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CS6 performance issues/dropped frames with Kona3 and Mac Pro
Just installed CS6 to evaluate making the move from FCP 7 to Premiere. My hardware is supported by CS6 (Mac Pro, Kona3, Quadro FX 4800, 16 GB RAM, SSD, XSAN, etc.).
Anyway, things are not going well in my first hour or two of messing around. Premiere has big performance issues for me – playback drops frames and maxes all 16 cores on the machine – and this is just playing a 15 second ProRes 444 clip. Final Cut and Smoke handle this with ease on the same box so I must be doing something wrong. Heck, even doing File > New Sequence has a few seconds or so of lag before bringing up the dialog box (also, opening the preferences window is less than responsive). Trying to play RED footage is an exercise in frustration. Audio also doesn’t play consistently, sometimes sounding distorted/crackled and sometimes not playing at all.
I’ve updated to the latest Kona drivers (10.3.1) and installed the latest AJA Adobe Plugins (10.3). I’m running OS X 10.6.8 and the machine runs fine otherwise.
The only thing that sticks out is one line in the AJA Adobe Plugins release notes that mention OS 10.7 or higher is required. I’ve asked AJA support if that is true or not (it sure didn’t stop me from running the installer and everything else claims 10.6.8 compatibility) but I haven’t heard back from them just yet.
I want to make the switch but not if it is like this. Given all the raves I’ve heard about the performance of Premiere CS6 I can’t imagine my experience is typical. Any ideas?
-Matt
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3 Replies
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Yeah. You need to be running Lion. The latest Kona drivers in general, as well as the CS 6 drivers require Lion. You are running CS 6 on an unsupported system.
Shane
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Yeah, I just heard back from AJA support (they were pretty fast!) and they said the same thing. Grrr.
Time to test Lion with the SAN, I guess. I’ve been dreading this day. 😉
-Matt
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Okay, so I’ve upgraded my system to Lion so I can properly test Premiere.
The upgrade solved my issues with the Kona card and playback stopping, so that’s a plus. However, I am running into something that I’m not sure if it is a driver/hardware issue or just the fundamental way Premiere works.
Say I have a timeline (1080/24p) and I drop a ProRes file in it that is also 1080/24p. I get a yellow bar above it but playback is fine. On the same timeline, I drop in a clip from a RED EPIC (5K). It also gets a yellow bar but I can’t play the clip back for more than a second or two before it drops frames when the viewer resolution is set to full. If I drop the viewer resolution to half, I can play it back OK but then, of course, my ProRes clip looks nasty because it is also playing back at half resolution. It seems Premiere doesn’t have dynamic resolution playback (like FCP 7). OK.
My system is a year-old 8 core Mac Pro, 16 GB RAM, Kona3, QuadroFX 4800 and a RED Rocket card. I thought I would be able to play pretty much whatever, whenever without rendering but that’s not quite happening.
Also, when I play the RED file back at half resolution, the system’s cores (all 16 of them) are maxed – I didn’t expect to see that much CPU activity, thinking it would leverage the GPU/Rocket more for playback.
Am I missing the magic “go fast” switch somewhere? I have my project set to use the Mercury Engine, so I should be getting some good hardware acceleration with this system, right?
I guess the dream was to not have to make proxy files from 5D and RED source material to offline with like I have to now with FCP 7. I was thinking I’d just be able to edit the native files in real-time in a mixed resolution/format timeline in Premiere and move on with life. No?
-Matt
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