Premiere CC incredibly sluggish performance?

etherealfocus

Senior member
Jun 2, 2009
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I'm running Premiere CC on the laptop in my sig. Win8-64, bog standard machine. Ran Premiere CS6 just fine. As I write this, I'm waiting for it to render a video to 720p, 10Mbps max, 6Mbps target. Progressive VBR, 1-pass, 23.976fps. Source is 1080p 23.976fps direct from a Nikon D3100. Video's about 2 mins long. No biggie, right?

Except I'm 7% done and the encode time says 2 hours remaining. I'm also getting really bad performance in the editor - lags like crazy when I hit play, maybe one frame every 2-3 seconds. Audio's smooth but video is almost useless. It was performing fine for a while after I quit CC and restarted it, then started chugging again.

I checked Task Manager and the CPU is mostly idle - utilization 2-4%, speed hovering around 1.3GHz most of the time with occasional spikes to 2GHz or so. Normally it sits solidly at full 2.4GHz when doing stuff like this.

Googled the issue and the complaints I've found were related to opening old CS6 projects in CC or to crazy amounts of effects and such. Nothing like that here - got a simple fadeout at the end and that's about it. And it was created from scratch in CC, not CS6.

Ideas? I'm stuck.
 

etherealfocus

Senior member
Jun 2, 2009
488
13
81
That doesn't sound right. For one, if CC was working fine, my CPU utilization wouldn't be dancing around under 10%. That's not intended functionality - and the video came out with intermittent stuttering when it finished. Also, it occasionally runs fine when CPU utilization isn't stuck under 10%. There's a bug somewhere that's keeping CC from working like it should.
 

etherealfocus

Senior member
Jun 2, 2009
488
13
81
Figured it out. Hardware rendering doesn't like my HD4000 apparently. Switched to software rendering and it's running fine. 4 cores at 99% and total render time ~7 mins. Win!

...Wonder why CC doesn't like hardware rendering when it worked fine in CS6. Weird.