I've been searching around for a way to improve my editing experience as an editor on Premiere Pro. I have a 6-core Mac Pro, with 64GB graphics, but I'm a long form documentary editor, I don't care about rendering speed, I basically just want untranscoded files to have smooth playback in the timeline (a big timeline ~2hrs).
It's difficult to get any clarity. I've been advised that storing media on an SSD will help, and indeed I'll try this (even though I'm using smaller compressed files out of the camera, so drive speed shouldn't make that much difference to my understanding). I've also been told that more cores does very little for decoding codecs like H264. So I'm looking for a faster CPU essentially. But it seems as though processor speed has majorly plateaued and computer manufacturers appear to be making up for this by adding loads of cores (which don't help me with my issue).
I had a assumed that buying a $10k computer in 2013 would solve this problem for me with H264, but I was disappointed. Surely in 2023 there is a computer that can playback H264 smoothly in a timeline.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Please don't reply with comments about using proxies - I know I could spend days transcoding on every project, I work in Premiere so I don't have to do that. I have money to spend, I just don't want to waste it on another computer that doesn't solve the problem.
