Poor performance with Premiere Pro on new Mac Pro?

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Poor performance with Premiere Pro on new Mac Pro?

A month ago I bought a 2013 Mac Pro mostly for running Premiere Pro CC. I have many projects in Premiere and don't want to switch to FCP. The configuration is 6 cores @ 3.5 GHz, 64 GB RAM, 2 x D700 graphics, 1 TB internal SSD. It runs OS X Mavericks 10.9.4.

I tried Premiere Pro CC today for the first time. The input--entirely stored on the internal SSD; no external disk was even connected--was about 100 clips shot as AVCHD (1080p25 PAL) at 24 Mbps.

I edited this in Premiere Pro and added small adjustments (mostly changes of levels) in about 20 clips. The rest had no adjustments. There were no transitions applied. For the most part, it just had to copy the trimmed input clips to the output.

I queued this for Adobe Media Encoder CC at H.264, 1080p25, @ 24 Mbps VBR 2 pass. Audio was 192 kbps, 48 kHZ,stereo. The output was written to the internal SSD.

While encoding, the CPU was running 50-70% idle (!!!) so it was using only 2-3 cores and half the memory (32GB) was unused. It certainly wasn't trying very hard. No other programs except Premiere, AME, and the activity monitor were open during encoding and I was just sitting there watching it lumber along.

The time to encode the timeline of 9:47 was 21:28. That is 2.2x real time. My 4-year-old Windows machine using CS6 could do that. Then I did it again with 1-pass VBR and it took 9:56. What's wrong? Should Premiere Pro be this slow on hardware that is blindingly fast? Is there some secret box "Use all the cores and all allowed memory" that I have to check (I set the preferences to allow Adobe to use 52 GB). Does Premiere get tired in the evenings? The internal SSD runs at 900 MB/s and there was no transcoding to do. The bottleneck wasn't the CPU, the memory, or the disk. What could be the problem?

This is my first test of Premiere and it is kind of disappointing. Did I just waste 6500 euros on the Mac Pro or am I using the wrong settings. Any advice is welcome.

Thanks.

Mac Pro (Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Jul 23, 2014 7:18 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 23, 2014 9:00 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

This is well known issue take a look at this http://9to5mac.com/2014/05/21/os-x-10-9-3-breaking-mac-pro-graphics-card-compati bility-with-critical-pro-apps/

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Answer 2

Sleepy Moose Author

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Jul 23, 2014 11:01 AM in response to innocentius

Thanks a lot for the link! That article talks about 10.9.3 with a hope that 10.9.4 would fix it. I am running 10.9.4 and still have problems. I don't have any crashes or artifacts, but the performance is what I'd expect from a standard mid-range PC, not a machine with six Xeon cores, 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of extremely fast SSD, and 4096 high-end GPU cores. Is there any way to see if the GPU cores are even being used?

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Answer 3

Jul 23, 2014 11:10 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

Sleepy Moose wrote:

Is there any way to see if the GPU cores are even being used?

With Activity Monitor in the Utlities folder.Did you mean CPU cores. Some have had success by turning off GPU, but I think you should go to Adobe forum

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Answer 4

Sleepy Moose Author

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Jul 23, 2014 3:29 PM in response to innocentius

No, I meant GPU. I have now done some careful timing tests of AME CS6 & AME CC on Mac Pro and AME CS6 on a much slower Windows machine with quad core, 18 GB RAM, slower SSD and only 256 GPUs. CS6 on the Mac Pro is slightly faster than CC on the Mac Pro and slightly slower than CS6 on Windows. So getting a Mac Pro speeded up AME by about 15% despite the hardware being much, much better. It is as if the 4096 GPUs on the D-700s aren't being used at all. That is why I wonder if there is a way to measure their activity. I suspect Premiere is not using them at all.

I did post this to an Adobe form but there was zero response :-(

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Answer 5

Jul 24, 2014 5:34 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

This free utility seem to measure GPU usage http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/30533/atmonitor

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Answer 6

Sleepy Moose Author

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Jul 24, 2014 12:56 PM in response to innocentius

That looks great, but when I go there and click on Download, nothing gets downloaded. Do you have to have an account to make it work?

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Answer 7

Jul 25, 2014 12:46 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

No, you should be able to download it directy or you can go to the developer homesite. I downloaded it withou issue.

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Answer 8

Jul 25, 2014 2:25 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

Sorry you are right it can not been downloaded, I was was downloading a wrong application. But I guess that there are many similar application out there, try to google.

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Answer 9

Feb 21, 2015 3:57 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

@Sleep Moose - I have this exact same problem too. Almost identical machine to yours. I just purchased it a month ago and it renders slower than my iMac. I don't see what I can do... it's very irritating.

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Answer 10

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Feb 21, 2015 7:29 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

http://barefeats.com/tube19.html

The 2013 Mac Pro Quad-Core with dual FirePro D300 GPUs beat the 2013 iMac Quad-Core i7 with the single GeForce GTX 780M GPU in 8 out of 12 of the tests featured above. However, it only 'blew away' the iMac in three GPU intensive tests -- two of which utilize the dual GPUs.

http://barefeats.com/tube17.html

LuxMark is one of the few OpenCL benchmarks that uses multiple GPUs. So we used it in our last graph to highlight the advantage of the 'late 2013' Mac Pro's slowest pair of GPUs (FirePro D300s). It obliterates the iMac's single GPU, but a 2010 Mac Pro tower with a really strong AMD GPU like the 7970 (running only on internal factory PCIe power feeds) comes close. I predict that the dual D700s in the top 2013 Mac Pro models will reach or exceed 4000KSamples/sec.

a comparison of all models from 4-Core to 12-Core using Pro Apps. And a 4-Core iMac is thrown in for good measure.

http://barefeats.com/tube03.html

I cannot point to a good test and review of issues with Adobe apps and nMP due to poor AMD drivers but I think you can find those.

Here is a jump into some, and I think you would find more over here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1747219&highlight=adobe+d700

Not sure if this issue went away or not, if 10,9.5 helped (it should have) or perhaps try a clean install (maybe external device if not backup + erase & install) There are enough issues with importing from another system using Migration Assistant to avoid that, but none with Setup Assistant (go figure why it has bugs... still).

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Answer 11

auriand

Level 1

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Oct 11, 2015 7:07 AM in response to Sleepy Moose

Hello,

I'm having a same kind of issue. I'm editing on a new mac pro 3,5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5, 16 GB ram, AMD FirePro D500, Yosemite 10.10.5, AND I can't get the best of this machine... When I export a video on Adobe Media Encoder, it takes only 55% of the resources... WHY ?

Is it possible to assign a percentage of the CPU's to a Task ? For example, i would like my CPU's to run at 90 % using Adobe Media Encoder.

Thank you very much for helping me,

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