Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Speeding Up Premiere Pro so it doesn’t run slow

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi everyone, this video is about speeding up your computer. If you are ready to throw your computer down the stairs because, it runs real slow, and the bouncing ball of doom happens on a Mac, where you get the hour glass on a PC, and it just can't work, and you're super frustrated. Even if you're not, you will be soon. The more that we go through this course, the more effects, and presets and filters that we're going to do, and it's going to slowly drive your computer to overheat. If that sounds like you then this course is for you, or at least this video is. Let's see if we can tame the rage. So you might find that your computer is already stressed out, or not quite stressed out, mine seems to be running just fine with the footage, and the reason why, mainly it's because, these are mp4s that we've imported, and, Premiere Pro loves working with them. It's a really easy codec that it can work with. 

If you're using other file formats, sometimes, like movs or other formats, it can stress it out a bit more. The other thing that I've done is I've made the mp4s really low quality, which means it can play it really easily. So if you're working with mp4s and it's really slow, it's probably because you've got really good quality footage. So how do we stress my machine out to try and show you? I'm going to just pretend it's running really slow. By slow I mean you hit 'Play' and it just spins and doesn't quite catch up, and it jumps along, and it can't do things. So what we want to do is, just so you know, the things that mostly stress it out, are things like the Effects Panel. So if I add a Gaussian, there you go, if I add Gaussian Blur as an effect, Gaussian Blur is the effect, it's the blur everyone uses in every single creative product. It's the same here in Premiere Pro. Blurring it out, let's hit 'Spacebar', ready? Hit 'Spacebar'. It's actually doing okay. Good, bad computer. You might find, if you do the exact same thing with your footage, Gaussian, it might take a little while, so how do we fix it? The easiest way is, we've looked at this before, is actually just to playback in 1/4, speed. If you are dealing with 4K footage, like really big high quality footage, which we'll talk about later on in the course, you can go down to these lower resolutions. They're grayed out because it doesn't go that low.


 So you might decide that 1/4 or 1/2 is the thing that works. Remember, you're not changing the actual export quality, you're just ex-- just the way it previews in Premiere Pro, it exports perfectly good. Now the other thing is just to check the minimum requirements, which is way too late. You've got Premiere Pro going, you might have to have a look at, what Adobe says should be your minimum and recommended requirements, and try and maybe upgrade your computer or buy a new one, but that's obviously out of the scope of this course. Let's look at things that affect the performance for me the most. It's mainly due to RAM. So RAM is a specification on your computer, right? So up here under 'Premiere Pro', under 'Preferences', on a Mac I want you to go down to 'Memory'. If you're on a PC it's under 'Edit', and down the bottom here will be 'Preferences', and go to 'Memory'. 


What you can do is you can allocate how much memory Premiere Pro is using, and leaving for the rest of the programs. You can see in here, in my case I have 64 Gigabytes of RAM, which is, at this time of recording, quite high for a MacBook Pro. Won't be in the future. I've left 10 Gigabytes left for other things to do. Often I have to come through here and change this quite a bit. I used to say actually leave 30 Gigabytes for other things. Mainly because I do lots of screen recording, at the same time I'm doing Premiere Pro, and the screen recorder needs some RAM to do its thing. So you come through here and say, actually get none, everyone else gets, it's a minimum of 6, and the rest of your operating system only gets 6 Gigs whereas, Premiere Pro gets the rest. So that's something you can do in here, but let's just say-- I'm going to put mine back to a moderate, that some of my other applications work, I'm going to click 'OK'. That's an easy one to look at to see how much RAM you have if you're not sure. PCs are quite easily updatable with RAM. 


Macs are near impossible. So you could go through and throw some more RAM into your computer, if you are finding you're around the 16, and it's running really slow, you might want to think about 32 or 64. Probably the most effect that has on me, as other program's running. So you can kind of see my Taskbar down here now. I'm using this bit of footage to do the screen capture. You can see the little black dots, just means I've got things open. So you want to close down everything that's not essential to Premiere Pro. Everything that's not essential to Premiere Pro. For me, I need my Chrome open because I need-- that's where I've got my notes that I use to teach you guys, that I kind of refer to before I start my video. Screen Capture, this, nothing else open. Make sure Word's not open, you've got Spotify not open. Anything you can close down will make a drastic change to Premiere Pro. If you've got Photoshop open at the same time, Man, that really, they fight over the RAM, and it just goes badly. Now this is on a PC, on a Mac-- sorry, on a Mac. On a PC, is very similar, you'll notice you'll have a Taskbar kind of down here. Next to your Start button, and there'd be indications of what's open. So just make sure everything is closed. On a Mac, easy way to check what's open is, just hold the 'Command' key down and hit 'Tab'. It just shows you the programs that are open. 

