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8GB RAM not enough to run Premiere and MPlayerX on MBP?
I upgraded my MBP to 8GB RAM in order to have a more smooth workflow running Premiere and MPlayerX for Video editing. After I watched several clips with MPLayerX and started to import them into Premiere and start to edit them, I can see on Activity Monitor, that the 8GB RAM are nearly fully used and the computer starts to go very slow. In Premiere you can choose to use only up to 6GB of RAM and leave the rest for other applications. I did that obviously, but nothing has changed. It cannot be true that 8GB is not enough to run the system. I have to admit that I am working with quiet high Bitrates HD footage (AVCHD files around 40Mbps), but thats not even top of the range. So, to live with that for now I have always to quit MPlayerX or Premiere or even restart the computer to free my RAM again. Its very annoying. Anybody knows what I am doing wrong? Cheers
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3 Replies
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Which version of the MBP are you running? What year model? ie. I have 8GBs of RAM on my latest model MBP 2.7 i7 but it does not have the high end graphics card in it. Seems to be speedy enough, given the usual caveats. I don’t use it for production use though. I am not using Mplayerx though. The low end MBP (like I have) is not a good choice, even with 8GBs of RAM, for editing HD footage on a regular basis. Not a good enough graphics card, nor internal drive. I bought mine knowing I would use a desktop for editing.
You don’t mention if you are on 5.5 or not. There may be upgrades needed to fix the problem, if it is Pr causing your slowness. You also don’t mention if you have your work on an external drive. The internal drive on my machine is only 5400 RPMs which is not the kind of speed you want to edit HD.
Fully loaded into RAM on my Mac, Pr only takes 346MB of RAM before loading a lot of footage in (I have loaded just a bit of AVCHD footage to trial it).
The OS is using, in total 7.6 GBs of RAM, but that’s normal. That’s actually including other programs I’m running with some free memory available. It’s not being hogged by Pr. Pr will use it as it needs it, I assume.
Make sure you don’t have a lot of background or other programs running, like the browser. Safari and Flash together take more RAM that Pr.
Al
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AVCHD isn’t an optimized editing codec. Because of its file structure (and most long GOP variations of h.264 encoding) when you watch one frame, your computer is actually decoding a number of frames. In layman’s terms, most frames in AVCHD are partial frames, only showing what has changed from one frame to another so it takes a group of them to create the frame you’re seeking to.
There are two ways to go about this. If Premiere runs fine on its own, why are you not ingesting and just watching your footage in Premiere?
Secondly, consider transcoding your footage to a more edit friendly codec like Avid DNxHD. The codec is free https://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=263545
Sure you’ll need more hard drive space for the transcoded footage but it takes less processing power to deal with and because the codec is quicktime compatible you should be able to preview your footage in Quicktime Player if you so choose to do so outside of Premiere.
Angelo
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Thanks Al Bergstein and Angelo Lorenzo for your replies. I just found the solution of the problem, which is obviously a huge problem of the Apple Lion users. Lion does not free the RAM after having used it. In the activity monitor you can see that suddenly all your beautiful RAM system memory is filled up with “inactive memory” (blue color). And suddenly your machine slows down radically, because there is no free system memory available. Lion does not reactivate the inactive memory, the devil knows why. So your machine becomes useless, if you don’t restart it. A lot of people have this problem, may be has to do with the fact that applications in Lion run on 64bits instead of 32bits unnecesserely. Solutions are:
1) Restart you computer
2) Repair disk permissions
3) THE BEST: Open Terminal and type “purge” enter/return, problem is resolved immediately.
Cheers
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