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A Series of unfortunate events.
So. Ill premise this by saying im sure this is my fault for trusting adobe software again. Oh and yes i would love to hear from Adobe on this one.
Anyway, we make documentaries. Nothing too far out, lots of people do. Generally we like to use Final Cut, its reliable, fast, efficient; and plainly we can TRUST IT.
This last week however, has been a very different week; our client had done his offline in Premiere. “No big deal” we thought, we can work with it, having Premiere ourselves; and proceeded to load up the project.
Heres where it stops being a normal day.
25 minutes later!! The project finally loads and we can work on it.
For something that runs for 1 hour and 38 minutes.
Seriously Adobe ? How is this helping my workflow.
So day in day out for the last week ive had to wait 30 minutes give or take while this project loads before i can work on it, and you know, sometimes you just gotta wait right ? Sure, we let it slide and kept pounding away on the job.Eventually we got to the point where we needed to colour grade it, so we hit our export media button to send a nice big uncompressed mov out to colour. 2nd mistake.
Now on face value anyone working with 30 second commercials would find Adobe Media Encoder to be a fantastic value add to the software package, i myself think its quite handy but it suffers from one fatal flaw, as does Premiere, its designed for backyard editing, its not a professional piece of software. So were sending out to AME, lo and behold it needs to load the project too, 30 minute wait (see where this is going yet ?)
We finally get to the point where we can hit the start queue button and go and work on something else, so we go ahead and take the plunge.
“Loading Project” .. again ? 30 minute wait.Eventually the export starts, tells me its going to take 16 hours and i can walk away knowing the software will do its job and get my nice big uncompressed file out in one piece.
At some point during the day about 6 hours later i heard the edit suite reboot . . not a good sign. Went to check on it and it turns out AME had crashed windows. How? I have no idea.
So i had to start the export again, Load Premiere Project 30 minutes…. export to AME… 30 minutes.. leave the office at the end of the day and hope that the system was still running the next morning.It wasnt.
As per the day before, AME had crashed windows.
30 minutes later i had the project loaded up and im now exporting in 15 minute blocks from the timeline, because it appears that its just too hard for AME to export the whole timeline without bringing the system to its knees. In the end, im sure we will get there.My question to Adobe would be, where is your product aimed ?
Is it for professionals working on broadcast? Or Amateurs messing around with their DV camera ?Our work on this project has clearly displayed that your software cannot handle an hour and 38 HDTV 1080 50i project without so many kinks and long load times that it makes it almost impossible to have an uninterrupted workflow.
Ironically my boss yesterday loaded up a 3 hour HD timeline in Final Cut and it took about 5 minutes. I shudder to think how long it would take in premiere, which seems to take longer and longer the more time your project runs.Basically its indefensible, for people who are increasingly working with larger file sizes, higher resolutions and more of it this software fails to keep up. Consistently fails to deliver whats expected of it.
As for this job, as soon as the pieces are rendered out its staying in Final Cut, and we will no longer be recommending Premiere to our clients either.
Just for reference sake, our system is a Quad core 2.2Ghz AMD, 4Gig RAM, Geforce 9800GT Graphics, 2TB SATA RAID Running Vista 64bit
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
24 Replies
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Hi Peter,
That does sound bad, but nothing really familiar. I for one often work on long form projects and all my projects load in less then 30 second, in most case less than 10. We are talking about a mix of DVCPro HD and 1080P Quicktime Animation from AE chroma key for many of our projects.
Your specs sound in the right range. What else is on the machine?
Is this a custom built? If not what model?
I can’t say that I’m a big fan of AMD after my past dealings with hardware issues but we all have our preferences…
25 minutes loading time on a 1 hour project and most of us would be on FCP too 🙂
It sounds like there’s a bottleneck for Premiere somewhere…
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
the only hardware i forgot to mention is a decklink HD Extreme card,
the software installation was refreshed barely over 2 weeks ago, including the OSthe machine is custom built
im more inclined to believe that the issue lies with the software though, the same project was loaded on another machine here and had the same load time issues
so we can recreate it
seems to occur once a project has a large amount of media in it, as well as a complex sequence
this particular project file is 58Mb in size, just for the project file
i did a little test and removed half the timeline, removed unused media from the project and saved it out to another file
then loaded it, and it seems that halving the media also halved the load timei believe it has something to do with premiere indexing the media on project load, which obviously cant be helped
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
It sounds like you may be running out of RAM. What does Task Manager say?
