Premiere Pro CC and 4k h264 not getting along at all

[Jim Roof]

I have copied some 4K 60fps clips onto a local hard drive to edit in the very latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro and the playback issues I am encountering are making editing impossible.

My machine is an Intel i7. Video card is Nvidia 1060 6gb version. 64 gigs of RAM. Windows 10 Pro 64 OS.

The videos play back in full resolution PERFECTLY at 60FPS with KMP Player. VLC chokes badly on them. PotPlayer does OK. KMP is the only player I have installed that has perfect playback. WMP does fairly well too.

So, I know my computer is capable of 4k at 60fps playback.

But, importing clips into Premiere CC (very latest update) and placing on the timeline, the clip will play at 60 fps for about 1 second, then it stutters at about 4 frames per second for roughly 5 seconds, then finally gets so slow that the frame updates about ONCE every 3 seconds.

I have read many threads on this, so let me also say this...

It does not matter what size preview I select. I can select 10% and look at a highly pixelized playback and..., the exact same thing happens. Premiere Pro CC appears to be unable to handle these files.

I have chosen every option I can see relating to hardware video acceleration in Preferences and in Project Settings. Nothing helps this.

Any ideas if this is just the way it is or if there is a REAL fix. So far, no thread that I have found anywhere seems to have revealed anything that actually helps the issue despite the confidence of those giving the advice.

 

[Don Barar]

HI Jim,

I also use Premier Pro CC to process 4k 60 FPS to process on my 2016 MBP15. Your experience is similar to mine. To process these clips in Premier Pro I need to create proxies and use this to edit.

Don Barar

 

[smiller]

You can try reducing resolution in the preview window to 1/2 and that will help a lot, but may not completely cure the issue. Even with an i7-6700, GTX 1070 graphics, and 32 GB of RAM I can still have stuttering issues in the preview window. The answer is proxies, and if set up properly they are almost completely transparent in operation (one click to go back and forth between proxies and originals.)

 

[Jim Roof]

You can try reducing resolution in the preview window to 1/2 and that will help a lot

As I stated in the opening post, that does nothing at all. I can put it to 10% preview resolution and there is NO playback improvement.

 

[smiller]

As I stated in the opening post, that does nothing at all. I can put it to 10% preview resolution and there is NO playback improvement.

Misread that, sorry, but no improvement even at severe resolution reductions would be unusual and hint that there might be some other problem going on, however regardless you're probably not going to get smooth playback on native 4K 100 mbps files no matter what you do.

 

[Techcop50]

Jim, have you tried the proxy route?

 

[AerialZ]

I would definitely recommend using proxies. It is the compression on our file wrappers that is causing the issues. I work regularly with 4K files from a host of different cameras and the P4P is the only that causes slowdowns if I'm just copying over the original during import. I believe DJI still has some work to do on the 264 and 265 codecs with the increased bit rates. The issue is much more pronounced than my P3P ever was at 60 Mbps.

 

[Jim Roof]

Jim, have you tried the proxy route?

Not yet. I am going to see what happens if I convert to ProRes. My son says he thinks that will significantly improve things.

 

[smiller]

Not yet. I am going to see what happens if I convert to ProRes. My son says he thinks that will significantly improve things.

That's what I tried first but in my experience while converting to ProRes helped a lot it didn't completely cure the problem, plus full-res ProRes files are huge. Proxies really are a better solution.

 

[AerialZ]

plus full-res ProRes files are huge. Proxies really are a better solution.

Agreed. That's why I didn't even mention it. It's not worth the hassle of the metric-***-ton file sizes when there is a simpler solution in proxies.

 

[JarrodF]

Even though the Prores file sizes are way bigger than H.264, I would definitely suggest doing that conversion if you're going to do any significant editing to your footage. I typically run mine through daVinci Resolve, do a little color correction there and then export Prores422 files. They cut like butter in FCPX and should in PP as well.

 

[smiller]

But there's no reason to have to deal with the huge filesizes of hi-res ProRes, proxies work just as well and are very easy to use. Also no transcoding loss since the final output is built from the original camera footage (that may be more of a theoretical benefit than real, but FWIW.)

If you prefer to do color grading on the original files and editing with the proxies all it takes is one click to move back and forth within the PP environment.

 

[JarrodF]

Not even a theoretical benefit. Technically there is no loss in converting from H.264 to Prores 422. You're going from a long GOP to inter frame codec of the same or higher bit rate and color gamut. Feel free to Google it or read the honorable Vincent Laforet's blog from a while back. Converting that H.264 footage… « Vincent Laforet's Blog

 

[smiller]

Not even a theoretical benefit. Technically there is no loss in converting from H.264 to Prores 422. You're going from a long GOP to inter frame codec of the same or higher bit rate and color gamut. Feel free to Google it or read the honorable Vincent Laforet's blog from a while back. Converting that H.264 footage… « Vincent Laforet's Blog

No, technically there has to be some loss during transcoding regardless of how good the intermediate file format may be. But in reality the loss is probably so small as to be insignificant.

 

[JarrodF]

Okay. Apple describes ProRes as "visually" loss-less. That means that while data is being removed during compression, the resulting images do not suffer from image degradation. It is technically recompressing the images but by putting them in a 10bit container you are much better set up for editing and color correction. It's not like the old days where we had to be careful not to recompress between lossy formats because it would introduce artifacts.

 

[KevMo Photog]

I tried ProRes months ago Jim. It helped some but did not fix totally. Same exact issue here as you have with almost same exact machine too. You have to use proxies man. It has solved all of my problems totally. And the playback on most of them is pretty darn clear too! I've been using one of the Go Pro proxy files I think.

 

[smiller]

I use ProRes 422 Proxy at same resolution as original, works well, reasonable file sizes.

 

[Richard Walker]

Would someone briefly describe how to use proxies in PP please.

 

[KevMo Photog]

Would someone briefly describe how to use proxies in PP please.

I would def just youtube how to set up proxies in PP. But basically its hitting the ingest button with your project settings window open. And it lets you choose one of them. There are 20-30 choices of proxies to use. Try several and see which one you like the best. I have been using one that is called Go Pro something I think. It works great. All of these proxy files are a lot smaller more compressed files that will play super quick to let you edit by.Then in your sequence play window you have to click a button to add a feature. Which is your proxy that your wanting to add. Then you click one more button to turn proxy file on or off. Youtube will show you really quick how to do this. Sorry I can't explain better. But once you do this you are running with fire man! Fast forward or rewind in lightning speed!

 

[smiller]

Would someone briefly describe how to use proxies in PP please.

This is not the sort of thing that can be described adequately in a short post. Google will reveal several good video tutorials.