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Choppy playback in Preview monitor, but smooth playback in Program monitor... Why?


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I just downloaded some GH4 4K 100 mbps mov cliips to test if my PC could handle this future investment :)
 
My findings were strange.
When I open the clip with VLC player, it plays back very choppy after a couple of seconds.
 
I imported the clip in Premiere CS6 to see what happens. When I play the clip back in the preview monitor, again it is choppy. Seems like the PC or the codec is not up for the task.
However, if I right click on the clip and select 'create new sequence from clip' and put the clip on the timeline, it suddenly plays back great. No stutters, even at full resolution with multiple clips on top of each other...
 
So what is going on here? Is there any method to get it to playback smoothly in the preview as well? I tried lowering the resolution but that didn't work.
Also when I create a 1080p timeline and drag the file on it and rescale, the playback is choppy.
 
So only creating a 4k sequence of the 4k clip plays back smooth in Premiere.
 
Codec problem? Or just too crappy hardware?
 
I admit that my PC is fairly out of date but it proved that it could at least play it back smooth on the timeline. Also, I have no problems with GH3 1080p 60p files.
 
i5 2500k
8GB RAM (not the bottleneck here, only used 50%)
GTX 660 (not the bottleneck here, only used 20%)
Win 7
1 TB 7200 RPM
 
Thoughts?
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Does it create any sort of preview (the "conforming file")? The only problems I see with your hardware are the CPU (it is not true that all operations are GPU based with the Mercury Engine) and the single HDD. Usually it is recommendable to have several HDDs in RAID or SSD to ensure the read speed is enough.

 

Also, have you checked why only 50% of the RAM is used? You know that the ratio of RAM allocated to Premiere and available for other programs can be tweaked, so maybe it only uses 4GB because it is as much as it is allowed, not because it is enough...

 

One of the things that slows down renders more significantly is the scaling of the frame (1080p timeline encoding a 720p output, for example), so it makes sense that a 4K timeline is smoother than a 1080 one. 

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Thanks Pablo.

 

I understand what you mean, but it is still strange that VLC player gives me choppy playback of the 4K file, Premiere also does in the preview, but doesn't on a 4K timeline...

 

Is that a codec issue? Or does the timeline 'gather more resources' or anything?

 

Btw, Premiere can use 6.5 GB of my 8 GB memory. It wasn't using everything because I just had 2 clips on the timeline I guess.

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