How stable is PPro on your system when editing large projects?

[Vince Becquiot]

Tim,

Absolutely agree, I’m about at 3 Gigs of ram at this point after loading, and going up to 3.5 as I play the timeline. I do believe Vista has improved things, of course it could just be the extra memory management, XP 64 would be something to try as well. It’s memory hungry (DDR3 especialy was far from cheap) but a steady sytem for under 3 grand I think was worth the investment.

Vince

[Vince Becquiot]

If you are working with “thousand” of clips, here is my take:

You are in one of these categories.

1- You shouldn’t be working with Premiere, you can probably afford Smoke.

2- You are doing poor project management.

3- You are a beta tester for Adobe.

By the way, it’s not uncomon for any editor to break large projects into smaller ones. Go ask in the FCP/Avid forums how their editor will handle 2000 clips, they’ll tell you just that, break it up.

Also, as I mentionned, my clips were partly uncompressed HD, not DV. That’s something to chew on.

Vince

[Vince Becquiot]

I have NEVER seen Photoshop crash on a windows machine (Since about Windows 95). I’ve thrown about any resolution you can think of at it in the last 10 years. Now I call that a good track record.

You would think the Mac would have an even better track record since they essentially only make one machine.

Vince

[Bill Buchanan]

Vinny

Sorry if I hurt your feelings and/or diminished your sense of self-importance. Working with projects that require only “120 clips” is nothing for which you should feel ashamed or fear being perceived as an aspiring home-movie maker. Regarding your “take” on my situation, you are wrong on all accounts.

Let me try to do a better job of conceptualizing this for you by putting it in context. I just finished a 90 min doc with over 5,000 NTSC uncompressed clips in the library, which as you may have read is not uncommon. Using PPro2, I rough cut the show without breaking it up. I broke it up into 6 parts only when I began to color correct, add video and audio effects, etc., which as you may have also read builds up the size of the project file and its memory requirements dramatically. The /3gb switch was necessarily enabled from the outset.

I used WinXP X64 to finish the more complex parts. Though Adobe does not officially support X64 for PPro, it works like a charm, but for a few annoying quirks.

Smoke is a facility-oriented app as you may have also read and expensive as hell. In my view not the sort of app most independent cutters working in long-form would opt for for any number of reasons, not the least of which is its cost and the time required to recoup the investment. I considered it long ago along with all the other so-called pro-level NLEs. I choose PPro based on its affordability, features and the Adobe name, believing it could handle long-form projects as well or better than the others in its class. Needless to say, I was partially wrong.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co

[Vince Becquiot]

Bill,

Well, let’s analyse this for a second. 90 minutes, 5000 clips, that’s a cut about every second (Don’t go put any transitions in there). So unless you are doing some sort of an experiment, you might want to review that workflow, or get that broom out of the closet.

And on a side note, NO NLE will handle that much data, even on a RAID, unless it was built with particular hardware in mind.

Vince

[Bill Buchanan]

You misunderstood what I wrote. Those “over 5,000 clips” were shots I had digitized from over 75 hours of footage. I didn’t have 5,000 shots on the timeline; they were in the bins. Even Michael Bay would have a hard time making a film with that many cuts in it.

I have over 4TB in a Raid 5, which of course has no bearing whatsoever on PPro. PPro doesn’t know or care what kind of storage the sys has. It’s only concerned with the data in that storage and its throughput speed as it relates to a particular project. PPro had no problems whatsoever accounting for all those shots/pointers, nor any problem with however many shots/scenes ended up on the timeline. It started choking when various effects/keyframes, etc. are added to video and audio, which apparently requires much more memory than the pointers in the bins or on the timeline.

Before I broke the project into 6 parts, it took about 7 to 8 minutes to load. The project file was about 143mb. Later after each part had undergone all the finishing processes, each one required about 3-4 minutes to load.

X64, as I said, handled the separate parts better than the 32-bit side of my sys.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co

[Jim Smith]

[Vince Becquiot]

And I again absolutely agree. As I stated earlier, you’ll need the memory. My “now 180” or so HD clip are getting me close to 4 gigs of ram. But as long as it doesn’t get close to 8, I should have some room to grow. So is it a Premiere issue, or is it a hardware issue?

Cheers,

Vince

[Heath Firestone]

I’ve worked on some pretty massive projects, including an HDV project where I captured over sixty hours of footage. The final project was about an hour and a half, which I chose to edit in chapters, with each chapter being a different sequence, and then piecing them all together in another sequence. I did it this way for my own sanity, not because of any limitations I have encountered. I haven’t had stability issues, but I have also been working with hardware acceleration, with a Matrox Axio LE card, which does most of the work, and allows me to work with native (non-conformed HDV files), and allows me to mix multiple codecs in the same timeline, and still be realtime with all of my effects. It is possible that the Axio is taking the load off of Premiere, allowing it to handle much more complex projects, but I can’t say for sure. I know that people have reported issues with HDV projects, which end up being too complex, and cause crashing with Adobe, which don’t have problems when edited with a Matrox RT2X card.

My systems are stable even on very complex, long projects, so you might look into hardware acceleration, which might make a big difference.

Hope this helps,

Heath

[Lance Bauerfeind]

6 months ago I finished a documentary that finished up at 80mins long. I swore after that experience I would never use Premiere to edit a large project again.
Now I still use it for my real job – 15 sec and 30 sec tv ads, 2-3min corporate promos etc and it works fine no problems.

The issue is I think in it’s memory handling. Go above 50mb in project size and … problems. I believe premiere has changed the way it handles it’s media eg images are saved within the project and are not linked. So you have a cut 80mins, add images, subtitles and then do a bunch of colour correction and watch your project go from 50mb to 280mb just like that. I found if you render then minimize premiere your memory usage will drop considerably (but cs3 doesn’t allow minimizing I believe).

I also ended up with random glitches after rendering and could not figure out why until I learnt that on big projects the preview files can get corrupted and produce glitches. Delete the previews and re-render and all should be fine but re-rendering can take a long time.

I agree with others in saying:
break it up into small bits eg 8 minutes
render out each part as avi’s and put into a master project
use the task manager to monitor your memory usage
buy ram and anything else that gives your machine more umphh!

I will still use it but just for the regular stuff.

BTW Out of the blue photoshop starting crashing when I tried to open a second file – turns out you cannot have a network printer as your default or crash! This never happened to me until 2 weeks ago so I don’t what happened there.

cheers
Lance

Lance