back again, guess why

[Tim Kolb]

[Jason Harris] “i often wonder how Adobe can continue to call its products PROFESSIONAL when they work so poorly,

yes i suppose if you bought the biggest and baddest hardware you might see SOME diffference, but the sad truth is adobe has been lying to its customers for years,”

Sounds like you’re seriously undergunned in the hardware department then? “Lying” is a strong charge. No question? Just the rant?

Not every tool works for every person of course, but I run CS4 on a beefy 32 bit XP Pro (2 cores) laptop with 2 GB of RAM when I’m traveling. This computer shouldn’t really even run CS4, but I’ve edited several programs on it without issue other than cutting EX1 HD footage on a laptop with an external USB harddrive has some lag in response. No crashing though.

The Media Encoder in CS4 seems fairly efficient…on a machine that is designed for it.

If you want some advice about how to get better results out of Adobe products, ask away.

If that advice in the past has been that you need better hardware to run the software efficiently…then it sounds like you might have chosen to pass on that advice.

If someone bought Avid Media Composer or Apple Final Cut Pro and they had a big-iron computer spec to run the software in an ideal way, people would buy it without question, but when Adobe doesn’t run super fast and stable under heavy processing loads (like encoding) on the minimum runnable system specified on the box, lots of users cry foul. I don’t understand.

Everybody likes having all that software bundled together inexpensively (less than I paid for AE alone 10 years ago), but the expectation is that it should run on a commensurately inexpensive computer platform…and that is simply not the case.

Next time around, when CS5 goes 64 bit only, I’m assuming that things will get even better as they can concentrate on one configuration and leave behind much of the potential for installation on a system that simply isn’t up to the task due to age or under-configuration.

No software is perfect and Adobe has issues to solve without a doubt, but I’ve been running Adobe as my primary post tools since 2000, and it simply needs big hardware to run at it’s best.

So…tell us what your hardware configuration is, along with your project settings…otherwise your comments have no context.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Vince Becquiot]

Great points as always Tim.

I think CS5 does offer hope in eliminating old hardware support requirement, and I think it will do much much to improve speed and reliability, but on the right hardware, we find the suite to be very reliable given the number of possibilities in hardware configuration.

Yes, with Adobe, you get the freedom to run the suite on about anything you want, no popups telling you you can’t install with that integrated audio card, or that cheap motherboard x company bundled with that Intel Core 2 Quad at $699 (Call now and we’ll throw in a 24″ flat panel).

If you look at the actual hardware recommendations on the Adobe site, you will find that building a stable system is possible, yet you have relatively few choices.

If you if you do this for a living, you really should follow that advice.

[Jason Harris] “Its not really to surprsiing though, i am sure the majority of people stopped BUYING these products a couple years ago, there are other ways to get them now, and you DO get what you pay for”

It sounds like you are saying that since it doesn’t work for you, you might as well pirate it. I guess I won’t go there…

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Jason Harris]

I appreciate the replys,

12 hours later i have a beautifully done flv file

YAAAYYY adobe

when i get a bit more patience i will post ALL THE DETAILS and maybe we CAN figure out what happend

I DONT PIRATE

[Joe Moya]

Agree… without specifics… a post like this only becomes a rant…

However, to take the edge off of the original post… I have posted my specific issues with Prem Pro in the past but it hasn’t help… and this is also true even when I attempted to get help from Adobe’s technical “support”.

As far as Adobe not working because of substandard hardware… I beg to differ. Below are my specs and I have NEVER been able to get Adobe to work well with HD files. Instead, to make PP work I have to dumb down the codec before editing with PP… which is why I don’t use it as an editing software.

All that being said, I do wish Adobe could find solutions to the many problems with Prem Pro and HD editing before they create a 64bit ONLY NLE and make third party 32bit plug-ins obsolete. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt so much to buy the Production Premium Package if Prem Pro worked as efficiently and effectively as certain other professional level software.

