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CS4 hardware/performance problems question
My relatively new system worked flawlessly for the first couple of months, but slowly Premiere started reporting the occasional drop frame during playback of rendered files then the footage started to stutter after it was rendered… I could even delete the render files and clear the media cache and re-render and the stutter would show back up but in a different place on the timeline… and now it’s dropping frames so bad I can’t even play back a rendered timeline. I built this system with small scale 30 second HD commercial editing in mind but I’m currently only working in SD. I started to assume that I was having problems with my internal RAID array but I also have a WD 10k raptor drive in the system to use for my media cache files so I tried moving a project (and all associated files) there (I redirected my cache files to another drive) since it should be more than enough to handle a small 30 second SD spot but I’m still encountering the same problems. So now I’m wondering if the problem isn’t drive related but possibly something in either Premiere or another piece of hardware in my system. I’ve updated the entire computer with the latest drivers and bios but I’m still having the issue. Has anyone else encountered this problem?
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Premiere Pro CS4
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5
Intel I7-975 3.33GHz
GeForce 9800 GT Video card
Blackmagic Decklink Studio 2
Kingston HyperX DDR3 PC3 16000 6GB (3x2GB)
WD VelociRaptor 10k 150GB system drive
WD VelociRaptor 10k 150GB cache drive
3ware 9650SE-4LPML Controller Card running RAID 10
4x WD RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB DrivesThanks,
Matt Morrison
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15 Replies
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Hi Matt,
Sorry but have to ask…drives defragmented? This is the most common cause of the issue you describe.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Sorry, I forgot to add that to my post… they are indeed defragged. I’ve done all the usual checks and maintenance I can think of and now I’m pretty much out of ideas.
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Make sure that “Indexing” is turned OFF for the video drives. That’s a right-click on the drive > Properties
Jeff
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Indexing is already off unfortunately…
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How full are your drives? particularly the cache drive and the source drives?
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The cache drive is a 150GB drive and it shows 118GB free… the RAID array is a 1.8TB and currently shows 1.7TB free.
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Video can get flaky if the drives get too full, but that doesn’t seem the case, one thing to check is the firmware on the raptor drives, there has been problems with some models of the drives, another thing is to try a memory diagnostic, also you could be having power supply problems
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Thanks, I’ll check into the firmware issue. I’ve run memtest and came up with no problems, but I haven’t checked out the power supply just yet… the thing that gets me is the system was working great in the beginning, but has slowly degraded.
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Usually highly fragmented drives or overfilled drives will may give this indication but you don’t appear to have that much on them, what size is your power supply? a power supply can degrade overtime and when running under load can give strange problems
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Thermaltake 850W Power Supply… I was guessing this myself at one point but the RAID array diagnostics don’t show power supply problems… not that this necessarily means anything.
For what it’s worth… Thermaltake has a tool on their website that lets you estimate your power supply needs and their rough estimate for my system was 625W
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