-
I love PP CC! / I HATE you PP CC. Can someone shed some light onto 4 big issues I’ve run into my first 6 months in the trenches with Premiere?
Hi all,
As the post states, I’ve been using Premiere Pro for about 6 months now on shows ranging from half hour episodes for broadcast to quite a few short form projects like 60 sec national spots. I’ve been doing a lot of final color corrects and if we only need a stereo mix, I’ve been mixing here in the bay as well. On top of that, I’ve been able to save a few productions the money and time / expense of renting a Red Rocket as I’ve been able to just pull in red raw files at 4k and edit natively without a hiccup. It’s been great… but there’s also been some VERY frustrating things with Premiere that have almost scared me off the program entirely.
First here’s my system: PP CC 2014 latest version as of 8/20/14 . I’m on a 2009 Mac Pro 2.93 Octo with 32gb of Ram and a GTX 780 6GB Edition on the latest version of Mavericks with SSD as my boot drive. I’m primarily working off of eSata graids or an eSata raid tower.
1. What kind of media does Premiere Prefer or work best with? In my beloved FCP days, it was always ProRes for everything. FCP felt like it was built to work with that codec. I can’t seem to figure out what Premiere likes. I cut the half our show for broadcast with native F35 XDCAM files at 1080p, native 5D footage and native GoPro footage all in one timeline without issue not to mention the project was extremely responsive, nothing ever delayed. Everything played back and seemed to never drop frames with basic color filters on. I cut another spot in Red Raw at 4k and the project did beautifully (playing back at 1080p that is). It didn’t get bogged down until the very end when I was using Magic Bullet looks in conjunction with GPU accelerated effects like fast color corrector. However on another project that was shot on the Alexa, they used a KiPro and I received 1080p ProRes 422 files at 29.97. That project is so sluggish and tweaks to color using the fast color corrector take 10 seconds to reflect – even stranger is that if I alter color settings in my Fast Color Corrector by adjusting decimals and numbers rather than sliders, the changes show up instantly as they should. As soon as I drag a color wheel around or the contrast slider, it’s literally a 10 second delay before I can see anything other than that frame I’m tweaking. Also jumping back and forth between timelines in the ProRes project usually takes the timeline 5 seconds to load the media back in. I had clients over my shoulder the past week asking why the hell I was dropping frames with ProRes on playback and why I’d get a huge delay making color tweaks using sliders. These are very well paying clients who know their stuff, I felt like an ass at times and had to make excuses.
2. Why does a timeline of rendered media showing all green bars STILL drop frames? This isn’t a data rate issue, I’m talking about playing back normal ole’ ProRes 422 media at 29.97 1080p. In the FCP days and in Media Composer now, if you render your media and it’s not anything too data intensive, you won’t drop frames. It’s pretty much written in stone. In Premiere, who knows. It might all show green but then decide to drop frames.
3. How can I decrease the time for all my media to be loaded in. Again, on my half hour show, the project took a reasonable amount of time to load all media. On the 4k Red Raw spot, it takes about 5 minutes for all the media to be loaded. This is especially an issue because when I crashed a couple times with clients here, it takes 5 minutes once I start the program back up and there they are again, asking how long it’ll be.
4. I can’t figure out export times. On the 30 minute show for broadcast (22:30 of content), with fast color corrector or 3 way color corrector on every single clip and a mixed timeline of native XDCAM, 5D and GoPro, my export was mindblowingly fast. Nothing ever rendered, just straight out of the timeline. I’m talking 5 – 7 minutes. Exporting a 6 minute 1080p ProRes sequence without renders and the same fast color corrector on all clips takes my same machine about 15 minutes!
If any one can shed some light onto these issues, I’d be greatly appreciative!
EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com -
12 Replies
-
Is Premiere Pro using 32 bit QuickTime on Mac like it does on Windows?
FCP7 is a 32 bit NLE that edits QuickTime so 32 bit QT codecs are optimal…Premiere Pro CS5 and later are 64 bit NLE applications that have to run a frame server to even use 32 bit QuickTime formats at all.
I would have thought on Mac that performance wouldn’t be as pathetic as QuickTime 7.x is on Windows as I assumed that Adobe might be able to use the new and spiffy Media Foundation for this sort of thing…but what you describe seems like a textbook case of Premiere Pro’s ability to crank through all sorts of media…until you get to a file type that can only be handled by QuickTime (unlike mp4’s for example, etc. which Premiere Pro decodes directly), which would slow things down on Windows…though the performance has really improved since version CC on Windows.
So, as odd as it sounds, it certainly sounds like QuickTime is implicated in the problem in some fashion from what you’re describing, even though that sounds odd on a Mac.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
-
Have you set up any custom sequences that match your source footage more exactly? Here’s a ProRes example, but you can do this with any of the available preview codecs.
https://blogs.adobe.com/VideoRoad/2011/08/a-prores-workflow-end-to-end.htmlHave you noticed a difference with playback between when the scopes are open and when they’re closed? This can still be buggy especially on older machines. And I’m guessing you’re certain Mercury Playback is always set to the GPU.
