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Premiere CS5 performance problems
Hi!
We just got our new MacPro (12core, 48GB RAM, Radeon HD5780). I tried to use multicam in Premiere CS5 with three XDCAM EX (35Mbit) streams and surprisingly the system can’t playback the 3 streams and starts to juggle. Then I tried the same thing in Final Cut and it worked perfectly.
I cannot imagine that PR is overextended with that task. Is it so that I have to buy one of this horrible expansive GPUs to get a minimal performance out of Premiere? Or is there an other problem?
John
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19 Replies
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How fast are your hard drives. Do you have multiple drives setup so media is not on the same drive as the OS? HD will need some form of RAID 0 or 5 at high speeds to run optimally. The ATI card may not be the best for Pr either. I have found the ATI 5770 card in a new Mac Pro tower and FCP 7 crashes on multiclip editing every 20mins.
– JonJon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
Hi!
The harddrives can not be the problem. OSX runs on a single drive, project and footage are on a RAID 0 (3 drives). Also it wouldn\’t work with FCP if the drives were too slow.
Until now I have not encountered any problems with the graphics card …
J. -
I just tried to convert the footage from XDCAM (35 MBit) to ProResLT (about 85 MBit). I can playback and edit the ProRes footage using 3 multicam streams even with my notebook.
It seems like Adobe PR simply does not support XDCAM footage very well.
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I’m curious…
Does FCP drop the clip res when it plays back multiple streams? In PPro, I’m wondering what the playback resolution was set to…
Also, I agree that your hardddrives would not be the problem if FCP has no issues with the material, however, are you handling the same files with both apps? Has the media come through log and capture (or whatever the FCP transfer front end is for XDcam) in FCP?
I’m curious if it has been ‘imported/processed’ by FCP, if you run the original camera footage unaltered in PPro (which is what it’s designed for) if that might not cure the problem. FCP’s “native” media restructuring is designed to be friendly to FCP…
Premiere Pro is optimized for the camera formats themselves.
ProRes is a conventional QT format and PPro has handled that pretty well on both Windows and Mac for a couple versions.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
There is some useful information in the Adobe Hardware Forum related to Mac Pro performance.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/737408?tstart=0Chuck
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Thank you for the link. Thats really interesting! I didn’t know that PR has such a bad performance on mac. I’d like to know if the performance problems are only concerning PR or the whole CS5 suite. Fortunately there are other good editing applications.
My XDCAM Footage was transferred with “XDCAM Transfer” to the PC. If someone wants to know it I can try to use the native recorded format from the SxS cards for this task and tell you if that works better.
lg
Jürgen -
Please do use the original recording data, access it via the Media Browser Panel not traditional import.
Be sure to have it on a drive that can play back at high speeds for the multicam, and if need be lessen the resolution in the source monitor as I think that affects the Multicam Window.
– Jon Barrie
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
“I didn’t know that PR has such a bad performance on mac”
It’s not an issue of Premiere Pro CS5 having poor performance on a Mac. It’s a matter of Premiere Pro CS5 on a high-end PC (Win 7 64 bit + supported Nvidia) being CONSIDERABLY faster (rendering, exporting) than most non-GPU accelerated video editing workflows.
The Mercury Playback Engine was developed by Adobe and Nvidia engineers to utilize GPU power to crunch certain processing tasks that are normally heaped upon the CPU. The Mac does not have this capability because it doesn’t support the Mercury Playback Engine.
Have a look at this performance chart to see how much the Mercury Playback Engine speeds up common workflow related tasks:
Look at the far right color coded area. MPE represents Mercury Playback Engine.
https://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.htmlChuck
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OK, there’s a new bug. I have edited now about 40 minutes with a ProResLT multicam-clip without any problem. But suddenly I cannot playback the timeline any more. If I hit the play button, there pops up a window that says “Erforderliche Dateien werden gerendert” (in english: “Rendering necessary files”) …
but nothing happens.🙁
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This article may be of interest:
https://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/16/nvidia_announces_high_end_fermi_gpu_for_apples_mac_pro.htmlIn my opinion, if you already own a Mac Pro, this should be good news. If you are planning on buying a new video editing system, I think a high end PC running Windows 7 64 bit, a 980X processor and an Nvidia GTX 480 should give similar performance for approx. 1/4 the investment.
Some folks love OS X and under certain workflow circumstances, it may be worth the extra money to stick with the Mac Pro.
Chuck
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