Premiere Pro provides a helpful engineering overlay called DogEars. In addition to dropped frames, DogEars provides some metrics about how “healthy” video playback is in Premiere Pro.

Figure 3.   Example of DogEars in Premiere Pro

The metrics that were critical to this testing were Dropped, FramePrefetchLatency, InQueue, and ‘CPU Frames CompleteAheadOfPlay’.

Dropped frames indicates the number of dropped frames. Obviously, the ideal number here is 0, though occasionally a single digit number of dropped frames occurs at the playback start.

Next is FramePrefetchLatency. This number is <30 ms during most Premiere Pro playback. If it spikes high enough, it is an indicator that the storage cannot sustain playback, and eventually Premiere Pro will start dropping frames.

However, FramePrefetchLatency is related to the InQueue and CompeteAheadOfPlay numbers. These two buffers fill up to just over 300 frames and stay there during playback. When playback starts, the FramePrefetchLatency is high while the buffers fill up. When they fill, the FramePrefetchLatency drops down. If Premiere Pro is unable to fill the CompleteAheadOfPlay and InQueue buffers, the latency never drops, and it is clear that Premiere is struggling to maintain playback.