-
Choppy Playback in Premiere CS5.5, Win 7 x64
Hello everyone. I’m new to this forum, and I’m not an expert with Premiere. However, I have been using it for several years and am not a total novice either.
I am experiencing extremely stuttered playback and I’m kind of at a loss of what to do. I’ve looked around on this forum, and I haven’t found anything concrete (either I’m missing it or the issues I’ve found are not the cause).
First, let’s get system specs out of the way so you know it’s not the issue.
Mainboard, CPU: EVGA E758 SLI Mainboard | i7 950 3.06 GHz (HT enabled)
RAM: 24GB RAM – Corsair Vengeance PC12800 (6x4GB)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 580 3GB
Audio: Focusrite Sapphire
HDD – System: 1.5 TB 7.2K RPM SATA 2
HDD – Audio Samples: 1 TB 7.2K RPM SATA 2
HDD – Video Files: Freshly setup 4TB (Raid 5) via Sans Digital TR5M (5 x 1 TB 7.2K RPM SATA 2). Also tried it as 2TB Raid 10 with a hot spare (same drives)
PSU: PCP&C Turbo-Cool 1KW
Monitor: 30″ Dell 3007WFPHC @ 2560×1600
Case: Lian-Li PC-P80 Full Tower CaseFor Software, I’m running Premiere Pro CS 5.5, fully updated, and my media files are all 1920x1080p, 29.97 fps, using the CineForm HD Codec. I’m using Windows 7 64 bit.
I’m not sure why I can’t even get basic playback. This has been an issue for a while, but after upgrading my hardware, it’s not gotten any better.
If I open the media files and just play them in windows, they play fine. I can even open four at a time and have them all playing with no problem.
When I play a single clip of video in a timeline, I get choppy playback when it’s at 100% zoom level, and I have to put it down to 25% to get smooth playback. If I layer 3 videos over each other with the opacity turned down, I get around 1 fps.
The most complex sequence I had setup was three different 1080p files layered on top of each other, each had the GPU accelerated alpha effect, and one of them with a GPU accelerated noise effect.
I monitored the system resources while playing this stream back (still 1fps or so). The only resource that was remotely taxed was the i7, at around 40-60% evenly distributed across the 8 logical cores. No core ever hit 100%.
I’m assuming I have software issues somewhere, but I don’t know what they are.
720P files play more smoothly, but not perfect.
Any help any one can offer would be greatly appreciated. Just ask if there is info you need to help clarify. Thanks very much!!
-
5 Replies
-
Make sure that you actually installed the latest updates. The Premiere Pro CS5.5 (5.5.1) update was released only hours ago.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
——————————————————————————————————— -
Hi Todd, and thank you for the note about the update. I was not seeing this in the update software (going to Help -> Updates while in Premiere). I tried to get After Effects 10.5.1 update, but there are no CS5.5 updates listed on the After Effects downloads page, only CS5 10.0.x. That shouldn’t be too relevant to this issue though.
With Premiere Pro CS 5.5 5.5.1, performance does seem somewhat better. Here are changes I’ve noticed:
– The render bar stays yellow now when I add a second and third layer of video.
– A single video plays back more smoothly, although it still drops frames here and there. 2 Layers of video plays back much more smoothly now.
– 3 layers of video, with the 2nd and 3rd layers at 50% opacity begins to play at about 10 fps, drops to about 2-4 fps after 7 seconds, and then begins to smooth out toward 15 seconds the end of the clips and plays at about 10 fps. This IS much better, but it still seems like it shouldn’t be this choppy. Here’s what my system resources are doing during this time:Note – Memory is set to 18 GB available for Adobe out of the 24 total system memory. Both my main and video ram are slowly creeping up in usage, which seems to happen a lot in Premiere.
System Idle (project is open):
– CPU: 0% avg, 0% min, 1% max.
– Ram: 5.94G
– Disk: 0 KB/s
– GPU: 0%
– GPU Ram: 494 MB1 clip:
– CPU: 12% avg, 10% min, 15% max.
– Ram: 5.98 G
– Disk: 9 MB/s
– GPU: 3-4%
– GPU Ram: 582 MB2 clips (top layer at 50% opacity)
– CPU: 18% avg, 13% min, 27% max.
– Ram: 5.98 G
– Disk: 16-18 MB/s
– GPU: 4-6%
– GPU Ram: 565 MB3 clips (top 2 layers at 50% opacity each)
– CPU: 20% avg, 16% min, 27% max.
– Ram: 5.98 G
– Disk: 20 MB/s
– GPU: 6-7 %
– GPU Ram: 574 MB11 clips
– CPU: 15% avg, 10% min, 30% max.
– Ram: 6.15 G
– Disk: 13 MB/s
– GPU: 0-5% – about 2 avg
– GPU Ram: 900 MBThe lowest resource usage times are when the footage begins to get choppy.
I thought maybe it was the raid array. I moved about 6 GB of footage to an external drive to test it out.
The drive is a G.SKILL 120GB SSD. SATA II, connected to a USB 3.0 enclosure, and this is connected to a USB 2.0 port on the machine.
I noticed while transferring the footage (the same 12 clips used above), I had alternations between about 83MB/s and 24MB/s transfer rate. When moving a single large (2GB) file, I got the 83MB as an average rate, but the file transfer windows pauses at the “5 seconds / 41 MB remaining” point, and the disk activity monitor shows a long period of 25MB/s transfer before it finally finalizes the transfer. Perhaps it’s the raid?
A 1, 2, and 5 clip layer test gave similar disk performance results, but the CPU usage was higher, around 40%.
Next, I decided to try the system drive (SATA II, 7.2K RPM). Transfer from the USB drive to internal rapidly bounced between 34 and 81 MB/s.
It seems like the drives are capable of reading at higher speeds than they do when Premiere is using them. Not sure if it’s Windows, the drive, drivers, or Premiere?
Internal test results were again similar. with similar resource use, except CPU was around 30-35% on average during the 5 layer version.
My next idea is to build a raid array off the internal SATA ports instead of the Sans Digital enclosure, but I don’t know if the raid is the issue.
Any ideas?
-
Having a similar issue with a similar setup. Ever resolve the issue?
– J
-
same issue with 6 core, windows 7 64-bit with 12GB ram and nvidia GTX 460. made one change that made playback smooth.
nividia control panel > 3d setting > manage 3d settings > adobe premiere selected from list > muti-display/mixed-GPR acceleration > changed to single display performance mode.
this worked perfectly even though i have two monitors and i just assumed the single display performance mode would not work for me.
good luck
-
Wow great find, that really helped me out (Core i7 3770k, 16gb RAM, GTX570).
I have two monitors as well.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up