Overview

If you are having performance issues with Adobe Premier Pro, follow the steps in this article.

Troubleshooting steps

Please note that administrators of Filespaces with Adobe Premiere Pro users should override the default mounting scheme.
This should be done on a Filespace-wide basis by setting the mount point to a fixed mount point (e.g. L: on Windows or /Volumes/filespace on Mac) Applying the change for all users globally will avoid issues arising from dynamic drive letter assignment that may cause links to media assets to break.
Using the new default mounting scheme (C:\Volumes\<domain>\<filespace> on Windows and /Volumes/<domain>/<filespace> on Mac) may result in compatibility and performance issues with Premiere Pro.

Using the command line interface, enter the following commands:
You must be the workspace owner, and will be prompted to enter your password.

lucid config --set --global --FileSystem.MountPointWindows L:

lucid config --set --global --FileSystem.MountPointOSX /Volumes/[name-of-filespace]

Choose your own drive letter for Windows and enter the name of your filespace on MacOS

1. Ensure the Renderer is set to GPU Acceleration

Go to File > Project Settings, and make sure the Renderer is set to GPU Acceleration (if any). If your GPU is cable of hardware decoding you will see it in the drop-down menu (or greyed out and already selected)

2. Lower playback resolution

Adjust the setting to 1/2 or 1/4 in the bottom-right corner of the Preview Window. 

You can also make sure High-Quality Playback is disabled. Click on the Wrench icon right next to the Resolution setting, then make sure High-Quality Playback is unchecked. 

3. Automatic audio waveform generation

To take advantage of the streaming capabilities built into LucidLink, it may be necessary to disable 'Automatic audio waveform generation' in Adobe Premiere. If enabled, Adobe will pre-read all video assets to draw audio wave forms on the screen. This negates the utility of streaming on-demand. Note that when disabled, audio wave forms will still be drawn upon specific video segment playback. 

4. Media cache location

In Preferences, scroll down to Media Cache to change the cache file location, preferably an internal SSD - for the best playback performance. 

5. Scratch Disks / Optimizing scratch disk performance

Under Project Settings, navigate to Scratch Disks in order to change the scratch disk’s file location to specify which disks Premiere Pro uses for media files. Setup the scratch disks when you set up a new project. By default Premiere will set the scratch disks location to the same volume where the project file is.

If you create a project on your Filespace the scratch disks location will also be the Filespace. The scratch disk space increases as sequences become longer or more complex. For best performance choose the fastest local disk for the scratch disks preferably other than the disk where you keep your project file, operating system files, or the files for applications. That way your media disks can access and play media files as fast as possible, without having contention from other processes. 

6. Automatically Refresh Growing Files

Under Project Settings, navigate to  Automatically Refresh Growing Files. This is a setting typically used for live broadcast productions. To disable it, navigate to Media under Preferences.  

7. Optimize Rendering for Performance

Allocate as much memory you can spare to ensure Premiere has enough spare RAM for utilization.

8. Mercury Transmitter

If you experience slow RAM preview frame rates when Mercury Transmit is enabled, turn it off or try one or more of the following:

Video preview using mercury transmit

If none of these make any difference its because you have reached the hardware limit, but you can try another way, which is to use the proxy workflow method:

Ingest proxy workflow

In short, proxies are low-resolution video files that can take the place of larger-resolution video files in your timeline. This is important because low-res files render faster in your video editing app — which is especially useful for RAW and uncompressed video. Editors use proxy workflows when working on large-scale feature projects, just so the computer they’re working on can handle the load. 

Premiere Pro and LucidLink: Ingest Workflow (video)

Additional recommendations

If your internet connection is not stable and you still have issues playing video files from your Filespace, you can try the following steps:

Pinning

This is especially useful when you need to make sure the data is on local disk and you don't want to rely on your internet connection and be dependent on latency and throughput problems. 

You can find more information about the Pin feature here:

Pinning Files and Folders

The LucidLink Cache

Ensure you have sufficient free disk space available or change where your cache is stored on local or external disk. Because the LucidLink cache is accessed in a random read/write manner, it is strongly recommended you locate the data cache on an SSD or NVMe drive as putting it on a traditional hard disk will negatively impact performance to a large degree.

Adjust Local Cache Settings