Premiere Pro Really Slow on my Mac Book Pro

lakong · Jan 11, 2017

I used Premiere years ago on the PC but have been using iMovie for simple home stuff the last few years once I switched to Mac. I recently purchased the DJI Mavic Pro and want to start using a more professional system so subscribed Premiere Pro CC. I have a late 2013 Mac Book Pro with Intel 2.6 GHz Core i5 processor, 50gigs of available SSD and 8gb 1600 MHz DR3 memory. The graphic chip is the default Intel Iris 1536 MB.

I have tried importing the standard clips from the Mavic in MOV format. I shot in 4k. Editing is really sluggish. So much so that it's really not workable. My desire is to keep all clips and final videos on an external drive. I am using a 2tb external Seagate usb3 drive. It doesn't have a dedicated power source. I initially suspected that this was the issue so I moved the clips and destination drive to my internal SSD drive but that didn't help.

A few questions?

- Is my mac capable of working with Premier Pro? I don't believe there is a memory upgrade path on my system, so that would be an option.

- Do I need to translate the clips to a different format?

- Does Premiere Pro work well with an external usb3 (no power source) drive? If not, what do you recommend.

- If the my macbook pro is not sufficient, what would you recommend? I want to stick to the Mac world.

Thanks, Scot

4wd · Jan 11, 2017

Doubling the RAM would make a big difference, I have an older (2010) PC than that can do 4K editing but it has 16GB of RAM.
A two year old 8GB laptop is OK with 1080p but pretty hopeless with 4K

Kilrah · Jan 11, 2017

The CPU is the real limit, the graphics card can be depending on the effects you use.

Premiere is just slow, and for 4K on it you really need top end recent equipment. Even on my beast of a PC it's not comfortable.

On a mac definitely use Final Cut Pro or iMovie unless you really have special stuff it can't do, that's WAY better optimized and usually runs circles around Premiere.

lakong · Jan 12, 2017

Thanks for the responses. I do like imovie, and may just stick with it but the LUT color correction I have seen in a few youtube videos was intriguing. I tried FCP and it's not bad, but I'm not in love with it. Someone on a Premiere Pro forum suggested I try using proxies and that actually worked pretty well. I might just start shooting in HD and that should solve the problem. Not sure what benefit there is at this point to shoot in 4k as most people are not capable of watching in 4k. If I get a call from Spielberg, then I might go back to 4k!

Here is my first quick PP test:
I had some sun issues on a few of the shots which I'll need to figure out. I saw a few 3rd party sun shield solutions that I might try. I also will do some tests with pointing the gimbal down.