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Premiere CS5 performance – choppy
I’m using Premiere CS5 (5.03) on a core 2 duo E6600 with 2 gigs of RAM, and I’m using the GPU acceleration with my Nvidia card (windows 7 64 bit). Despite this the preview playback for HD H.264 footage in simple projects (no layering/FX) is really choppy in – a second or two will play smoothly, then it becomes jerky and really slow. Is my computer too underpowered to run Premiere smoothly? I thought upgrading the GPU to get mercury acceleration would help but apparently not. Any advice appreciated.
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7 Replies
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Hi Michael,
A core2duo is very much on the edge with HD.
H.264 also happens to be one of the most processor intensive formats.
If it degrades over time, it could also have to do with a drive being too slow, especially if it’s on a USB port.
And of course, there’s also RAM. I usually recommend a minimum of 6 Gigs of RAM with CS5, and that can be low if you are going to use dynamic link.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Hey Vince, thanks for the advice, I’ve done a bit more investigating and it appears that my graphics card usage isn’t going up at all when I play back in Premiere. I’m using the Mercury Playback Engine hack with a GT240 1gb, have followed all the steps and Premiere says it’s using the hardware acceleration, but the usage of the card doesn’t seem to reflect that. I think this must be my problem but I’ve no idea how to fix it…
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I can’t comment on what you’re doing with the video card, as that’s unsupported. However, I can say that you’re operating with barest of system requirements (https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html). And that’s probably OK for cutting DV, but that’s not what you’re doing.
I suggest a beefier system with more cores and more RAM if you’re going to be cutting HD on a regular basis.
Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter! -
The fact that H264 makes small file sizes at high quality is great.
But the amount of CPU necessary to decompress and display frames for editing is a lot.
As of CS5, I believe, that the decompression and pixel aspect ration scaling of the frames are handled is handled entirely by CPU….so the GFX is not going to help you there.
Add Color correction or other fx…that’s where the GFX will have an impact, but in your case, that means it wouldn’t necessarily degrade playback further.
It is also my understanding that GFX does more under 5.5, which might help you out some.
Alex
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Alex is right on all points.
There are details of what the CUDA processing accelerates in Premiere Pro CS5 on this page.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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Everybody here is certainly trying to be helpful, but the bottom line is, yes you are grossly underpowered to run PPro CS5 with H264 media.
8 GB of RAM is the minimum that I recommend for any HD work, and one Quad core Xeon Hyper-threading processor is what you’ll need to feel like the machine is at least keeping up with you.
Having a CUDA card is great, and it does a lot, but since your machine is choking on just getting the frames decoded in the first place to just get playback, the CUDA card is undoubtedly standing around waiting on data.
If your CPU can’t even run the video at full rate, accelerating the effects is not even really possible.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
I think when Adobe made CS5 64bit they did not assume people would install 64bit Win 7 on older machines.The Mercury Playback engine is well promoted but without the disclaimer “performance not guaranteed on all configurations.”
Mike Cohen
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