• Adobe Premiere Pro

  DSLR footage – playback frae rate slows

  Posted by Paul Stroud on March 2, 2012 at 4:51 pm

  So I’ve got the native h264 footage from my 550d on the PremPro timeline. It plays well in most cases for a few seconds, but then stutters as the frame rate drops.

  It feels like it’s just not pulling it off the hard drive quick enough, but as it’s h264 I guess that’s not what’s actually happening? Hard drive is a 1TB 7200rpm

  I’ll consider using in intermediate codec if it’ll solve the problem, but thought I’d check with you guys to see if it would help.

  And I’ll consider setting up a raid array too.

  Playing back at 1/4 res doesn’t seem to be helping at all

  Quad core 2.6
  GTX 285

  Any thoughts?

  I know that transcoding and DSLR playback has been talked about a lot with regards to PP, but I just can’t find a straight answer

  Many thanks

  http://www.paulstroudmusic.co.uk
  http://www.stroudandcroft.co.uk
  myspace/paulstroudmusic

  John-michael Seng-wheeler replied 14 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Ryan Holmes

  March 2, 2012 at 6:11 pm

  How is the hard drive attached? Firewire? USB? Internal?

  Is the footage sitting on the boot drive of the machine?

  How full is the hard drive? (430GB of a 500GB drive). A full hard drive has a harder time serving up fast video.

  If you move to an intermediate codec I would recommend either Apple ProRes or DNxHD depending on where else you may be moving the footage (Avid, FCP, Resolve, Smoke, After Effects, etc.).

  Ryan Holmes
  http://www.ryanholmes.com
  vimeo.com/ryanholmes
• 

  Paul Stroud

  March 3, 2012 at 12:17 pm

  Thanks Ryan,

  The Hard drive is internal – SATA II and I guess it is a little full 360GB of a 400GB partition. It is the 1st partition on the disk btw. NOT on the boot. Footage is staying in PremPro and AE

  It’s H.264 straight from the 550D though, so I’m not certain throughput is the issue but then may be it is I don’t know?

  2 things I’ve noticed:

  Unsurprisingly, a long clip on the timeline is easy to play back, but lots of short ones from different files is a struggle. (I’m doing a fast paced music video so there are a lot of cuts)

  Surprisingly, playback seemed to continue for longer without stuttering with mercury playback set to software NOT hardware.

  Perhaps the CPU is better at decoding H264 than the GPU?

  I guess I’ll just have to try an intermediate codec to see if that helps. There’s sooo many conflicting opinions on this front. Adobe will have you believe you’ll never need to transcode every again and others seem to think this is a nonsense.

  If that doesn’t work then may be the Raid array is worth a try
• 

  John-michael Seng-wheeler

  March 5, 2012 at 6:00 pm

  How much RAM do you have?

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