Editing with ProRes in PPro on Mac

[Steve Modica]

someone mentions below you are going over a gigabit link. Is the raid array on a server? Have you tried playing the video in quicktime or something other than PP? First thought is you’re just dropping frames due to storage latency (or network latency).

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Steve,

Yes RAID array is SCSI attached to a server, which in turn is connected out to several macs via 1GigE. However The same ProRes files play fine in Quicktime Player and in FCP. Just seems to be Premiere struggling.

CS5 trial is running out and still not happy with performance, so just tried importing the ProRes files into CS4 to do a transcode and now won’t even let me scrub through the clip in source window!

The fun just never ends!…..

[Steve Modica]

This is the kind of thing where you have to understand what premier is doing. Quicktime and FCP both use AIO (asynchronous IO) which does the IOs in parallel from within the kernel. The App basically tells the kernel what to read and it starts several threads to do it. (10.6 makes AFP work in parallel as well which is good for multiclip).
Premier may not be doing that. It may be using a different IO type like write/read and it may be using a poor IO size. (Some apps choose their IO method based on the type of filesystem underneath, some do not).
FCP uses 4MB IOs when it can. There are smaller IOs for the audio.
There’s also the issue of frame size and how busy the OS is doing the IO. If you are using standard frames, it’s likely the OS is very busy parsing all the packet headers.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the reply. I wish I understood all that you just said, but I’m afraid I don’t! Is there a less techie way of explaining that and any way to solve it?

Tried to converting to an XDCAM HD422 .mov (exporting via QTPro) which is playing better in PPro, but still a bit choppy. Used this codec straight of the camera plenty (as mxf/mp4) which works a treat, but is it because of QT wrapper it’s not playing ball?

[Steve Modica]

[Jimmy Brunger] “Thanks for the reply. I wish I understood all that you just said, but I’m afraid I don’t! Is there a less techie way of explaining that and any way to solve it?”

I’ve come to learn that it’s a hierarchy of little things all related. So you learn about 5 things (disks, raid controllers, switches, network cards), and then you learn 5 things about each of those 5 things (rotational vibration sensors, aerial density, URE rates, etc) and before you know it, you have this laundry list of 250 items that need to be right for everything to work.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Jimmy Brunger]

Doesn’t bode well then!

Why can’t Adobe and Apple just play nice and get this silly little problem sorted out! Surely there’s enough room for PPro and FCP in the desktop edit arena!? Plus if Apple are trying to sell more hardware (which I’m sure they are), then giving hardc0re Adobe followers a solid platform to switch to and be flexible with FCP seems a no brainer to me.

How I digress….