You can click on them all and just close the ones you don't need down. Another thing you can do is kind of force quit stuff, on a Mac, I'll do PC in a sec. So hold down the 'Command' key, the 'Option' key, and hit 'Esc' key on your keyboard. It shows you the things that are running. You can click on them and, hit that one, 'Force Quit', just kind of make sure they're all closed. You should go individually and close them down but you can force them to do it. The other thing on a Mac is, up here in your Taskbar. This is my number one resource killer. Is Dropbox, you might not be using Dropbox, but when this thing is actually syncing and kind of doing this, and it's starting to upload files, man, does it steal resources. My fans come on my computer, Premiere Pro hates it. So I just make sure whenever I'm using Premiere Pro, I go into here and I quit Dropbox. So have a look, what else is running up here for you. That's my little screen recorder icon, but I got nothing else running. 

You might have a bunch of stuff running. Before we wrap up Mac issues, we'll do PC in a sec, is the Activity Monitor, that can be really useful. If Premiere Pro is not running really well, hit 'Command' and 'Spacebar' on your keyboard, and in here you can just type in 'Activity Monitor'. We'll just start typing it, and clicking on it. This will give me an indication of, at the moment what's using all my CPU. At the moment Activity Monitor is using it all. Camtasia is using a chunk, Premier Pro is not doing anything. Watch this, when I hit 'Spacebar' back here, it will jump to the top, because it's being used, and it will drop back down again, because it's not using my CPU. So you want to look at who is stealing all your resources. at the top here, there's all those random stuff that you can't really get rid of, but there might be stuff there, you're like, "Huh. "Didn't realize Adobe Acrobat synchronizer was stealing everything, but it's not, just taking a tiny little bit. The other thing is your memory. CPU and memory are different, but in our, kind of speeding up our machine, something that is stealing all our memory, like this one at the top here, Premiere Pro is using lots of our RAM, so is Camtasia. Chrome's down here, it's using quite a bit. You can see all these things that I could close down. And how you close them down, you click on this and say, close down, and I just want to Quit it. Sometimes you need to Force Quit things. Just to tidy stuff up, you're like, "Actually, Creative Cloud, I thought I closed you." 

Thank you very much. I'm going to quit it, sometimes you need to Force Quit it, and sometimes it will re-back open again. Just close down the things that you think might not be necessary. Be careful though, don't close down everything. Just a really good handy way to look at, what's open and what's actually stealing all your resources. On a PC it's very similar. I don't have a PC here to show you, but if you go to your-- two things, you want your Task Manager, which is kind of like our Ctrl-Alt-Esc. It will show you what's actually running. So find Task Manager, I think you just do a search down the bottom here, and it's a little application you can open. 


There's another one called Resource Manager, which is more like this, which will actually show you where your resources are being delivered, and we close down those programs that aren't necessary. For me that is more than any other tweak that I can do on Premiere Pro, is just to close the stuff that is not needed, down. The last quick easy thing you can do is, something, well avoiding Thermal Throttling. Thermal Throttling means, can't say that word, throttling. Just means your computer will slow down the CPU when it gets too hot, or slow down your machine from working because it's just too hot. It's easily avoided, like if you are sitting, working in your bed, you're hot, it's hot, your blankets keep it warm, and it just runs really slow because it's got no way of kind of cooling itself. So on your desk, if you are one of those people who like to keep your laptop closed, and plug it into a separate monitor, open it up, a lot of the fans and stuff that are used to keep it cool are there. It's meant to be used open. So I know my MacBook Pro, if I try and close it, and work on my other monitor, it's like a big heat sink, and just kind of, sucks it all in and doesn't-- the fans don't work effectively. Another thing that can slow it down is working off battery. Especially when you're close to the end of your battery your computer will, not ask you but try and slow things down. Just so that the battery lasts longer, which is cool, that your battery lasts longer, but bad that Premiere Pro can lose performance. You can get fancy with on-desk fans to keep it cool. If you're finding the fans are on all the time, like, you can use fans that sit underneath your laptop. I've seen a few of those, I've never used them. Basically if you work in a freezer, that is the most efficient way of working with your little computer. Doesn't have to waste time, or battery, or resources keeping itself cool. 


You may die but it would work nice and fast. Next thing you can do is something called Rendering or Pre-rendering. We're going to do that in a separate video, next, because it's pretty cool, and deserves its own little video. All right, let's go do it.