16 Can't-Miss Tricks and Tips to Improve Performance in Premiere

Part 1: Optimize the General Settings of Premiere before Loading Projects

Before you create any new project or open recent project files, take notice of the below 4 basic but important settings. And they are all in the general setting panel. To get there, click Edit > Preference

1. Set a Low Latency

Click Audio Hardware and find Latency
Set a lower latency if you don’t want to have any weird audio lag issue

2. Media Cache Database

Never save media cache to your C disk, hard drives with low RAM like 1GB or external drive as they may slow down the process. The right way is to choose a dedicate file as the location of the media cache database. They should be the fastest drive of your computer or the robust SSD disk.

3. Clean Unused Cache

You need to delete the unused cache frequently to set your memory free from piles off unused caches.

Tips: There are times that Premiere Pre starts to handle some certain files slowly after updating. And 80% of the cases are that the update of Adobe Premiere damages the metadata of the footage. You can fix the error by deleting the media cache in this way, renaming the project, or coping with the project file to some other place of your drive.

4. Memory

Click Memory and find RAM reserved for other applications. Here I assign it to1.5GB. Allocating lower RAM helps improve the rendering performance of premiere as more RAM space will be given to Premiere.

5. Playback

Click Playback and uncheck Enable Mercury Transmit

If you don't need to redirect the outcome to external monitors or outboard hardware, there is no necessity to enable it to bring additional pressure to Premiere.

Part 2: The preview of HD or 4K videos is Extremely Slowly? Pre-render Project or Play it at a Lower Resolution

As long as you have finished all the settings in general performance and enabled the GPU acceleration, now you can import your project. To get avoid a stutter playback experience on the timeline, you can pre-render your video project or play it at a ¼ or ½ resolution. Here are the steps:

6. Prerender your video project

Your clip is rendered if the timeline it refers to is in green. This is great for editing 4K videos or adding special effects. Premiere often response slow when processing un-rendered high-resolution footages and adding too many effects. When you pre-render the footage, new video files called "Premiere Pro Video Previews" will be created, then you can enjoy a smooth playback experience.

1) Mark the in and out point at the start of the selected area by hit the bracket icon under the preview monitor.

2) Click Sequence > Render Effect to Cut

Now Premiere starts to render the clip. Once the yellow bar on top of the selection of marked in and out turns to green, it means that clip has been well rendered and you can play at full quality without lag.

Note: every time you add a new effect, the bar will be back in red or yellow. This means you have to redo the pre-rendering process.

7. Play video clips at a low resolution

After dragging the video to the timeline, go to the lower right of the video preview window and find the options for the playback resolution, turn the value from full to ½, ¼ or lower By doing this, Premiere can play the video at a low resolution and reduces many lag issues without reducing the quality of your real video. Sadly, this tip does work all times, especially when you do it with a working project. Now, what if your playback still slow? To clear up your timeline and follow my steps to create a proxy for fast editing large videos.

Part 3: Create a Proxy to Edit Large Videos Fast Like Processing Common Videos

The recent versions of Premiere allow you to create proxy videos to edit large footage. To put it simply, it allows you to create a substitute file with a lower resolution than the source video. So your computer can edit footages at fast speed. When export, apply all editing decisions to the raw material.

Note: The same version of Adobe Media Coder has to be installed on your PC with Adobe Premiere Pro. Or you won't be able to create a proxy.There are mainly two ways to create proxies.

8. Use proxy for the whole project

The step should start before you importing any media to Premiere.

1) Click File > New Project and go to Ingest Settings.

2) Select create proxies and choose a preset that matches the aspect ratio or the source media.

Note:

• Make sure you choose the proper aspect ratio or there may be black bars around your video.
• CineForm and ProRes are editing friendly formats, so you are advised to choose them as the preset formats.
• H.264, as an intraframe compressed codec format with long GOP, is friendly for storage space and data transfer, but absolutely unfriendly for editing. Don’t choose it as the proxy format there.

3) Hit Okay, then Click File > Import Media and select the source media to the Media Brower Panel, or you can drag and drop the source media from your disk to the media browser panel directly.

4) Drag the video clips to the timeline.

Make sure the option of Ingest is checked. Then Adobe Media Coder is going to transcoding these files frame by frame in the background.

9. Create Proxies Video for Some Specified Clips

Some high-resolution clips in a video need to utilize a proxy to edit while others don’t need it. Right-click the high-resolution material in the project window, and then click Proxy > Create Proxy.

In the Create Proxies Panel:

• Set the preset resolution to SD or HD.
• Select CineForm or ProRes as the proxy presets.
• The aspect ratio has to be the same with raw material
• Timebase, 23.976 frames per second

After all the settings, Adobe Media can start to encode your file.

Not sure whether you are working with proxies? You can check the color of the swift icon under the program monitor window. It should be highlighted blue under proxy mode. When it turned off, then proxy turned off.

Note: toggle off the swift icon to close up proxy for exporting high-quality outcome.

Didn't find the switching icon? Click the add icon under the program monitor. Find the switching icon, then click and drag it to be in the line.

Part 4: Bonus tips to optimize editing or exporting speed.

10. Collapse Multi Video Tracks into One

Multi-video tracks on the timeline help you to better organize your element, but they can also slow down the export speed for some unknown reasons. Therefore you are advised to collapse some of them as one when necessary.