In CS3 with 4 GB RAM on 32-bit XP, I used to encounter low memory issues constantly with large HD projects. Closing unneeded timelines, switching the project window to list view, and turning timeline picons off seemed to help a bit. (Restart Premiere after changing these settings).
Now on CS4/64-bit Vista, and 8 GB RAM, those problems seem to have gone away. I just finished a three hour wedding shot on HDV (6 hours of source material), and the project loads in less than a minute. I edited the whole project over the course of a week, and burned a Blu-Ray disk with nary a crash.
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we thought it was ram too initially, but the performance of the software isnt hindered when its actually running
its only the excessive load times that are an issue~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
Peter:
If I wasn’t so heavily invested in PC hardware, I’d go to Final Cut before I finish this post. For long-form work, which I do, Premiere in all its versions is not ready for primetime–not by a very long shot. Truth be known, I can’t imagine their target market being pros working in anything other than perhaps tv spots or trailers or 10-12 minute corporate work.
I did a doc recently which had at one point over 5,000 clips in the bins. It was a 90 minute show, and to get through it, I had to break it up into several 10 to 15 minute portions. That was with Prem Pro 2 on an XP-64 box (the 32-bit side of that dual-boot sys, would choke one or two edits after loading). I’m now running CS4 on Vista 64. I’m working on a 1 hr show currently, but it has only about 100 clips in the bins. It loads within about 20 seconds, but scaling and repositioning clips, for example, is very, very slow. I’m running 8gb of RAM, a BMD HD Extreme card, 4tb of sata raid 5 with a nvidia 9800gt. I’m hopeful the next update from Adobe will address issues like yours, but I’m betting it won’t.
Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co -
Itd be nice Bill 🙂
But this particular problem i know has existed since CS3, maybe earlier ?
I completely agree though, PPRO isnt designed for longform complex projects, i highly doubt they even test it on anything more involved than a few clips in the timeline.
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
Here is a tip from another user. Might help.
I’m the winner =) Problems Solved by my self
by Aleksandrs Valters on Jan 28, 2009 at 6:50:32 am[first problem “Long idle time”] – Solution
Xmp Metadata!
Then you want to export project, what do you do? :
File/Export/Media…
“Export Settings” window is on your monitor
And now! Go to the little tab after tabs with[ ‘filters”format”video”audio”others’ ‘This small tab’ ]
and uncheck “Include Source xmp Metadata”
That’s all!
[second problem “Long idle time before file encoding in Media Encoder “] – solution
Your video files must be without xmp Metadata.
In my side all files was made by Aftereffects, but aftereffects by default put metadata to all rendered files. Uncheck before render.[third problem “Long time loading project”] – Solution
the same as solution of second problem.[plus] After removing xmp Metadata my Flash files drop ~30% of size (sample: 15 MB => 9 MB)
p.s. this is all about cs4 adobes software
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interesting.. ill give that a try now
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
I have had the same issue with CS3 and CS4: work with projects that need large selection of clips in project to work with. Making multiple timelines with different stories, copying from one to another, more or less “painting” with video. When I get a project with over a hundred clips, openning it calls for a coffee break or even breakfast.
Looking for ways to optimize performance myself, I saw that button for “Link xmp data” mentioned above and wondered…… Think I’ll do a “save as” with current project and unlink xmp, “save” again, shut down and reopen it and measure the amount of time to open and switch between projects.
One of my clients has his picture in the dictionary next to the word “Impatient” and I would love to not continue to induce more stress in his life every time we go from one edit job to another and he has to wait. Anything would help.
Might this “Unlinking” also help or eliminate all the RAID-reading that Premiere seems to do when opening bins or changing from text view to thumbnail view? That is also a time-sucker.
Anyone have any thoughts on what negative effects “unlinking” the xmp data might have? Since most of my work I call “MASH” editing, I don’t care if I retain all kinds of info on clips. Never need to go back and reload from tape in most cases, just buy more storage.
Thanks to everyone here for all your insights!
You never get hurt in the air!
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Ok, so, let me see…. Does unlinking the xmp data mean all the hours I spent adding keywords in Bridge is lost?
If that’s the case I would prefer to have a way to just ignore the xmp data in Premier.
Steve
Assembly Instruction Videos
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R/C Racing Event Coverage
https://www.pineforestmedia.com/info
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