Real-World Editing: Running Adobe Premiere Pro on Apple Silicon

“Larry, I want to buy a new computer that allows me to edit 4K in real-time with no rendering. What should I buy?”

The truthful answer is that no computer shipping today – not even the Mac Pro – can edit every 4K sequence without rendering. None. While any computer can play a 4K clip, once you start adding transitions, effects, color grading, multiple video streams, and the rest, any computer will bog down.

I just finished editing a 24-episode series using Adobe Premiere Pro on an M2 Max Mac Studio, with an attached OWC ThunderBlade SSD RAID. It’s one of the fastest systems on the planet. Yet, I still needed to render.

The purpose of this tutorial is to explain what worked, what didn’t and set expectations so that you don’t expect miracles from your gear. This was spurred by an email from a reader who had just upgraded from a 2018 Dell Intel i5 to an M3 Max MacBook Pro. He didn’t know what to expect.

CORE CONCEPT

Just because your hardware is fast, does not mean your software is optimized to take advantage of that speed. Premiere is fast. Your hardware is faster.

REAL-WORLD PREMIERE

My project consisted of a three-camera shoot, 1080p HD using H.264 camera native files. All three cameras were chroma-keyed into still image backgrounds. Each camera had four tracks of uncompressed audio.

Here’s a typical project showing three cameras, each with a chroma-key background.

To keep my brain from exploding, I used the following track assignments (Premiere supports tracks with gaps.)

• Track 9: Animated arrows for full-screen graphics
• Track 8: Text for full-screen graphics
• Track 7: Full-screen graphics
• Track 6: CU chroma-key talent
• Track 5: CU inserted animated graphics
• Track 4: CU chroma-key background
• Track 3: WS chroma-key talent
• Track 2: WS inserted animated graphics
• Track 1: WS chroma-key background

Graphics were animated layered Photoshop files added as subsequences. BorisFX Continuum 2024 and Hawaiiki Keyer 5 were used as 3rd-party effects. As you can see from the screen shot above, even with my speedy hardware and “small” 1080p frame size, parts of this sequence still needed rendering.

NOTE: The bar at the top of Premiere’s timeline (see screen shot above) indicates whether rendering is needed:

• Yellow: This section of the timeline plays smoothly in real-time, but potentially at lower image quality until rendered
• Red: This section of the timeline requires rendering to play smoothly in real-time
• Green: This section of the timeline is rendered and plays smoothly at high-quality in real-time.
• No color: No rendering needed, plays smoothly in real-time

I would generally edit these episodes without rendering. However, there was always a glitch – 4-6 dropped frames – at every transition between two cameras as Premiere switched from one chroma-key camera and setting to the other.

• All particle effects created with Continuum required rendering.
• Dissolves between chroma-key cameras required rendering for smooth playback.
• All morph transitions required rendering to play at all
• Animated Photoshop effects which were inserted into the chroma-key background always required rendering.

MEASURING SPEEDS

Obviously, render speeds will vary with each project. ProRes renders faster than H.264 or HEVC. Fewer effects render faster than more effects. Changing position renders faster than changing color grade. And so on – the list of variables is endless.

For example, on my system on average, 2:45 of sequence time took one minute to render. Premiere is doing a LOT of calculations to turn all these effects into polished video and those calculations take time to process.

However the bigger story is told here:

• Premiere is reading and writing less than 100 MB/second of data during render or export (the average was around 75 MB/s).
• Premiere is using less than half the total CPU output available (12 cores = 1200%).
• Premiere is using most of the GPUs (94.9% out of 100%).

In other words, my hardware provides more speed than Premiere can handle. Adobe still has more optimization work to do.

A CAVEAT

When I converted from an HDD RAID to an SSD RAID, I was amazed at how much smoother and “peppier” editing became. While it is true that Premiere does not take full advantage of all the speed my hardware provides, it takes advantage of a lot it. Editing became a lot smoother and more responsive with faster storage.

Without question, the easiest way to improve the speed of your editing system is to improve the speed of your storage.

SUMMARY

These results do NOT mean that Premiere is bad, or slow, or poorly written. This simply showcases a truth of the computer industry: Computer hardware performance always leads software performance. Why? Because software developers can’t begin to optimize their code until actual hardware and operating systems ship.

Does this mean that we shouldn’t upgrade our gear? No. Especially with Apple silicon, upgrades are necessary and totally worthwhile. But, what this does mean is that it always takes time for software to catch up to hardware – and, by then, the hardware has moved on.

I think the right conclusion is to realize that upgrading your hardware will allow your software to run faster. But don’t be unrealistic in your expectations – you’ll still need to render.

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