CS3 Abismal Playback Performance

[Vince Becquiot]

This is very likely due to system performance. CS3 is pretty CPU and RAM hungry. Can you tell us about your system, RAM, CPU, drives etc. ?

Vince

[Veronica Flume]

Systems is dual core, 2GB ram, XP.

As I mentioned, PP CS3 can’t even smoothly play back a simple clip in a simple sequence in an fresh, empty project. If that stresses Premiere, there is something wrong! Besides, PP1.5 and Vegas both perform just fine, so it can’t be some general deficiency in the hardware.

Regards,
Veronica

[Vince Becquiot]

The specs should definitely be able to handle that task.

There must be something wrong with the system, either OS or possibly background programs running. I certainely wouldn’t install CS3 without first doing a fresh install of XP (and make sure nothing else gets added but what’s absolutely needed). For starters no antivirus or spyware protection.

Unless there is a harware issues, Premiere will easily handle most DV timeline on a Core 2 duo. You should also be getting realtime playback without rendering.

Vince

[Richard Baim]

I’m running Premiere CS3 on a single processor HP laptop with 1G of RAM with no problems so there must be something going on with your PC. Go to Task Manager and look for applications and processes running that don’t need to be.

Rich Baim

[Richard Baim]

I just noticed one more thing- you said in the first post that you are using modest frame sizes like 960 X 540. If it’s a standard DV project, CS3 is looking for a frame size of 720 X 480. If you bring in something unusual like 960 X 540 on the time line, it would have to render first before it could be played back smoothly. When you add a clip, do you see the red bar indicating that rendering is needed?

Rich Baim

[Veronica Flume]

In the 960×540 example, the project and the sources are all 960×540. No rendering is taking place.

In all of our tests, with different frame sizes and codecs, Premiere 1.5 seems to achieve about twice the frame rate during playback over CS3. Its quite consistent. Sony Vegas seems to get about 4 times the frame rate. So it seems like something is wrong with CS3. And the surging and lagging in the frame rate is unique to CS3. We are starting to suspect that the rate control algorithm in CS3 is at least part of the problem, as playback oscillates between falling behind and catching up instead of finding a steady sustainable rate. One thing that is kind of cool about Vegas is that they display the frame rate during playback, so you can precisely see how different choices like frame size and codec affect playback.

Regards,
Veronica

[Vince Becquiot]

But in the end, the system dictates performance. You can expect much more demand on a system over 2 generations of upgrade. CS3 does much more than PP 1.5, and on the appropriate system, you won’t have to worry about frame rate. As I mentioned on a previous post, I am now editing 15 hours and counting of uncompressed 1080P footage and CS3 is playing a color corrected timeline in realtime with a fast blur applied to an alpha channel, without rendering and at highest quality. No Matrox here.

Vince

[Shawn michael Lee]

Another thought…are you using any boards on playback? AJA, Matrox, etc.?

[Veronica Flume]

How would the particular board account for poor performance in PP3 when PP1.5 and Vegas have no problem? Seriously. If you have any information, please do share.

Regards,
Veronica

[Shawn michael Lee]

For Example:

You install the new version (CS3) over the old (PP2.0). You will have to reinstall the drivers for your AJA, Matrox, etc board. These boards may react differently with the newer version software.
I speak from experience. I have the AJA Xena LS. I was wondering if your situation was similar.