After over 130 posts on the Adobe Forums and quite a few people getting involved here on my blog I think we’ve finally had a breakthrough regarding the lag that a lot of us have been seeing when using the timeline in Premiere Pro.

What’s been really confusing is why some mac users have been suffering more than others, was it CPU related, memory, graphics? Well as it turns out the reason it was effecting newer macs more was because they tended to have larger screens and as a result the workspace layout was different.

The thing that causes the timeline to be so unresponsive is the height of the timeline panel itself. The higher it is the more laggy the response of the clips. That’s true until almost filling the screen with the timeline when suddenly the effect reverses.

Thanks very much to everyone that got involved, it really did help as it’s highlighted the scale of the problem and now that Adobe know where to look hopefully they can resolve it.

I’ve been using Premiere Pro for the last six months and have been very happy with it but there’s one issue that I’ve always found slightly frustrating. When dragging clips around on the timeline there is a lot of lag, it’s almost as though the clips are attached to the mouse cursor by an elastic band and you have to wait for them to catch up when trying to reposition them.

I noticed in this thread over at the Adobe forums that this isn’t the case for everybody so I started Premiere up on my two year old Macbook Pro and noticed that the lag doesn’t happen on that machine at all. So why is my latest spec Mac Pro suffering?

Well the only way we’re going to figure that out is by getting some feedback from you guys and seeing if we can find anything in common when the issue occurs.

To see the effect for your self have a look at the following video…

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