System specs:
WinXP, ASUS W6T6 WS Rev., Intel i7 3.2Ghz 8X32bit CPU, 6G Corsair DDR3 (low lat.) RAM, GeForce GTX 280, LG DVD, Realtek AC97 Aud., Adaptec 5405 RAID SAS controller for 2 Stripes of 2xHD 15k rpm Fujitsu 300G ea., 2×20″Samsung 204t

[Vince Becquiot]

Incompatible is equally important. You have an integrated sound card for example. In fact, one of our system had consistent issues with audio filters causing crashes on this exact card until we added an M-audio system.

Many people build a gamer’s system instead of building a system geared for editing. The 2 are very different.

We have consistently built based on recommendations from the Adobe site and our current i7 system has been very stable with professional formats. I can’t tell you how it will do with the latest camcorder from Best Buy and I doubt Adobe could either…

Premiere is not perfect, but there is no doubt that it gives you the best bang for your bucks on the PC side.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Tim Kolb]

[Joe Moya] “As far as Adobe not working because of substandard hardware… I beg to differ. Below are my specs and I have NEVER been able to get Adobe to work well with HD files.”

You have an integrated sound card, a gamer display card, and even though you have 6 GB of RAM, 32 bit WinXP only makes available 2.5 at the most and PPro needs serious RAM…it just does. If you are not on a 64 bit OS with 8 GB of RAM minimum, you simply cannot say you have a powerful system in the context of CS4…or actually even CS3.

Even 32 bit PPro wants 4 GB of RAM…and no 32 bit system is capable of making that available, many can’t even make half of that available after the system takes its share. Open up Photoshop and AE for some dynamic linking (which each wants 4 GB of its own BTW) and now you have 3 RAM-heavy apps sharing a very limited amount of resources.

So even 32 bit CS4 and CS3 benefit substantially from running a 64 bit OS and more recognized, installed RAM.

As I said, (and I’m NOT recommending this…) I’ve been editing EX1 files in CS4 on a WinXP laptop with 2 Gigs of RAM (but a Mobile Quadro 2500 display card) and other than the computer being seriously taxed and external USB drives being a little sluggish to respond from time to time, I’ve had no issues to speak of (Panda Antivirus was a problem when I first got CS4, but that was easy to solve…switched to McAfee)…certainly no crashing or malfunctioning.

As I’ve said before…I think Adobe has made this software so inexpensive that it gives some people the impression they can run it on a relatively moderate computer platform. It’s a powerful set of applications (whether they are your favorite applications or not is irrelevant) and they need serious, serious system resources to operate properly.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Joe Moya]

I’ve never had problems with audio and Prem Pro. And, this is a designated editing machine… and, I don’t even own any video games.

I am not sure if you looked at the ASUS specs for this Mobo… but, this is not a gamer machine (exclusively) although I can see how it could be used that way… plus, I don’t know of any gamer machine that uses Adaptec Raid Controllers to set up Raid 0 setups with 15k rpm Fujitsu e-sata drives. I don’t think there is much demand for gaming machines to have multi-hard drive raid setups… which I use as render/scratch designated drives.

This machine works fine with AVID (both MC and Liquid), VEGA and All Adobe software except Premier Pro. …Not to mention C4D and Blender.

Specifically, all my problems with PPro revolve around rendering… it constantly fails to render and I get the Media Pending screen. The render failure occurs at random. After many months of messing with PPro, reading the manual, searching the web for answers and waiting for upgrades, I came to the conclusion that PPro does NOT work well with m2t files.

Also, the more complex the edit, the less likely PPro works. It is unreliable when working with HD video files, many third party plug-ins and complex multitrack edits. It doesn’t crash too frequently but it almost never can successfully render a work area with any degree of success and frequently freezes. While on the otherhand, I have not had ANY freezes/crashes for many months with AVID Liquid or VEGA and they work natively with m2t’s (…while it appears to me that PPro only claims to work natively with m2t files).

I really wished Adobe PPro would play well with HD file formats… but, I can’t give it any points in the category of HD editing.

