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Single Adobe Premiere Project Unusably Slow
I’m working on a large 12 hour project that is being broken down into 2 hour sections. I’ve been editing this project for literally the last 2 years without any major problems but most of the projects have been less than 1 hour.
Last night I started combining sequences into 1 larger 2 hour sequence and everything worked smoothly. BUT today I woke up and tried to work on the same project (I didn’t close it the night before) and it is unusably slow now. I will click play and it takes a minimum of 30 seconds to start playing. Sometimes it takes over 3 minutes to begin playing. Adobe Premiere itself does not appear to be slow because I can add effects or change titles instantly with out lag. It seems like Premiere is struggling to access the video files but it has never taken more than 1 second to begin playing in the past.
The only thing that I did last night before going to bed was I swapped out a few jpg files that are in the video in the working folder (I didn’t actually make this change in premiere because the file names are the same).
I restarted premiere and my computer and it didn’t help. I rendered the full work area and it didn’t help. I moved the whole project to another internal harddrive and opened it from that drive and it didn’t help.
I’ve got a decent computer with mercury playback enabled and like I said, I’ve been editing this exact footage for years without any speed problems. I can also open other projects and they work fine as well. Something seems to be wrong with just this project.I’m using an updated CS6 Any ideas?
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7 Replies
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Lee,
If sounds like you have a HUGE project with probably thousands of clip instances. One key thing you did not mention is how much RAM there is in your system. This is the single biggest factor when dealing with large projects. If you have 12 hours of raw footage (likely much more) in thousands of clips, if you say anything less than 32GB, that’s probably your problem.
The other thing is to organize your 12 hours into one hour chunks with all of the media moved to those locations. Twelve one hour projects (with appropriately smaller amounts of media) while maybe more difficult to manage, will be easier on your system than one 12 hour long edit.
Dennis
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RAM may be an issue because I recently had a stick go bad and I’ve only got 8gb at the moment. I did fix the problem though. Apparently the new jpgs that I added were the same pixel depth but much larger in size (from 5mb up to 25mb). When I resaved them smaller, premiere started working again. This is the second time I’ve had issues with premiere that led back to large jpg still images being the problem. Very strange that premiere can handle massive hd videos but still images are too much for it.
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Good to hear Lee. I would encourage you still to invest in more RAM.
I also have fixed memory issues by making super large jpgs smaller. The reason for this is because each still takes up RAM to have instant access. When you have dozens or hundreds of stills the RAM gets eaten up.
If you’re not doing pan and scan, consider using a Macro in Photoshop to batch process all of your stills into 1920xwhatever to make your editing easier.
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Sadly it’s a photography based video so I am panning, scanning, and zooming into 100% on each 36mp image. I have more RAM on the way to my house now.
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As Dennis mentions, large still images will bring just about any NLE to a crawl because it completely eats up the RAM. Huge video files are easy because they just stream off your media array.
One thing you also mentioned was you left your computer running with Premiere Pro still loaded all night. When working with a big project, best to quit out of the app each evening and we always shut them down and re-start them in the morning. A clean boot up each morning seems to give us the best performance during the day. We work with documentaries that sometimes have hundreds of hours of footage and it’s amazing what a clean boot each morning can do to make the edit go better.
Good luck!
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Well apparently Premiere has some glitch that doesn’t allow audio effects to save if you have synced your clips using Plural Eyes (because the sequence came from an XML file). Long story but basically I can’t close the project once I’ve started adding effects to the audio tracks or I will lose them all. I hope they fix this soon.
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Wow, that’s terrible. Glad we don’t use PluralEyes here…..
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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