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Premiere Pro hanging on start with large HDV files
Please forgive any novice remarks I may make here. I began video editing about three weeks ago and have played around with the various functions for premiere pro and AE in CS4 with some small test files. We recently recorded some church services (~1.5 hours) in HD (1080i60) with a Sony HVR-Z1U camcorder. The files are huge, ~25 GB a piece (only one file per project). Premiere Pro doesn’t seem to play well with these large files on my computer at least. I’m running a Macbook Pro 2.53GHz with 4GB RAM on snow leopard and when I attempt to open the projects in which I captured these files, it takes over an hour and a half to “open”. I use quotes because once its open its virtually impossible to do anything, even click on the timeline, much less edit clips or render. I’ve searched through Cow forums and the web to find an answer to no avail. From what I’ve seen my system with CS4 should be capable of handling these large files, even just to splice into smaller clips to work with, but it doesn’t. I’m running v. 4.2.1. I have ~100GB (of 320GB) of space on my HD (internal), so I don’t think its a VM or page out problem.
I would like to be able to burn to blu-ray discs in encore for people that have asked, so I would rather not have to downconvert for smaller file size.
Does anyone have any idea what may be the issue or what a possible solution is?
Thanks for your help.Tom
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8 Replies
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Wow!
You’ll never get those to play correctly at that size IMO, What format are they? They should be either MT2 or MPEG2’s. I know you’re not gonna want to hear this but I would re-capture the footage at say 3 to 5 minute clips each so you aren’t trying to bring in a 25GB file?
The workload for such a large file is very taxing on and computer and wil most likely not work.
You also need to make sure the files are NOT uncommpressed like an AVI.
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If you are using a single harddrive you are choking your system, you need a fast external drive for your source footage, either USB2 or firewire. HDV is approx 13gigs per hour and is not considered large.
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HDV uses and equivalent Data rate to DVCAM so the file size should be equivalent. You will need to cut from an external storage drive and not the laptops internal hard drive. The compression to fit all that data into such a small data rate requries some decent processing. Same drive for the OS, Apps and HDV is never a recommended workflow. A single 25Gig file means the computer needs to see the entire file while you make decisions on shots which is going to kill your processor and hard drive especially on a Laptop.
Move the files to an external USB2 drive minimum, a Firewire drive would be good, a firewire 800 would be great. Keeping the files in their original format and not converted or captured with FCP as that will use an AIC (PPro captures in the original HDV MPEG-2 compression and data rate as recorded so there is no loss of quality).
Good luck,
Jon
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net
http://www.suiteskills.com -
Thanks for all the input guys. I would have never thought that an external drive would be faster than an internal one, but I can see why now. I actually have all the files on an external drive but then would transfer them to my internal one because I assumed it would be faster. Newbie mistake I guess. I tried it using the source on an external 1TB drive, unfortunately I only have USB2 at this point, but it does speed it up significantly. Not quite enough for me to be able to render, but I can at least chop it up into smaller bites now and work on them individually.
I am looking into another drive though, since I’m at about 75% of my 1TB. I have my eye on one that has an eSATA port in addition to two 800/400 ports and a USB2, but its a little more pricey than I would like. Will the eSATA option be significantly better than just a firewire 800, or can I settle for the firewire with files this size? In the future, if I don’t have to chop up the files, I would rather not because I have to match up a separate audio track to the video and having to do it a half dozen times or so for one project would be pretty time consuming. I’d rather just do it once.
Thanks for all your help and quick replies!
Tom
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You have to watch external drives, you want to make sure that the drive is a 7200rpm drive, sometimes they put 5400rpm drives in the large sizes, a firewire 800 theoretically is 100 Mbytes/s which is fast, also don’t let your drives get more than 80% full as that will slow down things, another thing to watch is memory, Ppro likes memory, I don’t know about your Macbook but some use shared memory along with the graphic’s card descreet memory, I don’t remmember right now but I think there is a way to restrict shared memory usage, like to 512m total, plenty for HDV.
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Thanks for the advice. I decided to go with the 2TB OWC Mercury Elite-Al Pro. It’s 7200rpm and has an eSATA port and 2 firewire 800 ports, so I can daisy chain if I need to in the future. Its got 32 MB of cache, but I’m not familiar enough with hard drive specs to know if that’s good or not or even relevant for what I’m doing. I got an eSATA PCIe card for my MBP to be able to get the most out of the drive. We plan on doing three of these 25GB projects a week, so I figured I might as well get it now.
My MBP does have a 512MB discrete graphics card in addition to the 256MB integrated card, but I’m not familiar with how the shared memory fits into this, could you explain a little more?
Thanks for all the help!
Tom
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Shared memory(Shared Memory Architecture (SMA)) is the graphics card using blocks of main memory up to a certain ammount over graphics memory to booster performance, it is setup to anticipate graphics memory use and can tie up blocks of memory, keeping apps from using it.
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Wow, what a difference a hard drive makes. I plugged in my new 7200rpm HD using the eSATA port and it’s blazing. Nothing is hanging up, Premiere only takes about 2 or 3 minutes to load the entire 25GB projects and I can render in real time. Thanks for all the advice everyone!
Tom
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