Impossible to edit 4k@30fps in Premiere Pro CS6

[Retrograde]

Hey everyone!

Maybe a few of you have experienced that working with 4k video shot on the Mavic can be a headache and I was hoping you could offer me some insight;

I'm trying to work with some awesome video I took today with my new Mavic Pro (what a machine) and I've discovered (I'm new to editing in 4K) that previewing/scrubbing through the clips in Premiere Pro CS6 is super choppy and is pretty much impossible to work with - all whilst my CPU stays at super low load.

I should note that simply playing the .mov files in VLC is perfect and smooth as butter.

My computer is fairly powerful;

• MSI x99 Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard
• Overclocked i7-6850k (6 cores, 12 threads)
• GTX 1080
• 32gb 3200mhz DDR4
• 512gb Samsung m.2 Pro SSD (Where this footage resides)
• 3x 500gb Samsung Pro SATA SSD

After an exhausting few hours of research on this issue, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated because from what I can tell, my version of Premiere Pro (CS6) appears not to have proxy or ingest options built in, so I don't think it's a viable solution for my issue unless someone can hopefully prove otherwise.

Alternatively, I was wondering about how I would go about transcoding these .mov files to cineform and if that would help? I've read in a few places that this can be a solution.

Any tips or suggestions would be massively appreciated. I'm quite new (but very enthusiastic to start) editing in 4k. Is there something simple here that I'm missing?

Thanks for reading

 

[Plawa]

Make sure you have HW acceleration enabled in New Project settings, with those specs it must run perfectly smooth...

 

[Kilrah]

CS6 is 6 years old now, if 4K was supported in it it was very initial and unoptimized. It's probably also still going through QuickTime for MOV files, which is even more of a deprecated dinosaur. Might want to try making MP4 files.

You can also try to do the opposite of what Plawa says above, set to CPU only which might work better than GPU-accelerated on a GPU that's generations newer than what that version of the program knows about. That should get your CPU going a bit more.

 

[Retrograde]

Make sure you have HW acceleration enabled in New Project settings, with those specs it must run perfectly smooth...

You would certainly think so!

So upon checking your suggestion, my CS6 actually conveniently doesn't even give me an option to change this:

(Yay, another can of worms to google)

CS6 is 6 years old now, if 4K was supported in it it was very initial and unoptimized. It's probably also still going through QuickTime for MOV files, which is even more of a deprecated dinosaur. Might want to try making MP4 files.

You can also try to do the opposite of what Plawa says above, set to CPU only which might work better than GPU-accelerated on a GPU that's generations newer than what that version of the program knows about. That should get your CPU going a bit more.

Yeah it's becoming more obvious that CS6 isn't cut out for 4k footage.. I just am so accustomed to CS6 and I really would prefer not to hop on to Adobe's subscription method primarily because I can't afford it.

How do you change the Mavic to output mp4 instead of mov? You would think it would do that by default..

Just as a test, I shot a sample clip just now from a 4k Sony camera and tried it in a new premiere project (Mp4 format) and it scrubs and previews smooth as butter.. So that says something, right?

 

[Plawa]

You would certainly think so!

So upon checking your suggestion, my CS6 actually conveniently doesn't even give me an option to change this:

(Yay, another can of worms to google)



Yeah it's becoming more obvious that CS6 isn't cut out for 4k footage.. I just am so accustomed to CS6 and I really would prefer not to hop on to Adobe's subscription method primarily because I can't afford it.

How do you change the Mavic to output mp4 instead of mov? You would think it would do that by default..

Just as a test, I shot a sample clip just now from a 4k Sony camera and tried it in a new premiere project (Mp4 format) and it scrubs and previews smooth as butter.. So that says something, right?

Video format in the app in camera settings.. change that to mp4, see if you can figure out why CUDA isn't enabled and you should be golden

 

[Kilrah]

Yup, could be the file container/quicktime thing, the MOV/MP4 choice is in the Mavic camera settings.

About the GPU acceleration if I remember well at that time there was an exhaustive whitelist of supported cards, could have been only Quadros and obviously it wouldn't include current models it doesn't know about. There was a trick to edit a file and add your card's identifier and have it enabled, a bit of googling should find that again.

 

[Retrograde]

Video format in the app in camera settings.. change that to mp4, see if you can figure out why CUDA isn't enabled and you should be golden

Yup, could be the file container/quicktime thing, the MOV/MP4 choice is in the Mavic camera settings.

About the GPU acceleration if I remember well at that time there was an exhaustive whitelist of supported cards, could have been only Quadros and obviously it wouldn't include current models it doesn't know about. There was a trick to edit a file and add your card's identifier and have it enabled, a bit of googling should find that again.

I'm going to find out if the .mov format is what's giving me trouble by changing the Mavic output to .mp4 then recording a test clip and importing it. Something tells me this should do the trick. If not, I'll check out that whitelist file - thanks for the heads up.

It would just kind of suck now that this is the issue because I spent all day today filming some really cool shots. Maybe I could convert these existing .mov files to .mp4..

Also, thanks for all the help so far lads. I couldn't even get access to DJI's forum due to a ridiculously annoying error on their website and people on the Adobe forum don't seem to really care. So far, this forum rocks.

 

[Retrograde]

So here's an update, tried a mp4 recording and I'm still getting the super choppy previews.

