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Lag and sluggishness with complex timelines in Premiere CC
We’re an independent production company editing long form documentaries. We do the offline in house and outsource our online.
We’ve moved recently from FCP7 to Premiere. Currently using 7.2.3 and 7.2.2 on some older projects and CC 2014 on some newer projects.
The sequences will typically be around 50 minutes long and setup as 1080i/25 ProRes 422. We edit with in HD native formats from the following cameras:
F55 (90% of timeline)
GoPro
5D
XF305
BlackMagic (ProRes)With all our machines I’m having problems with long timelines. When projects are small and timelines are short everything is fine. But as soon as the project gets big with long timelines and multiple codecs things get very difficult, especially when fully zoomed out on a timeline. Pretty much everything relating to sequences is sluggish, playback, moving clips, copying and pasting, right clicking sequences, resizing windows. Normal menus, media browser and the rest of the system seems to work fine.
Is anyone else experiencing this with either 7.2.2/7.2.3/2014? Is my setup wrong somehow?
System Specs
Model: Mid 2010 Mac Pro
Processor: 2 x 2.9GHz 6 Core Xeon
Memory: 32GB
GUI GPU: nVidia GeForce 120
CUDA GPU: nVidia GTX 680
Internal SSD for OS and Project on Desktop: 240GB SSD (Around 80GB free)
Internal HDD for Cache: 2TB 7200RPM (Around 1.7TB Free)
External HDD for Project Backups and Rushes: G-RAID (RAID 0) 8TB with 2TB free (USB3)
OS: 10.9.2We have 10 mac pros in all and several different projects which all have similar issues. They all have their own quirks which cause crashes occasionally but they all share this issue with sluggishness with long timelines.
Specs of other machines
Model: Earl 2009 or Mid 2010 Mac Pro
Processor: 2 x 2.4GHz or 2 x 2.66GHz Quad Core Westmere/Xeon/Nelahem
Memory: 32GB
GPU: nVidia GTX 680
Internal SSD: 240GB
Cache HDD: Internal 1TB/2TB 7200RPM
External HDD for Rushes: G-Tech G-RAID 0 4TB/8TB
OS: 10.9.2Is this being caused by our storage? We’re getting an 80TB DDP soon which I hope will help out a little.
If not I’m thinking we should be simplifying our codecs and trying to switch all our non-XAVC media to ProRes Proxy. Bit annoying though as part of the reason to move to Premiere was to edit natively!
Any thoughts or help most appreciated!
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13 Replies
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I’ve never had a problem with long complex timelines with multiple codecs and thousands of edits. Your storage speed is the likely problem. I use a 12 channel internal Areca controller on a x8 pcie slot.
David
https://AllinOneFilms.com -
So I’m guessing the storage could cause problems in a few ways. The biggest problem would be if your connection speed was not fast enough (say trying to stream 5-6 streams of XAVC HD through a USB 2.0 connection) or if the drives weren’t fast enough (but 7200RPM should be plenty).
We’re connecting through USB 3.0 which should give us plenty of streams. This seems to be the case as we don’t generally have dropped frames during playback.
But is there something more complicated relating to buffering that occurs when you view an entire timeline? Is it trying to access media from across the whole sequence and therefore trying to access multiple parts of a disk containing rushes? If that’s the case we should see improvements in performance moving to something like RAID 5/6.
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First of all I don’t think you can depend on usb3 to give you consistent media access times. It
s great for storing and transferring large amounts of material but that’s all. You need a fast TB or internal PCIe raid controller on each of your individual machines if you’re working with large complex timelines. Raid 6 is always preferred over 5 if you have the drive numbers to allow 2 for redundancy.David
https://AllinOneFilms.com -
Sorry just to be clear the codecs for those cameras are:
F55 – XAVC HD
GoPro/5D – H264
BlackMagic – ProRes
XF305 – XDCAM HD -
USB3 can give you 180 to 200MB/s but the latency for the drives is far higher than internal drives. That is where the sluggishness occurs when reading multiple streams/files. A internal raid 0 or SAS storage would be far better for this. The USB3 should be used for archive or mobile storage/work drives with laptops.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com -
Concur the setup you have for Disk I/O is inadequate.
Here I have the media cache and media source folders on Raid 5 arrays.
4gb fiber channel (one room) and Pci-express direct connected (another room)Never had any sluggish performance.
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Try to deactivate “show duplicate frame markers” in the timeline wrench Menu.
You Can also try to deactivate “display out of sync indicators for unlinked clips” in General tab of The precerences.
This helped us a LOT when working on longer Timelines.Nils Welter
Adobe Certified Instructor – Premiere ProCBC Cologne Broadcasting Center
Cologne, Germany -
The 2009 & 2010 Mac Pro’s didn’t even come with USB3.0 ports, so unless your plugging in a PCI Express USB3.0 card, you won’t see the speed difference with all your media.
Andy Edwards
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Hi Andy,
Yes we installed a PCIe USB3.0/eSata card in all our machines.
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That’s good to know because we are already planning to fix it. We’ll be connecting to the RAID via a 1GBe connection (possible 2 x 1GBe if that’s possible). We didn’t think it was necessary to go to 10GBe. I’m guessing that will be enough for a few streams of XAVC HD. The disk access speed of a RAID 5 should be what gives us the best improvement I’m hoping.
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