Cutting long form with Premiere Pro CC

[Jay Thomas]

Hi Tom, sorry that I’m not posting an answer but rather jumping onto this thread with the same question. I’ll reiterate to help try to spark some answers:

Anyone out there (including Adobe) have a successful workflow, trick, whatever to avoid or fix the long index/save times on long form projects with many thousands of items to load each time we open a project? With about 50,000 items in mine, it’s a 30 minute project open each time, even over thunderbolt with a new iMac loaded with 32gb RAM, clean hard drives, lots of space, attempted on multiple computers, all the good things that are supposed to make things go all zippy like.

Also this project has no effects going on, almost entirely DSLR footage, 35 minute timeline of basically straight cuts, cache’s located next to the media… again supposedly all the right things to do.

Adobe, how can we long form doc editors adapt to you? We’re trying. Help us out.

J

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Jay,

No problem, this is pretty much the exact issue I’d like feedback on anyway. From your own experience do you think the long load times are caused by which of the following factors:

1) Large overrall project size
2) Amount of rushes in the project
3) Size and complexity of individual sequences
4) Number of complex sequences

Or a combination of all of the above?

cheers

Tom

[Jay Thomas]

Tom –

Like you, I’ve done small projects on Premiere with no significant tech issues, though definitely climbing the learning curve from an FCP past.

I’m just now adopting this one long format project in its early stages. It has two sequences in it, totaling about 30 minutes of run time, mostly straight cuts with no effects going on. So it is definitely not sequence heavy.

The bulk of the media is DSLR along with a number of jpg stills. There are a lot of items, in the 50,000 range.

The 75mb project and media drive were moved to my iMac 27″. The first opening of the project, with media cache set to the same location on the drive where it had been set on the previous computer, took three hours to fully index. Auto-save times took 30 – 60 seconds. Save times at project closing only took 10-30 seconds.

The next opening of the project, just moments later, took nearly 30 minutes to index.

So at this point I can state that the number of items in the project are causing long index times on open. I can’t say why auto-saving is taking as long as it is, given that the project is only 75mb. I have yet to test full editing on the sequences, or what happens as the sequences get bigger.

Adobe, is it the DSLR footage? Can you advise here? With numerous long long long format huge projects on FCP under our belts, we’re eager to make use of all the features your software offers, we just want to know how to work around the stumbling blocks we’re finding too, just like we had to do with FCP.

Tom, I’m continuing to research and will keep you informed of anything I find. Please let me know what you discover as well. Thanks!

J

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Jay and thanks for that feedback. I can understand that Premiere (just like Avid) would take such a long time to create an index for media when it is first loaded on a machine (Though Avid seems able to share these databases between machines). What is annoying is that it seems to “forget” a decent portion of this and have to rebuild it every time you switch on! It wouldn’t be so bad if this was just at the beginning of each day as we can start machines early but after a crash, when the editor is already frustrated, this will cause a lot of anger!

Maybe with the (supposedly imminent) release of the new version of CC this will be sorted out but I’m not too hopeful. What’s more frustrating is Adobe have an offer of 40% discount on year long contracts right now and I’d like to sign up a load of machines but this is making me falter.

[Kevin Christopher]

I am now on my third 90 minute plus project with lots of footage. The biggest thing I have found is to not to save anything, temp files, autosave, nothing on the system drive. Especially if it is a SSD drive. I use fast SAS 6G direct attached storage. I store everything on here. It makes a huge difference in load times. It’s not as fast as we all want, but it is no where near 30 minutes. Now Speedgrade from premiere on a long project is another issue.

Kevin

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the response, that’s very interesting. We’ve got the following setup at the moment:

Internal Spinning Disk: Project Files
System SSD: Cache Files
External G-Tech eSata: Project Auto-Saves and Media

Are you saying we should have all of this on one external unit? We are currently planning to invest in a Small Tree 80TB 10GBe setup in the next few months so will no doubt have to change our workflow then.

Could you also let me know your other system specs and the exact model/spec of the attached storage you’re using, it would be really helpful!

thanks

Tom

[Kevin Christopher]

So I am running a Mac Pro 4, 8 core with 24 GB ram, 500GB System SSD, Nvidia 680 with 4GB, and OSX 10.9.2. My drive Array is a SAS Cineraid 16 bay rack mount that I have portioned into 2 raid 5 setups one with 8 TB, and the other with 16 TB, other odds and ends: Kona 3, and a Caldigit USB 3.0

Kevin

[Jay Thomas]

I’m going to revitalize this thread in the hopes of some more guidance on this long format issue.

Yesterday I opened a 200mb project, added no media to it, created a new sequence and edited about 3 minutes of material into it, no effects of any kind, saved the project. That new project is now 238mb.

Today that project is taking 30 minutes to load/index.

There is nothing processor heavy in this project, none of the targets people have mentioned in other threads – no warp stabilzers, no effects, no super long clips, etc.

I’m just beginning into this long form edit and I’ve got a ton of sequences to create going forward. As a newbie, I’m shuddering at the thought of generating 40mb with just one small sequence. There must be something I’m doing wrong.

Anyone have any tips on this? What I should be looking for?

Operating on an iMac, 32gb RAM, one external thunderbolt drive containing all media, scratch disk, cache, with plenty of free space on the drive. Currently still using CC 7.2.

Many thanks!

[Mark Jackson]

Just to say that worked for me – I’m cutting a 90 min project using original H264 DSLR footage. Was struggling with long load times, but saving EVERYTHING, all media files etc to the same external HDD (Thunderbolt G drive) seems to have helped a lot. Load time from 15min down to 2min?