable format is a heavy-duty task for any CPU.
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