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Multi-Camera Window Slowness / Freezing
I have a Mac Pro 2008 8 core with 12GB Memory and a variety of fast RAID eSATA drives and an NVidia GTX285 utilizing the Mercury GPU accelleration, using Premiere Pro CS5. Right now the Adobe render files are on my startup drive, which is a very fast internal RAID.
I’m using a combination of file types, Sony XDCAM EX, AVCHD from a TM700, and Canon DSLR as well as 16 bit WAV dual system audio.
I’m experiencing strange behavior when I’m trying to use the Multi-Camera window. I didn’t experience it much before but now it’s getting strange. I have ‘yellow’ or no color bars on the sequence, indicating that I have enough power to play back the clips. When my problem is happening I’m not seeing PPro creating preview files.
In the Multi Camera window, I’m finding that it is becoming quite unresponsive. It will either freeze or display nothing. If I toggle the ‘Show Preview’ (this is the window that shows a full frame of the currently selected track on the right, and the usual 4-up Multi Camera on the left) on and off it will sometimes come back and will be responsive for a while but then will go away, either displaying a gray or black window.
I’m wondering if there is something I can do to ‘clear out’ or reset the project, or Premiere Pro, and/or figure out what is causing these problems. From using FCP I know that trashing prefs helps. I have a suspicion that there might be a problem with how PPro handles EX files, but I’m not sure. I also have “Calibrated Software’s” Quicktime plugin for EX, but since I think that PPro bypasses Quicktime it shouldn’t be a problem but maybe there is an interaction. However in non-multi camera mode video tracks play fine in any workspace window.
Thanks for any advice.
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4 Replies
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1. You are trying to multiclip 4 different formats/codecs. I’d get them all the same at least for an offline edit. The stress on the CPU alone must be completely overwhelming.
2. One internal RAID for OS applications and media is not going to cut it. You will need probably 3 very fast drives for native multicam playback. 1 for OS + apps. 1 for media. 1 for media cache. (3).
Getting the clips into a single format like P2 or all XDCAM would help a lot. Then just replace the proxy clips with the originals (if you need to) in a duplicate project called “online” in the nest used to multicam once you are done cutting it. My 2c
– Jon Barrie
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
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Thanks for the response Jon.
Here is the thing:
I have multiple eSata drives the media is spread out amount them, they are superfast 300MB /second rate, I don’t think it is a media access problem.
The reason that I’m using PPro CS5 now and ‘switching’ from FCP is that I DON”T want to transcode clips. I’ve been transcoding for years with FCP and I’m tired of it, it’s a waste of time and hard drive space. If I didn’t mind transcoding, I’d have just stuck with FCP as I know it well and it works well with Prores transcodes and does better multi camera than PPro in my opinion when the tracks are all prores. One of the promises of CS5 was the ability not to transcode, and I’ve seen plenty of marketing material that show disparate codecs on 12 tracks, with effects playing at once, without transcoding.
Also, if I do a ‘Cocktail’ cleaning (a useful Mac utility) of the system caches on my Mac OS system (I’m not sure if this actually does anything to help the problem though), and restart, multicam works perfectly fine. It seems though that PPro gets bogged down after a while, like a memory leak or something after doing some complex imported and use. I was just wondering if there was a way to save some time and reset it within PPro, it’s caches, or preferences to get it into that initial state where it works fine.
Thanks again, and I welcome any more suggestions.
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It probably is a memory issue. If you were all XDCAM there would be no transcoding and multicam would work nicely. But you must consider that you are using many codecs. AVCHD and DSLR alone are hogs but work on a timeline fine. Multicam is technically an effect so it has to work so much harder. You could work old school and just PIP your shots, which I still do for FCP as that is more crashing than it’s worth in multiclip mode.
The only other thing I would suggest is to go to premiere pro preferences… Media… Clean cache. Close pppro. Wait 20sec so all the BG apps close. Relaunch PPro and allow for the caching and indexing to finish before editing.
– Jon
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
Thanks for the follow up.
I’ll try the cache clean thing.
Is there also a reason to move the location of the media cache files or database to another drive? I’m looking at those files now and most the large ones are .cfa, and some are .pek. I notice when I’m on a fast CPU there are less of these files, I guess because PPro can render right away and doesn’t need to save a preview file, is this correct?
Anyway, thanks for the help, and any other suggestions are welcome.
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