Kona LHe and Premiere CS5.5 –No Go?

[Walter Biscardi]

It’s looking like an 8 core Mac will be the minimum to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 / AJA Kona combination. We have a single four core machine and while it can play with FCP fine and ProRes, the activity monitor shows that the CPUs completely max out with Premiere and the Kona playing a ProRes timeline. This causes dropped frames continuously. Remarkably though, the system does keep playing, it doesn’t just grind to a halt like FCP would with the dropped frames.

When I switched over to one of our 8 core machines, everything went beautifully. Still testing, but it’s looking like the four core machine is not going to cut it for this configuration.

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

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[Walter Biscardi]

And by the way, ensure that you boot the Mac in 64bit mode when testing. Default is 32bit mode.

that’s the one thing I have to ensure tomorrow when I get back in to the shop. Make sure the 4 core machine was in 64 bit mode.

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

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[Jason Jenkins]

[walter biscardi] “it’s looking like the four core machine is not going to cut it for this configuration.”

Thanks, Walter. That’s just what I needed; some real world experience. I won’t spend any more time trying to get Premiere to work with the Kona on this machine. It’ll be just FCP7 for now.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[Jason Jenkins]

[walter biscardi] “And by the way, ensure that you boot the Mac in 64bit mode when testing.”

That’s just the thing; the MacPro 1,1 won’t run in 64 bit mode.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[John Pale]

The Mac Pro 1,1 cannot run the 64 bit kernel. The EFI firmware is 32bit on that machine. Oddly enough, you can run the 64 bit Windows 7 kernel in Bootcamp, so Apple might be able to fix it, if they actually wanted to.

For most practical purposes it doesnt make any difference. It uses 64 bit processors. You can run 64 bit apps with no speed hit and you can use large amounts of RAM. in this case though, it might be a problem, as the interface with the PCIe bus is stuck at 32bit.

[Andrew Southard]

Walter,

So your single 4 core did not work–what about a dual 4 core? Am I also going to have problems there?

Drew South

[Tom Daigon]

Im running CS 5.5 with an early 2008 dual quad core stocked with 8 gigs of ram. The system is running like butter. This only varies with the codec of the clips I use in PrP 5.5. Canon 5DM2 clips slow the system down a bit due to the highly compressed h.264 files. I intend to boost the ram to 24 gigs to aid the MPE engines functioning.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Jason Jenkins]

[Tom Daigon] “Im running CS 5.5 with an early 2008 dual quad core stocked with 8 gigs of ram. The system is running like butter. This only varies with the codec of the clips I use in PrP 5.5. Canon 5DM2 clips slow the system down a bit due to the highly compressed h.264 files. I intend to boost the ram to 24 gigs to aid the MPE engines functioning.”

Tom,

Are you running a Kona card as well? Do you have a CUDA enabled graphics card in the mix?

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[Tom Daigon]

I am running a Kona 3 and the new drivers. My display card is just a non CUDA ATI 3875.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Andrew Southard]

Good to hear, Tom.

90% of our footage is XDCam (optical disc not ex). Anyone have any caveats using XDCam with Premiere? Other than I will have to buy the Main Concepts plugin (over $800!) to output back to XDCam disc.

I’m one of the soon to be Final Cut refugees. We have 3 edit suites on a Maxx Digital Final Share System RAID. All 3 suites have AJA Kona Lhi or Kona 3 cards installed. So, Premiere makes sense and should be an easy switch. I’m just trying to find any details that I may have overlooked.

Drew South