Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > Dell PowerScale: Adobe Premiere Pro Configuration and Optimization > Workstation Performance in Premiere Pro
Playing professional video codecs is taxing to even modern workstations with powerful GPUs. Having a properly sized workstation is as important as storage performance for a satisfactory Premiere Pro experience. When analyzing a video edit client system, it is important to use the operating system’s onboard monitoring tools to evaluate CPU and GPU load. Task Manager in Windows has a performance tab for this purpose, and Activity Monitor in macOS provides similar statistics.
When CPU and GPU use goes to >80% or so, it is common for Premiere Pro to struggle and start dropping frames. This behavior is especially common when Premiere Pro has been tasked with playing back multiple streams of high resolution or high framerate compressed video.
One quick and nondestructive way to reduce workstation load in Premiere Pro is to lower video resolution in the source or program monitor. This resolution does not impact the resolution of the source video files or even the video exported by Premiere Pro. Itreduces the number of pixels Premiere Pro must decode and display.
Reducing the playback resolution does NOT reduce storage load. Premiere must read the entire file from storage. When Premiere Pro is struggling to maintain playback, reducing playback resolution may result in storage load to increase as Premiere Pro is no longer dropping frames.