Dodgy playback and horrendous output times recently in CC

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Joe,

What are you using for a media drive? If everything is on the one system drive, that could be slowing down exports/renders. Perhaps getting full and/or fragmented? Always recommended to use a dedicated media drive for NLE.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Joe Chow]

I’m using a 3 TB Mercury Elite drive from OWC with a FireWire 800 connection. I’ve been doing the same thing for years, originally with FCP Legacy and now with Premiere CS6 and CC. But performance has deteriorated drastically only recently with CC. I actually did a test last week in FCP7 with the same project (9 minute ProRes Sequence with 1 cut and 1 filter) using the same footage, and again playback and output were far superior.
Just now since getting your reply, I took the same footage and opened it in a new CS6 project. Again, made a 1-cut-1-filter sequence, and playback was smooth and output far speedier. So it’s something to do the the CC update. Anyone know what?

[Kevin Monahan]

Hi Joe,
Sorry you are experiencing difficulty. Is your GPU one of those with only 512 MB of VRAM? If so, you may be experiencing less performance than previous versions. We had to increase our GPU requirements to be 1 GB or more, minimum, after 7.0.1 for Mercury Playback Engine GPU support. GPUs with 768 MB VRAM or less, should not have been approved previously anyway. Not sure how the 6750M with 512MB VRAM got past those requirements in the first place.

I recommend going with Software Only mode for the Mercury Playback Engine for now. You may want to look into getting a newer computer with a more modern GPU to get better performance in the future.

In the mean time, you can file a bug about your experience: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Chow] “. Recently, a project with with untranscoded Canon C-300 footage played back fine until I dropped a Fast Color Corrector filter on several clips. Even at ¼ resolution it got all stuttery and export time slowed whenever Media Encoder got to the clips with filters. On another project using transcoded ProRes footage, a 9 minute sequence with only 1 edit in it plus the Fast Color Corrector required 3 hours to output. Playback also wasn’t too smooth. When I did a test and removed the filter, the sequence took only 15 minutes to output. So I figure my computer/graphics card is probably not playing nice with Premiere and/or Media Encoder. My question is: why? Should I not have updated each time Creative Cloud informed me that updates were available?”

What media array are you using? When playing back ProRes, that means you’re now using Quicktime video playback which has always been slower than native. You don’t get near the realtime functionality with any Quicktime format that you do with native files in PPro.

Sounds like you either have a slow or a nearly full media array at first glance.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Joe Chow]

Thanks for your reply, Kevin.
Actually the graphics card HAS 1024 MB VRAM. So it should have squeaked by. Plus performance didn’t dip until after November, so probably closer to a 7.2 update is when it failed to meet system requirements. I am also puzzled by how well everything still works in CS6. I don’t relish the prospect of spending hours to reconfigure existing CC projects in CS6 (supposing I CAN do that via XML) although the long export times in CC may justify the effort.
In any case, perhaps in future, there should be some big warning attached to CC software updates when system requirements are revised.
P.S. I did order a new computer – a PC laptop with a nVidia GeForce – GTX 770MX video card w/3GB GDDR5. Hopefully that’ll keep me going for another year or two, but in the meantime I have to finish these projects on the old MBP.

[Joe Chow]

Actually after realizing how long the outputs were going to take, I went back to the camera card, copied the native format footage, imported it into Premiere to create a native-format timeline (sorry for the inaccurate terminology). Playback was better but output was still horrendously slow. And as I responded to both Jeff and Kevin, using the same footage and filter in a CS6 test project cut the output time on a 9 minute sequence by 2.5 hours! And this was with both the ProRes and native-format timeline.

[Kevin Monahan]

Hi Joe,
Sorry about that. Can you file a bug then? https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Your 1024MB card should be working fine. I have seen some issues with the older AMD cards and the team is looking into the problem. In the mean time, I’ll investigate your issue from my side.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

Tweets by kev_mon

[Joe Chow]

Thank you. Will file report.

[Jonathon Thompson]

i agree with Joe. my rig (Dell T7600) died and i had to have some major work done on it. we stopped editing videos. finally got back up and running and the first thing i did was update.

i cant even look at h.264 in premiere pro cc. something is up. it worked like a charm before the update.

i am sending in a bug report too as suggested.

[Peter Garaway]

Hi Joe,

We are aware of the performance issues that were introduced in version 7.2 with certain AMD GPU cards. The 6750 being one of them.

We’re investigating the problem now.

I know this is not ideal but in the mean time here’s a few workarounds:

– Revert back to 7.1

– Disable GPU acceleration

Here’s a list of effects that seem most problematic:

*Fast Color Corrector
*RGB Curves
*ProcAmp
*Edge Feather
*Lumetri Looks effects

These effects do not appear hinder the performance in my testing:
*All Blurs Effects
*Three Way Color
*Crop
*Garbage Mattes
*Levels

Again, I apologies the the inconvenience.

Best,

Peter Garaway
Adobe
Premiere Pro