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Lag moving clips in the timeline
HI,
I am running Premiere CS5 on a MAC with an ATi Radeon 5770 HD 1GB graphics card and a KonaLhi card and am having an issue I have never seen before using this setup.
Basically whenever i try to drag clips around in the timeline I get serious lag. Oftentimes the clips won’t move when I drag them or will jump around to different layers as if I still have the left mouse button pressed and still have hold of the clip.
I am using a Bluetooth mouse so maybe this could be the issue ?
Has anyone seen this issue and if so do you know a workaround ?
Thanks.
Chris
Chris Holland
Editor/Animation/Design
hollandedit.com -
14 Replies
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It seems to be a well known problem, I experience it as well as it seems, most other Mac users. Adobe, though seemingly helpful, has not admitted the problem. There are threads here about this problem, as well as a very long post on the Adobe forums here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/826437
Please post to that forum as well and describe your hardware and problem so Adobe has more clues.
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I had the same issue with my Mac Pro. Since I swap from FCP to Premiere I decided to also switch to Windows 7 and it seems to run smoother and fast vs the OSX version.
NIADA
Technical Director -
Interface lag always makes me look at display card drivers first. When you’re flipping from FCP to PPro CS5.5, you’re moving from a 4 year old program to a 4 month old program…FCP will run beautifully with Kona and display card drivers that were released around the same time as CS3…a lot has changed, so you need to check all the surrounding ecosystem on the machine.
I have heard from more than one person that Windows runs faster on a Mac than Apple’s OS. I have no idea why that is.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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I think it really behooves Adobe to address these performance issues with the Mac version of Premiere Pro. The Mac can and is a very powerful machine, though paying a premium for the hardware, the user experience can be great. Mac computers are the 3rd largest computer sales in the US, behind Dell (#1) and HP (#2) at 11% of all computer sales (not including IOS devices such as iPad and iPhone) and have a disproportionately large percentage in the Video / Creative professionals area, I’ve heard some say in the 50% to 75% range. Certainly in the video world it’s in this range.
I think Adobe programmers use an abstraction layer to allow their Graphic Interface and middle layers to be the same between Mac and PC platforms, and the lower layer is customized for Windows or Mac. This way they can make changes to both platforms more universally.
However, the low level layers that are OS specific need expert programmers in their platform, and these deal more closely with the hardware idiosyncrasies of the platforms. I think Adobe needs to make this a top priority, considering all the switchers from FCP that will be coming their way but experiencing less than optimal performance.
I would like to see some posters on the Mac version of Premiere Pro to tell their experiences with the software. In my experience, it’s been good for low-complexity short form projects. For me, when the premiere project begins to get to get complex, it seems it gets very sluggish, and it makes me wonder if I can actually produce a project with thousands of elements with Premiere, at least on the Mac platform. FCP has a lot of long form projects under it’s belt and in hollywood, I actually don’t know if Premiere on the Mac does.
That being said, Premiere Pro is poised to become what FCP became prior to the FCPX debacle, if they can get their Mac performance up and address these issues.
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Thanks guys for responding.
I probably noticed it more because before using a MAC I have always edited in Premiere on a PC and never ran into this. My home system is a PC and it runs fine.
I am actually still running CS5. It seems odd that Adobe doesn’t see this problem on any of there systems, yet it doesn’t seem like an isolated issue. And the fact that the Updates for the Lhi card are only 7-8 months old I wonder if AJA has seen this issue as well.
At my job we have 2 MACS, running everything the same except he has the Quadro4000 and the ATI card in his system and he doesn’t have the problem. We are looking at getting 2 more MACS and it worries me that the other guys could have these same issues.
Thanks for the feedback again. As was mentioned hopefully Adobe is working on this and has the ability to see the issue in house.
Chris Holland
Editor/Animation/Design
hollandedit.com -
[Keith Moreau] “I think it really behooves Adobe to address these performance issues with the Mac version of Premiere Pro. …
I think Adobe programmers use an abstraction layer to allow their Graphic Interface and middle layers to be the same between Mac and PC platforms…the low level layers that are OS specific need expert programmers in their platform, and these deal more closely with the hardware idiosyncrasies of the platforms. I think Adobe needs to make this a top priority, “
Um…a couple insights from someone who was all Mac (I had 9 of them in my office) until OSX arrived…and a few other Apple related items forced me to move on…
1. To have a software product work well on a host platform, it does take some contact/interaction with the host platform’s folks from time to time. While I am not an Adobe employee, it’s not my perception Apple goes out of their way for any outside video editing manufacturer…hell, how long has the QT gamma problem existed?
