Brand new Mac Pro, Premiere CC 2015 crashes and bugs out often

[David Roth weiss]

Brett, unless you want us to make random guesses, you’ll have to give us some specifics you left out…

1) what is the camera original you’re trying to edit? (Codec, pixel dimensions, frame rate)

2) what are your sequence settings? (a screen grab would be best)

3) what type of media drive(s) or RAID are you using for video storage?

You always need to provide this info in the future, otherwise it forces us to ask, which is totally inefficient. Okay?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Brett Hansen]

Hey David, sorry about the lack of info. Im a newb when it comes to posting to the forums…

1) 1920×1080 H.264 30fps shot on canon T3i

2)

3) Lacie 6 Tb thunderbolt drive Raid 1 (~80% full)

[David Roth weiss]

Okay Brett, it was good you supplied that info, because as I suspected you have a few things set improperly that are impacting your system performance, and may be the source of your issues.

1) In System Settings, make the following changes:

a) change Pixel Aspect Ratio from HD Anamorphic to Square
b) change Fields from Upper Field First to None
c) change Preview File Format from I-Frame Only MPEG to QT
d) change Codec from MPEG-I Frame to ProRes 422

That should do the trick for starters, unless you somehow transcoded your camera original improperly. thus creating interlaced anamorphic video files. (***For future reference, ALL DLSRs shoot progressive (non-interlaced) frames, so whenever you fields stating upper or lower you should know immediately that you went wrong somewhere.)

And, almost all modern cameras shoot square pixels these days, anamorphic was a trick for producing HD at lower bitrates in the days before computers became as powerful as they are now, and before hard drives got as cheap as they are now.

And that last part is the perfect segue into my last bit of wisdom, which is to tell you that RAID 1 is a total waste of money and performance for those editing video. You are using your most expensive storage, chucking out half the capacity and half the performance in the name of security. You’d do much better to configure that RAID at RAID 0, which will double its performance, because every time you double the number of disks in a RAID array you double its performance. Of course, your media will be vulnerable, and you’ll need to back it up, but you can get a large bare drive (4Tb $150) and a hard drive dock ($29) for very inexpensive backup, instead of wasting the performance and capacity of the RAID, which you paid for.
***(see: eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock)

[Brett Hansen]

Thanks David!

I was able to do A& B, but with the editing mode set to Sony XDCAM or even DSLR I was unable to change the video preview settings…

So i switched it to Custom and I was able to change them…

Is “custom” the proper setting for the editing mode or do you suggest a different mode?

*Thanks for the suggestion about getting a HD dock and switching to RAID 0, but my company is in the process of setting up a SAN to edit off of so the Lacie drive is just a temporary workflow. Hopefully the sequence settings will do the trick…

[David Roth weiss]

You’re just fine selecting “custom” in the seq settings… That whole preset thing is a bit wonkier than it should be at this point anyway, hence the fact that Premiere defaults to the I-Frame MPEG Video Preview setting, which should be interpreted as a warning to all that the particular preset chosen has really NOT been fully configured.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Steve Connor]

What OS is it running?

[Brett Hansen]

OS 10.10