CS4 – Dynamic Link is Slow and other joys

[Vince Becquiot]

Mike,

Regarding the biggest issue, being Premiere becomes unstable while running the media encoder.

Yes Ram will improve things (though I would spend a bit more money on “good” RAM). The cheap stuff is asking for errors and is usually very slow, which could actually create a new bottleneck.

You can also do a ctrl-Alt-Del, then select the process tab and right click set affinity on the media encoder process. From there you can assign only one core to that process, meaning it won’t bring the entire CPU down. That of course is even more efficient on a quad core.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mike Cohen]

interesting, I will try that…next week.

[Mike Cohen]

Somewhat related, after grinding to a halt, and finally shutting down both Premiere and AME after long waits of “not responding” I noticed 3 incarnations of PPROHEADLESS.exe running in the processes tab.

A google search revealed this thread on Adobe:
https://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6ec5e

New Software – new error messages.

Now if i could just figure out that weird grinding noise in my car.

[Vince Becquiot]

Do you have the first update installed already ?

There was an issue that popped up on some machines with AME if you did an upgrade from CS3.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Tim Kolb]

PPro headless has to run to manage the sequence that’s being encoded…the PPro version you have open has to edit for you.

On the temp file location…that’s actually where the file is…the sequence needs to be exported to a self-contained file, again, so that it doesn’t interfere with the instance of PPro you’re using to continue to work with…

On speed…unfortunately (and I use XP too), I think CS4 has simply outgrown XP…the 2.5 Gig RAM recognition limitation is a serious problem for any sort of dynamic link functions. Vista has it’s issues, but it does recognize more RAM…as does the Mac OS.

I’m cringing over whether or not to go Vista myself…it’s giving me the heebie geebies (if anyone knows the proper spelling for this, let me know.)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Mike Cohen]

Thanks guys for the feedback and clarification. We talked about Vista today given the ram limitations and CS4’s resource hogitude.
We did a complete system reformat and installed only CS4 before the first time using it.

I did crash the media encoder today by simply selecting the audio check box in a windows media item in teh queue, although this was whilst the computer was having a meltdown already so who knows.

On the plus side, the media encoder is a cool tool – I can load it up with sequences then let it rip overnight, which is how I use Squeeze and how I used to use Premiere 6.5 batch.

Also, the ability to make any sequence go full screen on the 2nd monitor is an improvement over having to first setup the project that way in CS3.

Mike

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Some interesting points here. Has anyone done a practical comparison of CS4 on XP vs. Vista vs. Apple? Speed and stability-wise of course.

That said, I personally would never encode a project and continue editing simultaneously. Even with Canopus’s wonderful Procoder, I could get glitches in the encoded file if doing intensive editing at the same time… using a quad-core system.

Hey, Adobe has given us (back) the ability to batch encode, so surely the work flow should be as Mike described it, with encoding done in the peace + quiet at night.

I too was overjoyed that previews can now be done on an external monitor without dv-device with a simple mouse-click. Generally speaking, I am quite impressed with CS4 at this point… seems to run real smooth so far.
greetings, Ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Okay regarding the possible perk using CS4 with Vista64bit: jeebies or no geebies, I found THIS INFO
https://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/09/23/adobe-says-mac-users-wont-miss-64-bit-support-much-in-cs4

in which Adobe estimates “only” a 8-12% gain in performance using 64-bit …

So is that worth the risk of VISTA, and 3rd-party plug-ins not working?

Seems to be NOT.

Other opinions/experiences?

[Tim Kolb]

[ninetto makavejev] “in which Adobe estimates “only” a 8-12% gain in performance using 64-bit …”

Ummm… That’s a MAC test. Mac and Windows are two different animals. Not to mention it focuses on the software’s support for Mac’s 64 bit architecture, not a 32 bit processor vs a 64 bit processor…or a 32 bit vs 64 bit OS.

In the case of XP/Vista, XP’s RAM recognition limit of 2.5 GB is a serious consideration. The Mac test has little bearing on the Windows side of the equation.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Ninetto Makavejev]

It is hard to determine just what Adobe was refering to with the “8-12% performance gain” with 64-bit comparison, since there is no 64-bit version for Mac. That said, Mac really isn’t such a “different animal” as Steve Jobs would like us to believe, since moving to Intel processors.

But back to the theme at hand: to Vista or not to Vista, that is the question. Here are some interesting remarks at the Adobe forum:
https://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b72483

It seems to me at this moment in time the complications of switching to Vista outweigh the possible perks. (BTW my 32-bit XP sees 3.5 GB of the 4 GB installed… although I have not research if this is true or just a cosmetic report in system info)

regards,
ninetto