2. For Adobe to be somehow “not expert” on the Mac makes me think you may have just showed up in the video industry in about 2002. The reason Macintosh was -sold- through the 90s was due in no small part to Adobe software for the entire decade…video is one thing…print dwarfed the numbers video used, and Adobe had that segment well in hand. Through the 90s there were probably a quarter of the creative industry across all segments that was under the impression that Adobe and Apple were the same company as you never saw one without the other.
(Premiere (not Pro yet) 6.5 ran on OSX the day it showed up…did FCP even run on OSX before Puma?…I know we had to stay dual boot for FCP and ProTools early on…)
3. Adobe is seeing proportionate performance from both platforms to hear it from engineering…but keep in mind that they are working with software that is brand new and they are running on Macs that are also new, configured to do the job, and are running the display card choices, etc that the software is written for.
Many FCP users lose track of the idea that while FCP has been stagnant for 4 years so that all the drivers for peripherals as well as for system components haven’t needed revising, Adobe’s had a major release every year while they’ve been making huge changes. You say you’d like to see Adobe pick up where FCP left off…I’ve been an Adobe user for a decade and to pick up where FCP7 left off you need to go back to about CS2 (released in 2006…when PPro got its 32 bit float internal image processing pipeline, which FCPX introduced in 2011).
The tradeoff is that PPro requires a really beefy system to do its thing. And most FCP systems more than a year or two old might not make the transition very well as converting everything to QuickTime was a great way to get a responsive edit experience out of a 32 bit NLE 10 years after the company that makes it went 64 bit with the host OS…but very few of these systems are really up to the spec that is required to get the same responsiveness from a 64 bit edit program that mixes formats on the timeline and reads nearly every camera format available natively…
All that said, I am not telling anyone that Premiere Pro CS5.5 or any other editing system available is perfect. Talk to those who have taken my classes…I point out the obstacles and the areas I’d like to see improved.
I would just like to see FCP users give the same troubleshooting patience and configuration consideration to CS5.5 as they did FCP.
Check your display card’s capabilities and make sure the drivers are up to date.
Got an I/O card? PPro doesn’t work with it? 2, 3, or 4 year old FCP I/O card drivers on your Mac probably won’t work with edit software that’s had four releases in as many years…check on the drivers before you post here and say “PPro doesn’t work with my Serial Monkey 9000 card even though they say it does!”
Got an ATI card? Many Macs do…they’re good cards…but you get CUDA support using NVIDIA CUDA cards. If FCP was in a similar configuration, FCP users would run right out and get the right card for their systems…if you don’t want to switch your display card, that’s great, but then don’t complain about performance because there will be a substantial difference if the roles were reversed, FCP users would be the first ones saying “…if you can’t afford to play in this league…”.
On the Windows side of the fence most of us who have been around this block a time or two are telling users they need at least four cores and 8 GB of RAM to just launch the program, dual quads and 16 GB is best for pro use…if you have an older workstation that is on the bottom end of that…again, doing performance trials on that system will be disappointing.
Honestly…in the last handful of years, Adobe has been working to develop this product and taking over in places like BBC and CNN and has been working with RED R3D footage natively for 3 releases, has the most versatile DPX handling capability of the mainstream edit systems with CS5, and has been loading preceding versions files back 6, 7 and 8 versions as well as loading FCP7 projects when Apple’s own current product won’t even do that…
Please… Once you’ve tried it and see the tools you need are in there…take the time to design a current, clean system to run a PPro/CS5.5 system in 2011 in the same way you did FCP in 2006…THEN tell us how the software performs.
Remember, there are quite a few of us over here helping you guys adapt who made the choice to use Adobe instead of FCP long ago…there are reasons why we did that.
Nothing personal intended toward Keith here as I think he wrote out what many are thinking.
I just felt like some of these posts are passing a lot of judgement with very little experience with the product.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Tim, thanks for the long post and no offense taken, you’ve been really helpful to me in this forum about many issues. Do you currently edit with Mac OS X and Premiere Pro CS 5 or 5.5? It sounds like you don’t, but let me know and if so let me know how you think it performs vs a Windows system. I’m betting that the Windows Premiere Pro performs better with equivalent hardware, which is what I was trying to say in my post.