11. Stop Premiere Re-Rendering your Video Projects When Exporting

When you add many effects to a video via Premiere, chances are that the output speed turns to be extremely slow. That’s because premiere pro will re-render your footages when exporting files. Therefore, stop your video from being re-rendering can fast up the exporting process. Before we move to the detail steps, what is worth to mention is that this trick doesn't work under a proxy editing mode.

1) Go to File > Export > Media, manage export settings such as format, file name, and file location, then hit Export.

2) You can choose to export only audio or video using the checkbox. The export codec, size and bite rate should be the same as the source.

• Right-click your clip on the timeline and then click sequence settings, then the sequence setting panel will pop up.
• Set editing mode to custom.
• Change the format of the preview into Avid DNC or ProsPres
• After making all the editing decisions, click File > Export to check Use Preview
• In that way, premiere pro will not render your effects again

12. Constant Bitrate Makes Your Life Easier

If you need a fast export and careless in output quality, you can choose a constant bit rate and select a lower bitrate. I personally not recommend this way as it gives many sacrifices to quality.

1) Click File > Export and find the Bitrate Settings segment.

2) Select a constant bite rate for Bitrate Encoding. Set the Target Bitrate to a lower value if it is high.

Part 5: Premiere Not Using GPU Acceleration to Render or Export? [Culprit for Slow Performance] Utilize VideoProc to Test your GPU and Hardware Acceleration Inofmration and MoreOne Click to Detect

Transcoding should be a very helpful method. If you have Adobe Media Encoder, you can use it to conduct video conversion. If you don't have that tool or can't manage to convert problematic MOV files to desired format with Media Encoder, you might as well try an easier-to-use yet powerful video converter - VideoProc. It is able to work with various MOV files, no matter what codecs are wrapped in and no matter what devices record.

13. Enable the GPU Acceleration with Proper Settings

Now, let's download and install VideoProc on our PC or Mac computer.

Take my detected result for example. My computer is built with AMD Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics. This is a poor built PC for editing videos. Luckily, my system supports hardware acceleration of H.264 and HEVC videos. If the icon of Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD all displayed in gray, then your computer can't get benefits of hardware acceleration.

Don't forget to enable the GPU acceleration properly, you need to:

2) Enter the Renderer setting panel

Click File > Project Settings to check your renderer setting

3) Select Mercury playback engine GPU acceleration (OpenCL or CUDA).There are 3 modes for you to choose：

• Mercury playback engine GPU acceleration OpenCL - accelerated by Intel core GPU/AMD card users (Adobe has discontinued OpenCL support for NVIDIA GPUs in Premiere Pro)
• Mercury playback engine GPU acceleration CUDA - accelerated by for NVIDIA card
• Mercury playback engine GPU acceleration Software only- accelerated by render only by software

Could you find OpenCL, CUDA, or both? I'm using an AMD card, so I need to select Mercury playback engine GPU acceleration Open CL. If VideoProc can detect the Graphics cards, but the related acceleration mode is gray out, you should update the card driver. To take NVIDIA card users, for example, the latest version of Premiere Pro requires the latest version of Intel graphics driver as Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 has qualified Intel driver version 100.6286 as a baseline to avoid any stability and performance issues.

When updating your drive, there are another 4 tips you should know:

14. Install the Graphics Driver Manually

Though you can install a new graphics driver over the top of the old one, you should remove the present driver on your computer anyway. Otherwise, your computer or premiere may fail to detect your GPU. Another suggestion is that you should download the driver install package manually from the official website instead of downloading the new driver from the windows update.

15. The lags happen rhythmically? Roll Back the Driver

A headache problem for some NVIDIA users is that the Premiere turns to response slowly after updating both program and graphics drive. There isn't a one-fit all solution for this issue, but you may watch the lag state. Suppose the lags happen rhythmically and freeze can be found everywhere from getting the preview to hitting menu, you should install the older version of the graphic driver. This error is reported caused by some unknown incompatible problems or drives bugs for version 100.6286 and above.

16. A Larger VRAM Space Always Wins

Don't know how to check VRAM information? Enter Display Settings in the Windows 10 search bar, and then click on the first result. Find Advanced Display Settings in the display pages (they are highlighted in blue) and hit it. Click Display adapter properties on the bottom of the page, the value of the Dedicated Video Memory is the VRAM information you are looking for. The VRAM of your GPU should be larger than 4GB. Or Premiere may fail to utilize GPU acceleration, even though both PC and Premiere can recognize the cards.

Final Words:

Adobe Premiere, like other products of Adobe series, is buggy as hell. Slow performance is one of its most notorious features. The tricks and tips covered in this post are tested useful to make the video editing process faster, which is great for editors and pro users. Supposed you are just an occasional user who needs to do some basic editing for your clips, we highly recommend you to choose some easier video editor as an alternative of Premiere. Shotcut, Avidemux and the once mentioned VideoProc are all quick editing programs. They don't cost a dime to try it out. Better yet, VideoProc can cut, trim, split and merge any video you throw at it including 4K videos in one click. You can also utilize it to deshake, denoise, add subtitles, or watermark for your videos. So don’t hesitate and give it a try.

1. Download VideoProc on Windows
2. Download VideoProc on mac