Lesson learned – when adapting to a new audio system and settings, make sure that your video file settings are consistent with the audio.
For the last several days, I have been attempting to edit the latest gaming session – something that up until recently was not really that bad. However, this time after the first major editing pass, the computer ended up choking badly on the files – just starting a scrub would take several minutes, and then lag badly, and when I stopped, the system would chug for several more minutes before quieting down.
Obviously something was different, and my first thought was the recent release of Premiere Pro 2020 – perhaps there was something significantly different, or the new application was just unstable. As a result, I tried to swap the project files over to Davinci Resolve – no a simple or straightforward process. After struggling with that for a day or two, I gave up, and went back to troubleshooting Premiere.
My next attempt was to render out the intermediate files, so that the system would not need to render live – thus saving cpu cycles and hopefully resolving the issue. That is when I hit upon what appears to be the solution – by watching the audio preview files, I realized that a majority of the files were being transcoded to 96000 kbps, when my audio recording was in 48000 kbps. As a result, the system was not only spending 4x as long creating unnecessarily large files, it was also gobbling up my available storage.
Checking each timeline, I manually changed each audio setting to the correct 48000 kbps, and re-rendered. This time, not only did it finish with a crash, but it ran in a fraction of the time. Fingers crossed, and I believe this has resolved the situation.
All of this was a result of my change in audio recorder – the prior H1 Zoom was set for 96000 kbps, since I only recording a single stream. With the new H6 Zoom, I am recording 5 streams, so I have reduced to 48000 kbps for space (and the extra quality was completely irrelevant). Now I have a note to validate those settings in Premiere Pro as well, anytime those changes are made, and hopefully I can get back on schedule.
