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Premiere Very Sluggish
Hello.
So I just switched to PPCS5.5 from FCP7 – I’m an experienced editor looking for a few pointers in the new workspace.
So my main question is whether the sluggish response I am getting in PP is normal.
It seems way, way, slower than FCP in the response time it gives me just when traversing the timeline.
Scrubbing, clicking my CTI to a different point in the timeline and even pressing play give me a delayed (sometimes several seconds) response.
Also when bringing in DSLR footage – which is mostly what I work with, it takes forever until I can actually edit. I get a “Conforming (filename)” message while it goes through each file. Literally takes 10-20 minutest to do that.
I have an 8 core Mac Pro with 12 GB ram… the most beefy mac money could buy when I got it a year ago.
Running Lion.
The reason I made the switch was because of Adobe’s marketing that PP can edit the H264 QT’s from my Canon 5D natively.
I am creating the sequences by dragging the footage to the “create new comp” icon, so I think the settings are all auto-created.
Please someone tell me this is not normal….
Thanks
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9 Replies
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Hi Joseph,
HD files in the H.264 format require a lot of overhead for playback. I have more experience on the PC side, but I’m sure that adding a Quadro 4000 for Mac display card would help greatly by enabling the GPU-acceleration in the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine. That’s been my experience on the PC side, huge difference in performance with the right GPU.
As for the conforming, that is for the audio. The video is not transcoded, as FCP always did, but the audio must be standardized internally. It should only do this once, the first time you load the clips.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Joseph,
I would also look at your drive setup. Premiere deals with footage differently than FCP does. In fact, FCP mostly deals with Prores vs native footage in Pr. A good RAID setup is the norm to get fluid HD work done in Premiere.
For single machines, we use Caldigit HDelements in RAID 5 and playback is instant and realtime, even with uncompressed HD on either Mac or PC.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Vince….
with files so compressed….
Is spindle speed less of a concern when using ftg from DSLR’s?
Alex
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OK.. so the only way to edit native h264 in real time is by purchasing an expensive video card?
I suddenly feel a little cheated by Adobe’s marketing.
Thanks
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That doesn’t sound right.
GFX hardware should not be affecting decode or Pixel aspect ratio conversions.
That should be all all CPU.
GFX would be affecting FX over standard editorial.
Where does your media live on your system?
Alex
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If you can’t get anywhere I would suggest a fresh install of Snow Leopard and fresh install of CS5.5 on another drive or partition. You should be getting better than that. You don’t really need much of a RAID for DSLR files as they are pretty compressed. My files zip right in. PPro is not as zippy as FCP but something is wrong with those kinds of times.
As for Cuda I think Adobe is pretty clear about it. It makes things faster but it’s not make or break. But if you do decide to go with a Cuda board I’d recommend a GTX 285 from Ebay. Around $380 and very similar if not better performance than a Quaddro for less than half the cost.
The way to look at Premiere is editing software that is taking advantage of state of the art hardware so that means it’s a little more narrow as to what it works well on. But a year old 8 core is totally enough.
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Hi Joseph,
are you using AJA or some other external video output? Premiere Pro gets much laggier and unresponsive with many things when you’re using video output. Without external video it runs very smoothly for me. Also coming from FCP7 + AJA land this external video lagging is big minus for me.
Best
Tapio HaajaOn-Air Promotion Producer
https://avseikkailuja.blogspot.com/ -
[Alex Udell] “GFX hardware should not be affecting decode or Pixel aspect ratio conversions.”
Actually, CUDA support has been employed in CS5.5 for pixel aspect and scaling conversions as well as framerate mismatches, etc.
Even so, the main decode is still CPU based as Alex said. However, once you start placing any effects on the footage (like color correction) having a CUDA capable card in the machine takes the effects load off the CPU to free it up to do more decode work.
In the playback settings, you may want to see if you can gain any speed by dropping to half res on playback, which will reduce the load a bit more.
Handling these extremely compressed formats takes horsepower no matter how you slice it, and DSLR and AVCHD are both a load. All that said, I don’t typically see the sort of lag you’re describing in my 4 core AMD machine…so I would think you should be able to move through the footage without that much difficulty…keep in mind that Adobe needs QT 7.6x on the system to run, QTX is not supported at this time.
And BTW, CUDA video cards aren’t all expensive…check the Adobe list. There are gamer cards on that list as well. You don’t have to buy the professional display card models if you don’t want to.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Please install the Premiere Pro CS5.5 (5.5.1) update and let us know how things work after that. There are a lot of fixes for performance issues in this update.
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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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