[Tim Kolb]

[Joe Moya] “This machine works fine with AVID (both MC and Liquid), VEGA and All Adobe software except Premier Pro. …Not to mention C4D and Blender.”

I haven’t done any HDV native in a long time, so I can’t speak directly to that. The EXcam stuff I’ve done seems fine and that’s also long GOP and higher data rate, but it’s an MP4 wrapper…

I will say that C4D and Blender are both applications that use up a computer system in a completely different way than an NLE will. Those two apps have so much less interaction with the various systems in your machine than an editing system will that you can’t really use them as a benchmark.

As far as Avid and Vegas are concerned, keep in mind that when you launch PPro, you’re launching a background app for Photoshop and a dynamic link manager, an importer, etc., and those are using resources. Most NLEs don’t have as much other stuff running in the background.

I’ve long been an advocate of giving the user a switch for the beginning of the session…(Dynamic Link ON/OFF) so that PPro could just run like an editor, but I’m guessing this isn’t possible.

How big are your page files getting during a session? This usually seems to be the catch on most systems…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Joe Moya]

I didn’t know that CS4 used 64bit… I looked at the specs and don’t see any mention of it being a 64bit application. In fact, it doesn’t even use the 8 processors available… it will use only 4 (or at least I am assuming this since that is what the max processors AE will use).

I don’t think RAM is the problem (nor should limit rendering capacity)… case and point… AVID and VEGA use the limits of 32bit ram of 3G (if you use the /3G command) or 2.5G… they use an effective memory cache system with HD’s as the source for additional memory space. In which case really fast hard drives set up in multi-arrays come in really handy. So… in the case of 32bit with XP, faster HD drives make up the difference in the RAM limitations of 32 bit Windows. In that case, the raid setup I use is just about the fastest setup than can achieved for less than 1,500 dollars.

As for RAM… I have 6G of RAM because the i7 mobo uses a 3X2 gig RAM setup for the mobo… the i7 boards like to use 3,6,12 combinations of RAM. I didn’t put more RAM on the board expecting the use of that addtional RAM… thats just how the mobo is designed.

In this respect… REALLY fast raid structure that use I/O of 2 e-sata HD per raid 0 setup means I have 4 times the I/O channels used in combination with a very fast raid controller with the fastest HD’s made to date. To put this into perspective…. these 300G Fujitsu will do a FULL format in about 40 seconds (yea… I said it takes 40 seconds to do a FULL format). Now… that is fast.

All this being said,… the problem is NOT the Prem Pro is Slow… and, that I have a slow system. The problem is that PPRo CAN NOT render successfully most m2t files. While this is not a problem with other editing software.

If I don’t have a powerful system in the context of CS3 or CS4, then Adobe will have some serious problems when they move to the 64 bit system because this is a 1st generation 64bit compatible mobo that simply needs to move to Win7 64bit software upgrade.

[Joe Moya]

As far as Avid and Vegas are concerned, keep in mind that when you launch PPro, you’re launching a background app for Photoshop and a dynamic link manager, an importer, etc., and those are using resources. Most NLEs don’t have as much other stuff running in the background.

I think you have something with this idea of background dll’s causing problems…

As for my page sizes using m2t files during render, (which I noticed PPro used ALL 8 CPU’s… not 4 like in AE)PPro was 2.01 Gigs. or 40% of total available (or 66% of executable RAM).. and uses about 75% of total CPU. And the overhead never gets above 81% of CPU or 45% of total page size available. Based on that, I have plenty of overhead to handle an uncompressed m2t file. And, during my test to see how much resources were being used… the Media Pending gold screen shows up with the green bar showing complete and the m2t file fails to render – a very typical results.

I just don’t believe this is a system issue… but, rather an Adobe issue… the only verification has come from a fellow editor who said he had the same problem and did pretty much what I did… just avoid using Prem Pro and sticks with Avid to edit m2t’s and 2K files. I am curious whether anyone else has this problem but just gave trying to solve this problem… or… they figured out a solution… but, I be darn if I can find any post referencing a solution.