I’m a ‘switcher,’ that is about a year ago I got fed up with Apple’s FCP and their 4 year old obsolete software and heard reports from other ‘switchers,’ such as Chris Fenwick and others were using Premiere Pro instead of FCP. I got tired of the endless, buggy and unpredictable behavior with FCP as well as it depending on underlying technology (Quicktime) that was great in the 90’s but was limiting it’s ability to do much with new codecs. I was starting to use all kinds of codecs and multi-cam shoots that needed to be transcoded for FCP to work with them, and I could see that the time this was taking as well as as the hard drive space was going to become unmanageable.
I’m actually a very strong proponent of Premiere Pro. Though my main editing system is Mac Pro is a 2008 model, it is an 8 core top of the line, and I enhanced it with a SSD boot drive as well as 24GB of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4000 to help Premiere Pro’s CUDA performance. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t believe in Adobe Premiere Pro. I’ve invested big bucks in the ecosystem. And when Apple comes out with new Mac Pro that supports Thunderbolt, I will be upgrading (if they ever do release another Mac Pro.)
When I go over to help fellow filmmakers and editors with their FCP systems because I’m regarded as somewhat of a technical expert, I recommend they try out Premiere pro, they would be a lot more productive. When they mention how many Hollywood features have been cut with FCP, I say, “Yes, and those editors also had an army of assistant editors to keep the FCP cut from crashing altogether with string and bailing wire, you don’t, so you’re on your own with FCP and you have to deal with it’s flakiness.”
I’m also, however a strong proponent of the Mac and Apple, always have been. Their recent resurgence and ridiculous popularity of late is a testament to the Apple / Mac quality and customer service. I don’t want to have to give up my Mac to have an optimal Premiere Pro experience, and I don’t think a lot of Mac users will want to either. So I know that Adobe reads these forums, and I’m trying to point out that as disenchanted Mac / FCP users try to move over to Premiere Pro, they will encounter these issues over and over, and it’s not necessarily because to their system that was optimized for FCP, some of it will be because the Mac version of Premiere Pro isn’t optimized yet by Adobe as it has been for Windows.
That being said, Premiere Pro and the whole CS suite is remarkable on any platform.
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Thanks for that Keith…
It sounds as if your system should have more than enough torque to be quite responsive…and I know there are Mac users who do not have runnability issues, so it’s not all Macs we’re talking about…
My colleagues who have told me that they wouldn’t switch to Windows OS on their macs…but it runs so much faster, now number 4 or 5, and far more I’ve encountered on forums in obviously a far less verifiable account of user perceptions on the topic.
I do know that Macs are a different animal running Adobe software, though Adobe engineers who I trust say the differences between Windows and Mac really are minor with each exhibiting slight advantages over the other in isolated areas.
I had an ad agency client recently that bought a new Intel quad core Mac Pro because they had a project that required rendering multiple versions of a specific video out with custom names placed in custom areas within the video that I set up in AE. They would replace the text in a source file in Photoshop, and the AE project would be re-rendered, etc.
Their Mac rendered that video so unbelievably slow that I was shocked. I did the test renders on an old AMD dual dual core 2220 BOXX machine that I have and rendered the viseo in something like 12 minutes…their system was hours. I left before it finished, but it was crazy…it should have been at least equal (ish) I would have thought…
I’m not a programmer, so I can’t speak to the problem directly, but the lag in response that I’ve seen now a couple times…that’s a conflict. That’s not slower functioning…that’s malfunctioning.
I have to believe that there is a conflict somewhere in the Mac systems that have the problem…certain hardware? Display cards? driver versions? Other Mac applications on the machines? A particular version of QT?…something.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Im on a
Mac Pro 3.1
Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz
OSX 10.6.7
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital Raid array clocked at 745 mps.& Areca controller
ATI 3870 Graphics card.
USB wired mouse
No blue tooth anythingNo lag with h.264 (but I do drop resolution to 1/2 resolution for real time playback)
No lag with full format red R3D files (also drop playback to 1/4 resolution for real time playback)
All other formats (Prores, P2, AVCHD, DVCPro HD, etc) playback fine at full resolutionTom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
I’ve just watched a youtube video which explains this laughable yet highly irritating bug. I’ve got a 6-core 2.93 mac pro and it sure as hell should not lag like it hasn’t on my much weaker previous macs. The answer is simple. Decrease the vertical size of your timeline and voila, problem solved. In the smaller timeline, files zip around at the speed of your mouse. Also, another glitchy thing is that if you make the size of the timeline the vertical size of your screen, the lag disappears again.
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