This is also posted in the After Effects Forum, but I thought I'd put this up in the Premiere forum too, as a lot of my problems have to do with linked After Effects Compositions inside a Premiere timeline. Original post below:
Hi all, I apologize in advance about how long/dense this post is going to be. This probably should be threeish posts in one.
I’m a senior in high school (take that as you will), and have been editing in Premiere for almost four years now. I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere near an expert with any of the Adobe applications, but I’ve done enough video editing, effects work, and sleuthing around forums to say that I know how to use Premiere and After Effects at a pretty confident level, and am fairly knowledgeable.
I recently upgraded from a mid-2015 11inch Macbook Air, 4gb of ram (it’s what I had from school), to a custom PC Build. The PC is running the following:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 6-core CPU (w/ stock Wraith Cooler), boosting to 3.80 GHz with no throttling
Gigabyte Aorus B450 Pro Wifi Motherboard
16GB Corsair Vengence LPX 3000 MHz (running at said 3000 MHz)
Asus GTX 1070 Dual OC, 8gb Vram
Samsung 850 Evo SSD
WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm HDD
The most recent version of Windows 10
I’m also running the most recent 2019 CC Updates for all my Adobe applications.
I’m having some problems, some of which may be normal, and some could easily be me expecting too much of a new computer. (I also know that Adobe works loads better with Intel chips, but I got an amazing deal on the Ryzen chip.) I've been hunting around the Adobe Help Forums and r/editors and r/premiere for a while now with little to no luck, so I thought I'd finally ask for some help.
EDIT: Yes, this PC build wasn't built specifically for editing. My brother was the one paying for most of it and was steering more towards gaming, so I tried to find a good middle ground for both our needs (and either way, anything is an improvement to the MacBook Air). I'm starting to wonder if this parts selection is not ideal.
Issues are as follows:
First, a couple more minor things:
After Effects chugs after a few minutes doing rotoscoping with Roto Brush and Refine Edge. Probably has to do with caching all the different frames as they're rotoscoped.
After Effects takes ups insane amounts of ram (although, it is After Effects), and becomes very slow to cache when things get somewhat effect heavy. I’m consistently hitting upper 95+% of RAM usage.
Premiere also pushes the system to the upper 90%’s of RAM usage, but more below.
More pressing issues:
I have zero GPU Utilization in Premiere, Media Encoder, or After Effects. The GPU is not being used to accelerate anything at all. I’m on the most recent NVIDIA drivers, have CUDA acceleration enabled in everything, and the most I’ve seen it pushed was a brief spike to 7% when opening Premiere. Usage in AE is less. I know that GPU acceleration doesn’t work for everything, but I feel like I should be seeing more use out of the GPU.
The other main issue is that when I open up my project file, an After Effects process starts hogging up RAM. The process takes up 10+ GB’s of RAM, plus Premiere itself takes 4 or 5, on top of whatever Windows does in the background. I’m hitting 97-99% RAM Utilization when trying to render previews in the timeline, and near that when just idling on the timeline sometimes. This likely has something to do with the fact that I have several linked After Effects Compositions, but it still boggles my mind. Those linked comps also get stuck as “Media Pending” for between 5-20 minutes. Also, more often than not, closing Premiere doesn’t kill the After Effects process that opens up, and so it keeps hammering the CPU and hogging 8-10 Gbs of RAM with both Premiere and After Effects closed. I have to kill those processes manually or restart the computer. Premiere also has issues closing and will stop responding, sometimes leaving its own processes running after it’s been quit for me to kill in task manager later.
Sluggish timeline performance in Premiere was generally sped up after clearing out cache files. I can't play back linked After Effects Comps on the timeline in Premiere, toggling proxies doesn’t help (which makes sense), and I only managed to successfully Render and Replace an After Effects Comp once before Premiere crashed (I only got it to work that one time by killing the After Effects task I mentioned earlier, a trick that sadly no longer works.) Rendering and Replacing now either crashes Premiere or appears as if it is going to take too much time for me to risk being locked out of my timeline.
I would encode or export the compositions inside After Effects or Media Encoder, but I can’t, because it’s going to take 20+ hours to export a 10-second comp in ProRes 422. Also, rendering preview files of those linked compositions in Premiere isn’t an option either, because that too is looking like it’s going to take over 20 hours. I know to not fully trust the estimated time number in any Adobe app, but at the rate these exports/renders have been moving, and from personal experience, I’d believe it. I feel like this level of performance is not what I should be expecting to see from my system (but I also think I could be asking for miracles).
It’s getting to the point where it’s almost impossible to get any work done, and I have a deadline coming up. This whole debacle has also affected the overall performance of my computer, slowing it down a ton earlier today after I restarted due to After Effects crashing (speed and boot time issues were fixed after restarting 5+ times due to some of the other previously mentioned issues). From what I've been seeing, it feels like these problems have to with the apps themselves, and not Windows stability.
I should note that I shot the project on a Canon t7i, 24fps, h.264 (dunno the bitrate of the top of my head) w/ I think IPB compression? The linked After Effects comps include some simple ones that are just masking and/or roto and layering footage, as well some that have roto, two layers of Echo, two layers of AE Pixel Sorter (3rd party plug-in), as well as some layers of footage (effect plate, clean plate, etc.). The video as a whole is looking like it's gonna sit at about 4 minutes, with nearly two minutes of effects shots.
I have a feeling that encoding all of my original footage to ProRes, Cineform or something less compressed would help with performance and render times, but I have no idea how long that would take given the current performance of the system (I should note though, it rendered something like 50 1024x540p ProRes 422 proxies in what felt like 2 minutes a few days ago, but those are very low resolution. It also handled h.264 proxies of the same resolution fine). I also don’t want to completely uproot all of my project files figuring out how to replace/link newly encoded footage. If it will help, I’m willing to uninstall and reinstall apps, but I’m not sure if that would help.
Anyone know any way to help? If people want pictures or more info, or me to break down the issues individually, just ask. Do know it may be a bit before I can respond. Sorry it's such a bear of a post, and I hope I wasn't overly specific. I know these types of posts can be very vague sometimes, and I wanted to avoid that.