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"I-frame first" fast seeking for inter frame compressed video files

When you are "seeking," (which means QUICKLY looking through a long video by clicking and dragging the playhead with the cursor,) there is sometimes very high "prefetch latency," meaning that frames will load slowly, resulting in very few frames being shown. This can make it very difficult to find what you're looking for.

But when seeking, perfect frame accuracy is not nearly as important as seeing what you're doing. Therefore, to reduce the "prefetch latency," I suggest that the nearest I-frame is loaded and displayed FIRST, (because I-frames are always the fastest to load) while the exact B or P frame is still being slowly decoded. As soon as it's decoded, it can be displayed, replacing the displayed I-frame.

If the user is seeking quickly, there might not be enough time to load the P and B frames before the user has already moved the playhead nearer to another I-frame. This is fine! The I-frames should always take priority.

In VLC, there is a similar feature called "fast seek."

Combined with my "ghost playhead" feature suggestion, it would be made clear to the user exactly what is going on. (Linked below)

However, it would probably be important for fast seeking to be optional, and perhaps even off by default, as it may confuse some users.

NOTE: This works best if only ONE video source is visible. With more than one video on the timeline, the I-frames will probably not be in the same spots. Nevertheless, it COULD still work, but there would have to be multiple ghost playheads. This might be too difficult to code, and confusing and frustrating for users, who won't understand why premiere is showing video frames out of lockstep, especially in cases where one video has high prefetch latency, and the other is low.

LINK TO FULL EXPLANATORY VIDEO: https://youtu.be/XeFezzmG22c

LINK TO GHOST PLAYHEAD USERVOICE ENTRY: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/42186274-a-ghost-playhead-which-always-marks-the-timeline

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TaranVH shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • John Pooley commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Yes this is desired, but the FramePrefetchLatency bug is a bug and let's call it what it is. You shouldn't get multiple seconds of Prefetch lag before clearing the Media Cache, and 1ms afterwards. This wouldn't fix that entirely, just as hardware decoding didn't fix it. Adobe needs to get to the root of the problem.

  • Thomas Berglund commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @TaranVH Cool. Let us know if you notice a difference. I have tested this on both Windows 10 and macOS 10.15.7, with Premiere Pro 14.6, and even with a 2 hour long i-frame only based video the amount of frames displayed while scrubbing, when "Play audio while scrubbing" is turned off compared to on, is substantial.

    The Adobe Premiere team also changed the way Premiere Pro handles pre-roll for playback of audio, which dramatically speeds up start of playback for audio when using clip based audio effects. This changed was introduced in Premiere Pro 14.5.

    "Faster audio pre-roll in Premiere Pro provides responsive playback for large projects or projects that use a lot of audio effects. No more waiting for playback to start on macOS and Windows."

    This new feature can also be turned off/on under "Audio Preferences > Use legacy audio effect playback pre-roll".

  • Thomas Berglund commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @TaranVH Have you tried to turn off "Play audio while scrubbing" (shift+s, or Preferences > Audio)? This dramatically improves scrubbing performance overall. I have reported this to Adobe for many years, including screen recordings. It is especially noticeable with longer videos, and even more so with long highly compressed Long-GOP videos.

  • colin cameron commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    yes just did an edit tonight where i had to find the start of a minute and a half segment in four and a half hours of footage and this feature would have been incredibly useful.

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