Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 Media Management

[Aanarav Sareen]

I haven’t had any performance reduction with large clips and I frequently work with projects that have over 15 hours of footage.

Aanarav Sareen
premiere@asvideoproductions.com

[David Cherniack]

My experience with 45 hours of material for a documentary, a few thousand clips and 2 levels of sub-timelines: I’d prefer having 32 root canals.

Anyone starting a very large project should keep in mind the following:

Because media management is rudimetary and memory management is still not completely fixed, design your workflow so that you can easily split it up into multiple projects if you run into trouble. Keep sub-timelines to one layer or not at all. If you’re planning on re-ingesting your material at a higher rez, remember that all timelines in the project (whether sub or not) count as part of the project trim. Finally have a voodoo doll representing the architects of the software standing by. You may need it.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Victorypoint]

David, are your issues likely related to hardware or are you working with a pretty smoking machine? What kind of footage? Any add-ons (e.g. Aspect-HD, Matrox Axio, etc)? Any bottlenecks that should be avoided?

-AJ

[Troy Murison]

I have used PPro recently for projects with hundreds of individual clips, but the
timelines aren’t too long (10-ish minutes) without any hardware assist (DV).
My experience is mainly w/1.5, not 2.0 yet. I found that, in general, the number
of clips didn’t slow it down TOO much (except for loading the project on startup)
but the more versions I saved as seperate sequences, the more sluggish and more
tempramental it would get. After working for a while and producing several
versions of a cut by duplicating the sequence, then continuing in the new one,
I would get predictable crashes when either beginning to edit or trying to render
in the new sequence. A restart of PPro using it’s ‘copy’ of the project usually
righted the ship, but once this had happened in a project, every time I duped the
sequence and moved on, crash. This happened on several different projects.
But, I have to say my experience wasn’t too different (other than the crashes)
from other systems I have used (sluggishness-wise) given my particular project type.
Maybe slightly more sluggish than FCP, but I haven’t used 5.0.x for this type of
project. Avid systems on similar projects seem to be slightly better than FCP.
I found too that a regular (twice-ish daily) restart of PPro really helped if
it hadn’t already crashed from the ‘duping’ thing. The last project I did, I tried
deleting old sequences that weren’t relevant any more and that SEEMED to help a
little too (not with the dupe crash though, just sluggishness). The dupe crash
I mentioned is repeatable on different systems too BTW (at least for me). It may
be that a longer timeline with the density of cuts I have may get more sluggish
too, but I don’t know.

PPro’s bin structure with that many source clips really is limiting though for me.
Not being able to open more than one bin window is very frustrating,
especially when browsing bins as thumbnails. Just my .02!

-Troy Murison
Flyingspot, Seattle

[Mark Palmos]

[David Cherniack] “Keep sub-timelines to one layer or not at all.”

Hey there David,

do you mean keep it to one sub-timeline depth, or to have only one layer of source on a sub timeline?

[David Cherniack] “I’d prefer having 32 root canals.”

does that include an alpha canal?

later
mark

[David Cherniack]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in answering. I’ve been wrestling with the monster (PPro) and am writing this while the project is re-loading for the 4th time today. (it’s 10am)

Victory, I’m editing on an Axio running an HP 9300 with dual-dual 275 Opterons and 3 gigs of ram. It’s a smoking system and I hate to think what shape I’d be in if I was on anything less. The issue is the memory management architecture of PPro, nothing else. Adobe is well aware of the problem but has chosen not to completely fix it yet – I guess because it only effects those with really large projects or who are running lots of large graphics.

I can only re-iterate – if contemplating a large project proceed in a way that you can easily break it up. I began my project in 1.5 assuming that the memory management was so poor Adobe would fix it in 2.0. While they did improve it, it is no way completely fixed as my numerous restarts attest. As I’ve pointed out elsewhare Matrox provides a utility to monitor memory usage by PPro. I can usually see when I’m about to hit the wall and restart before PPro crashes.

They really have to fix this if they expect to be taken seriously by long formers. Would the time I save by Axio’s real time be worth the frustrations of PPro? I’m not sure but I have my doubts. The frustartions at this point in my project are immense and are starting to get me down.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[David Cherniack]

[Mark Palmos] “do you mean keep it to one sub-timeline depth, or to have only one layer of source on a sub timeline?”

I mean one sub-timeline in depth ie no subtimelins inside sub-timelines. That Helps PPro’s speed and memory management issues with long sub-timelines. It also allows relatively efficient trimming of projects. Unfortunately, with my double system sound in this project, I couldn’t do that. My 17 hours of interviews became 17 hours of subtimelines.

Alpha canals? They can be more painful than root canals.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Mark Palmos]

[David Cherniack] “Alpha canals? They can be more painful than root canals.”

yep, they hurt quite a bit, at least 8.

catcha later david,

mark.