-
[Tim Kolb] “Is Premiere Pro using 32 bit QuickTime on Mac like it does on Windows?”
Yes it still is. PPro is still hooking into Quicktime as a 32-bit app. I’m hoping one of the near-future updates will allow them to tap into AV Foundation and speed up the render and use of codecs like ProRes.
As to the OP problem of smooth playback of ProRes in PPro I’m not quite sure. Our workflow centers around ProRes (Proxy all the way up to 4444) and I don’t have any problems playing back on our Mac Pro towers which range in age from 2008-2012. All of our data runs off of a 10Gb Fiber SAN.
You could also try clearing out your Media Cache every once in awhile and see if that helps improve load times.
Have you run a speed test on your raids to see what type of throughput you’re seeing. Something like Blackmagic or AJA speed tests would do the trick. I’m just curious if we could see some numbers (since you’re playing R3D files I doubt that’s the problem, but…..)
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost -
[Ryan Holmes] “Our workflow centers around ProRes (Proxy all the way up to 4444) and I don’t have any problems playing back on our Mac Pro towers which range in age from 2008-2012. All of our data runs off of a 10Gb Fiber SAN.”
That seems more predictable to me…I know that ProRes wasn’t snappy on Windows until CC and then, even with 32 bit QuickTime (remember that Adobe is cross-platform and AV Foundation is not), it’s improved markedly.
I know it doesn’t make much sense, but the behavior Bryan talks aboiut does seem like QT figures in as he has no issues with other formats…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
-
[Bryan Roberts] “1. What kind of media does Premiere Prefer or work best with? In my beloved FCP days, it was always ProRes for everything. FCP felt like it was built to work with that codec.”
We avoid any quicktime formats as much as possible. With FCP we always converted to ProRes before the edit. Now we go native all the way through the process as it’s faster and make a ProRes master. Quicktime always performs much more sluggishly than native.
[Bryan Roberts] “2. Why does a timeline of rendered media showing all green bars STILL drop frames?”
Too many factors here from RAID speeds to RAM to Graphics Cards to a lot of things. We get that on occasion even with light timelines.
[Bryan Roberts] “How can I decrease the time for all my media to be loaded in.”
Good, simple media organization on your drives.
[Bryan Roberts] “I can’t figure out export times. On the 30 minute show for broadcast (22:30 of content), with fast color corrector or 3 way color corrector on every single clip and a mixed timeline of native XDCAM, 5D and GoPro, my export was mindblowingly fast.”
Render timeline first, then Export with the box “Use Preview Files” checked. Very fast export times.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaCraft and Career Advice & Training from real Working Creative Professionals
-
Hi Bryan,
Sorry for all the trouble. Do you still have Premiere Pro CC (7.2.2) installed? If not, can you reinstall it and perform tests with your ProRes footage to see if it exhibits the same issues?Thanks,
KevinKevin Monahan
Support Product Manager—DVA
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe
Follow Me on Twitter! -
Thanks everyone for your responses. Sorry for the delay, I got sucked back into last minute edits on a spot (even though it was “locked”).
My Drive speeds are definitely solid. I’m getting read / write speeds around 200mb/s on the standard esata Graids I’m using. I WAS using a much faster esata 4 drive Graid raid tower that I figured I’d try to nail down as the culprit. So I copied over all my media to a smaller “normal” esata graid and then restarted to see if that might help. Sure enough, exact same issues so that wasn’t the problem.
Thanks for the sequence setting – ironically I actually used that same link to setup my sequences before starting this project as I figured there should be a way to setup a native timeline for ProRes material so that’s not the issue.
Walter – can you clarify simple media structure? I generally keep with the organization that a DIT does on set which is typically Date > Camera Name > Card Name > Media Files
Unfortunately no I don’t have 7.2.2 installed. After my initial spot cutting on CC 2014 went so smoothly, I uninstalled 7.2.2. If I have the time next week to try it out on the older project I will but time is not looking good next week 🙂
So with all that, I’m not sure how to attack this for next time. It is very disheartening to be on edge every time I hit my spacebar to playback a sequence for clients in the bay with me. Eeeesh.
EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com -
[Bryan Roberts] “I’m getting read / write speeds around 200mb/s on the standard esata Graids I’m using”
You wrote mb/s (megabits per second)….did you mean MB/s (megabyte per second)? If you do mean mb/s be aware that 1 stream of 1080p30 ProRes will run about 147 mb/s. If you’re pushing ProRes HQ you’re looking at 220 mb/s. If you do mean mb/s then your RAID is likely a bottleneck for your playback.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost -
Sorry yes… I’m getting 205ish MB/s write and 215ish MB/s read. I’ve been dealing with all forms of ProRes since ProRes came out and have used much slower drives than these in FCP with no issue.
EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com -
Bryan.
What are you video previews set to in your sequence settings? What file format and codec?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up