EDITING H264 IN Premiere PRO CS5.5 IS VERY SLOW

[John Pale]

You have things set for the Apple Intermediate Codec, not ProRes. You should avoid AIC.

[Tom Daigon]

Pierre,set your Preview settings at the bottom of the Sequence Settings screen to MPEG I Frame. It should speed up things during the editing process.That affects ONLY the Previewing function while you cut your project together. PrP works differently than FCP in how you set up your Sequence Settings.
PrP doesnt care what you want to output the sequence as at first, it just needs to know frame size, aspect ratio,frame rate and fields. When you are ready to OUTPUT you can select Prores from the EXPORT options.. I strongly suggest you read this book because PrP is quite different in many respects. https://www.amazon.com/Editors-Guide-Adobe-Premiere-Pro/dp/0321773012

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digita / Areca 8tb. raid

[Pierre Conti]

Thanks for the input!

Tom, yes I switched the preview back to mpeg-1 and it does go a little smoother.
But this is still not great considering the price of this machine.. if I switch very fast from clip to clip on the timeline (like I do all day long editing), the lag become quickly a problem. I mean it does still feel slower than editing 422 with FCP 7 on a mac book pro, wich I find almost unbelievable. My FW 800 hard drive are not ideal, and I should get an NVIDA card, but somehow I find it hard to pour all that money when I can get a faster machine for half the price (PC).
Apple has become totally ADOBE unfriendly and I need to take a long term decision and choose the right soft now that fcp is kind of dead, without spending $8000. Love osx.. but my heart is broken and I need a lot of AE.
I am tired of transcoding to 422.. I want to drop h264 on a timeline and start cutting.
Just in case if you have any idea how to improve my mac.. do you think I should put internal disks first or get the quadro 4000?
Any other suggestions are most welcome!

Thanks again

[Tom Daigon]

To take advantage of the CS5.5 MPE system you need FAST hard drives (Firewire doesn’t cut it),a CUDA supporting graphics card, lots of ram and at least a dual quad CPU (the faster the better). The lack of any of these elements will slow you down . Take a look at my signature. You will see a system that has no lag and no issues. Thought its true, the newer Macs seems to have some issues the older ones dont. Some folks say that Lion cleared up the lag, but I cant corroborate that myself.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digita / Areca 8tb. raid

[Gerwyn Bowen]

What flavour of h.264 is it? There is apparently a known issue with some .mov h.264 from some DSLRs on Mac OSX. There is a workaround to convert the extension to .mpg! You may find this works! I believe it has something to do with the QT importer getting confused. You can find out more about this on the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 forums.

[Jim Wiseman]

If you have a Nikon D7000, go back to 5.0.x. PP 5.5.x broke native H264 .mov Nikon playback on several cameras. I find that easier than messing with file names. When I need a feature of 5.5, I just move the material over to 5.5 as ProRes, or translate to ProRes and edit with Media 100 Suite or FCP 7. Pain in the rear.

Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.0.2, Premiere Pro 5.0 and 5.5, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe

[Pierre Conti]

I don’t think that’s it. I shoot on a 5D.

I think after all these comments (thanks everyone), I believe I need 1- faster drives (that seems really obvious) 2-Nvidia gcard

The pro res is behaving ok now (not perfectly). But it’s such a pain to convert everything.

Thanks all!

[Juan Francisco calero]

I am trying differents workflows for our webserie (FCP7, FCPX, Media Composer, Premiere CS5.5) and for native workflow (H264 from 5D and 7D) Premiere is the worst, and I have an Octo-Macpro with 24Gb RAM, a Quadro 4000 card and a RAID 0 of 4 internal drives.

I try the CS5.5.1 upgrade and it runs better, but I still can’t play the full episode (12 min without any effects or transitions) without stopping 1 or 2 times. It is true that the webserie has a lot of short cuts, but it runs better on Avid (AMA)

So think twice before expending money to get more realtime. It helps (I upgrade to the Quadro and the RAM recently) but H264 runs still better on Avid and on FCPX now and before this last upgrade.

I hope it helps.

Juan Francisco Calero

Production&Postproduction
https://www.antena3.com/elsotano/lascronicasdemaia/

[David Bicho]

Juan Fransisco Calero has kind of the same computer specs as Tom Daigon. 8 core, Quadro 4000, 24 gig ram, Raid 0 but experience slow performance?

It would be interesting to find out what differs between your computers… DDR3 or DDR5 memory? What else could it be?

My self have a Mac Pro 5.1, 8 core, Quadro 4000, Internal SSD drives for video, 16gb ram (DDR3). I find h264 smooth in PrP5.5.1 as long as I don’t use any effects. If I put on a RGB Curve (which is cuda supported?!) then its all jerky and impossible to work with. I convert material to ProRes for better performance.

AfterEffects on the other hand is flying with h264 compared to before when I had a ATI Radeon 5770-card. Performance boost of many hundred percent there.

[Tom Daigon]

David, I have…

1.Areca Controller card with my Maxx Digital Raid 5 array.It is designed and configured to maximize disk access (about 750 MBPS for 1080 HD clips) That could be a difference, since his are 4 internal drives.

2.DIMM Riser A/DIMM 1:

Size: 4 GB
Type: DDR2 FB-DIMM
Speed: 800 MHz

And of course it runs better on Avid AMA since it is rewrapping the clips for temporary editing use to speed things up. But then most Avid editors I know will consolidate the sequence, then spend the time to transcode the clips to DNx, which is a WHOLE different way of doing things. Though some GOP intensive clips may necessitate doing it this way even in Premiere Pro.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3