I tried adding my GTX 1080 to the CUDA whitelist and it completely broke Premiere and it looks like I'm going to have to reinstall.

I just can't win tonight..

 

[4wd]

Davinci Resolve might be worth trying.
Premiere can be infuriating at not utilising resources available, but your machine is more than good enough to do live RAM preview even after some simple edits.(but not with NR most likely)

I shot a sample clip just now from a 4k Sony camera and tried it in a new premiere project (Mp4 format) and it scrubs and previews smooth as butter..

Don't really understand this though, there's nothing unusual about Mavic video files should cause this.

 

[Lake_Flyer]

Davinci Resolve might be worth trying.
Premiere can be infuriating at not utilising resources available, but your machine is more than good enough to do live RAM preview even after some simple edits.(but not with NR most likely)


Don't really understand this though, there's nothing unusual about Mavic video files should cause this.

Agreed!

@ the OP:
Resolve is the best bang for the buck. Zero cost. Unless you want the Pro version which adds some extra pro features most of us won't need, and even then it's still a good deal at 299$. With your PC specs, Resolve will run buttery smooth. And you get the finest colouring tools in the industry. But also very sophisticated motion tracking and stabilisation.

And you can get rid of Adobe license checking stuff going on in the background. Resolve is humble and honest. No nagging about licenses and no spam in the mail, no 'helpers' secretly installed etc.
I love it. Coming from Adobe you might be surprised how well thought out and logic the user interface is and how quickly you know your way around in the program.

 

[Kilrah]

Don't really understand this though, there's nothing unusual about Mavic video files should cause this.

He might have used XAVC(S) footage which is less of a pain for editors to process.

 

[davemorts]

Pinnacle Studio 21 ultimate is a cheap alternative and has no problem working with my mavic air 4k footage.
You can purchase it for less than £100.

 

[gjhick]

You can work with proxies in CS6. Here’s one approach:

- create a folder for your proxies next to the folder containing original footages and name it e.g. AVCHD.Proxies;

- transcode your MTS files into MPEG2 ones with the same file names and MTS file extention (or run Batch Rename in Bridge after transcoding with MPG file extention);

- close your PrPro project, created out of original MTS files;

- temporarily rename AVCHD folder containing original MTS files to e.g. AVCHD.Sources and AVCHD.Proxies to AVCHD;

- open up PrPro project and enjoy: all your original AVCHD files are now linked to MPEG2 proxies.

When you're done, reverse rename folders.

 

[maven4336]

Pinnacle Studio 21 ultimate is a cheap alternative and has no problem working with my mavic air 4k footage.
You can purchase it for less than £100.

Hi guys, I’m super green on editing especially 4K, just got a text iMac desktop 5k, were on sale Best Buy so I had to splurge 1700$, what is the best editing for my 4K on the Mavic pro Final Cut Pro?, and I just want to mention it is a lot more work takes a turn more memory for 4K I’m loving the detail but I’m having to fly totally different because of motion blur, sorry to get off the beaten path here main question what’s the cheapest best for editing 4K on the Mavic pro with my iMac???

 

[martinpagh]

Hey, I know I'm late to the game here, but I was having similar issues, and I solved it by transcoding all my footage to an intermediate codec before I started editing, like you suggest. Use the Cineform or DNxHD codec, since it looks like you're on Windows. ProRes or Cineform on Mac. h.264 is great for creating small files, but it's really tough on your CPU, so it becomes the bottleneck in your system. And you don't need to do a proxy workflow, because the transcoded assets will be same quality as your originals, you simply edit directly with the transcoded assets. Only thing to watch out for is file size, intermediate codecs aren't exactly optimized for file size.

Before I did this, I could barely scrub a video as soon as I had any effect on it, after everything is smooth as butter, and my computer isn't as powerful as yours. I'm on Premiere Pro CC, but it should be the same for you.

 

[Joely-Bird]

My Rig is an old dog compared to yours (2nd Gen i7, 16GB Ram, GTX560). But I don't really have much of a problem working with 4k in CS6.

If you need a quick fix, try setting the preview window to 1/4 res, it lets you scrub through at a much smoother rate and honestly, for cutting an edit together, you don't need to see it at 4k. If you're getting more fancy with your footage, however, and taking it into After Effects, to edit pixels and create VFX then I can see the need to edit in 4k

Just sharing my workflow, hope it helps.

 

[mdgo]

I too have a fairly powerful Windows PC, but still using Premiere Pro CS6, and realized pretty early on that MP4 was the way to go. MOV files had to go via QuickTime and it was so laggy that it became frustrating to even edit a small sequence.

 

[kgechols]

So here's an update, tried a mp4 recording and I'm still getting the super choppy previews.

I tried adding my GTX 1080 to the CUDA whitelist and it completely broke Premiere and it looks like I'm going to have to reinstall.

I just can't win tonight..

This might be a bit late so I hope you already solved your problem, but here is a great article that gives precise steps how to appropriately add a CUDA card to the cuda_supported_cards.txt file using the description from gpusniffer.exe
How to Enable GPU Acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5 for Unsupported nVidia GeForce Cards

 

[kgechols]

Video format in the app in camera settings.. change that to mp4, see if you can figure out why CUDA isn't enabled and you should be golden

Here is an article to help with getting your CUDA card that is fully capable to be recognized as supported for hardware accelleration:
How to Enable GPU Acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5 for Unsupported nVidia GeForce Cards