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Editing HD in Premiere Pro CS4
Hello guys and girls,
I’ve got an AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core Processor, 2.20GHz with 4GB of RAM and I’m using Adobe Premiere CS4.
We have been shooting on the Sony WEX3 using the SxS cards. The footage was transferred to a MAC as MOV files then from a DVD to my PC.
They all come across fine and after downloading and purchasing Calibrated Q XD I was able to open the HD MOV files in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 no problem.
My problem is that if I try to render or edit more than one of the MOV files at a time then premiere crashes or freezes or just disappears.
Do you think that upgrading my RAM is the way to go?
Any suggestions are welcome – my email address is fr*********@***il.com
Thanks,
Fraser
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19 Replies
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Fraser,
While I would recommend a minimum of 8 Gigs of RAM with a Quad Core (and a 64 bits OS), the problem may well be with the format you are working with. It certainly would be a good idea to double the RAM either way.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Well…..I will throw in my 2 cents for what its worth. I just bought a Panasonic HS700K last week and it uses AVCHD format. I have a Mac and a PC both running CS4. AVCHD is supported natively in PPRO so I put the footage on the timeline and it causes PPRO to crash and freeze when trying to play more than one at a time…..sound familiar? LOL
My PC has 8gb of RAM, a RAID 0 setup for scratches, a 10k velociraptor C: drive, NVidia GTX260 card, and it, much to my surprise would not handle the workload.
SO…….
A friend of mine has an 8-core Mac Pro, 12gb of RAM, qty. 2 raid zero setups, and his machine running CS4 did the same thing. (this machine cost him close to 10 grand)
As a side note, I tried them in Final Cut Pro 7 as well on his Mac Pro and it wouldn’t play it any differently than CS4. (and that was wrapped up into Apple ProRes format which is lighter supposedly….I had to do that because Final Cut does not have native AVCHD support.)
SO…..on with my 2 cents.
In my humble opinion, the problem lies with the fact that the CS4 and the FCP studio are both 32 bit applications….which only recognize a maximum of 4 gigs of RAM. I believe that is where the bottle neck lies. You could have 128gb of RAM and it still will not use more than 4gb of it. The new CS5 is fully 64-bit, so it will make use of ALL of the RAM that your machine has, opening the floodgates……not to mention it is written to place a balanced part of the workload onto the GPU allowing the CPU to be freed up a bit. There is a video demo of CS5 where the put 4 cameras of Native Red Camera footage (4k RES) into the multicam window and it streams it perfectly without a hiccup. Now granted that guys machine has a 4thousand dollar Quaddro graph. card in it, but it does play it smoothly.
In summary….CS5 (I hope) will be the answer that all of us who are working in filebased workflows are desperately looking for. We shall see.
Anyone else have anything to correct or add to “my two cents” feel free :o)
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Unfortunately, AVCHD is a nightmare for just any editing app. Clients drop us footage in AVCHD from time to time from consumer cameras, and I almost feel like giving them someone else’s business card. There doesn’t seem to be a standard on how it is encoded and is pure processing hell.
I honestly would never recommend a camera that encodes AVCHD to anyone in the professional field…
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
problem is even some of the low end professional cameras like panasonics hmc-150 is an AVCHD camera. There is however a halfway decent solution for us AVCHD guys….and that is to buy an I/O like the BMD decklink and then bypass the cameras AVCHD compression altogether…by capturing live through HDMI. Then you encode it to whatever you prefer, prores, uncommpressed etc. and edit away. (did that sound like a commercial for BMD? LOL HEHEHE :o)
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But capturing it takes time and further reduces the quality of that already highly compressed format. When someone drops that kind of footage to us, we usually covert to uncompressed HD, which obviously is a monster to edit with, but at least it’s stable.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
yea having someone drop off AVCHD files sucks, cuz you are forced to convert.
but what i was saying about using the camera and a capture device, goin from the camera out through an hdmi cable, completely bypasses the AVCHD codec. you use your camera as a playback device, and it bypasses the compression to AVCHD allowing you to have an origianl full quality signal from the camera goin to your capture device, which can then go to an edit friendly format like pro-res, motion jpeg, or uncmprsd HD (if you have the drives to manage the throughput)
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I agree, a pity, 4GB of RAM and 4GB clips in H.264 mov and that is all it can handle so it is slow as you go.CS5 may be better ?
It is a bit like the Canon 5D mark II, 12 minutes of video because of Windows restriction and it stops in 1920 x 1080p at about 12-13 mins of clips . And then you start again, does not matter in the camera , but, it is a pain in Premiere Pro.Freelance Imaging & Video
AUSTRALIA -
I’m wondering if the way you are importing the footage has something to do with your problems. You really should import the whole BPAV folder straight from the SxS card – not doing that (from what I understand) can cause problems.
I shoot with an EX3, and edit it all in CS4, and that method has always proven to provide a smooth editing experience.
—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com -
does the folder from the camera have other files that are important to the footage?
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From what I understand, it does…there is a lot of metadata in there that (again, from what I understand) helps PPro. You’ll get an error message when importing that it doesn’t know what to do with all those extra files, but just skip past it. It’ll then import in all the footage from the folder.
Looking over your specs, your RAM isn’t the highest, but I’ve cut XDCAM EX footage on my laptop with 2GB and not had any problems – although I did adjust the playback to draft for smoother playback. Having more RAM always helps.
—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com
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