Computer Specs for Playback

[Kyle Kearns]

Hey guys, a lot of the time my playback is very choppy in Premiere. I'm importing the 1080 individual jpg files (exported from lightroom) and nesting the frames as one shot.

I'm looking at getting a new computer and am trying to figure out what specs are needed to playback smoothly.


For those of you that have smooth playback what computer specs are you working with?

Thanks!

[andy kh]

I hav a 5 year old 2nd gen i7 laptop wit 2gb nvidia graphic card. The playback is pretty smooth. I would suggest you to go for nvidia graphic card if u are into premiere pro and davinci resolve. there is an option in premiere pro cc to choose between GPU Accelarated and CPU only. if you turn off the gpu, palyback wil b choppy or not smooth. my old 2gb nvidia graphic card helps a lot. i can even playback cdng smoothly and mlvfs doest the job so i don even have to convert to any other format to edit in premiere pro

[50mm1200s]

Are you using jpg sequence for video? I wouldn't recommend that. Try using ProRes 444 or DNxHD.
I have a Ryzen 5, 4GB DDR4 and a very old GPU from AMD and it still playback ProRes. I agree with andy kh, get a Nvidia GPU. Adobe has contract with them, so it's optimized for CUDA. Get a Quadro GPU, such as P1000, they are designed for graphics work.

[Kyle Kearns]

andy kh, that's strange. It sounds like my specs are pretty similar to yours. My computer is a 2012, 8gb of ram, i7 2670-qm, and nvidia gtx 640m with 2gb.

I've tried using the GPU accelerated option and it doesn't make any difference. Changing the playback resolution doesn't do anything for me either no matter what footage I'm working with.


50mm1200s, what do you mean jpg sequence? I usually just drag a regular 5d .h264 file into an empty timeline to create a sequence.


I was talking to customer service at Eluktroniks computers and they were telling me the models with the option to switch all of the graphic processing the GPU only would be significantly better than the computers with out it. To me it seems like half the people say GPU is the most important and the other half say the processor is more important. Any thoughts on that?

[50mm1200s]

50mm1200s, what do you mean jpg sequence? I usually just drag a regular 5d .h264 file into an empty timeline to create a sequence.

Well you said that: "I'm importing the 1080 individual jpg files (exported from lightroom) and nesting the frames as one shot."

I was talking to customer service at Eluktroniks computers and they were telling me the models with the option to switch all of the graphic processing the GPU only would be significantly better than the computers with out it. To me it seems like half the people say GPU is the most important and the other half say the processor is more important. Any thoughts on that?

Both are important, as is the RAM and storage speed. GPU is very important for software supporting CUDA or OpenCL (this is the case of Premiere and Resolve).

[Levas]

Well you said that: "I'm importing the 1080 individual jpg files (exported from lightroom) and nesting the frames as one shot.

You can also export in uncompressed tif format with lightroom, which is more standard in the video world. Jpg uses compression, so little quality loss there, but probably only visible if you do some additional color correction in Resolve

[Kyle Kearns]

Do you think this computer will do okay playing back?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834316435&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC-_-pla-_-Gaming+Laptops-_-N82E16834316435&gclid=CjwKCAjw14rbBRB3EiwAKeoG_64bF5SJb-zXX8BIogHrAxtmgEgCw0zBPcDQ426Dxp4nbg4HOt0lIRoCUNQQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

[Walter Schulz]

Specs looks good on paper. There are two problems for such designs:
Thermal management may (or not) cause processor throtteling and serious drops in performance.
Power management default settings when not connected to power supply.

2nd one should be treatable. Will drain the battery on a higher rate, though.
1st one ... You have to find out. If you're lucky you will find a review cornering this aspect.