-
PPro CS5 takes forever to load projects – conform audio to blame?
We’ve been trying to switch to Premiere CS5 (5.0.2) for editing weddings here and it’s been nothing but problems so far. Still trying to troubleshoot some other things, but one really annoying issue is that when we start a project it takes like 10 minutes to load all the files needed. Basically the current project involves about 400 MXF files taken from a Sony EX-1 XDCAM. Now our camera only records 2 channels of audio, but Premiere conforms audio for 4 channels, and when you go to open the project it says it’s opening around 2,000 files and takes forever. If I load the same files in Sony Vegas Pro 9 it takes about 20 seconds, doesn’t need to conform any audio and only shows the 2 channels of audio that are recorded. I should add that I’m not talking about importing files for the first time, this is just opening a project where the conform audio and pek files have already been created.
In terms of relevant system specs, it’s an i7 860, nvidia 470gtx with Windows 7 64 bit, 8gb ram, editing off 1TB Western Digital 7200rpm ESATA. I’m just confused by this, because if every other NLE I’ve used has never had a problem playing back 48k audio in real time, why does Premiere need to create massive conform audio files for every single channel of every clip without giving the user an option to skip it?
-
7 Replies
-
[David Shirey] ” Now our camera only records 2 channels of audio, but Premiere conforms audio for 4 channels”
4 channels of audio are recorded, whether or not you use them. You can select all the clips in your project panel and using audio channel mapping, you can change everything to stereo (prior to bringing any clip into the timeline).
[David Shirey] “and when you go to open the project it says it’s opening around 2,000 files and takes forever. “
With that amount of footage, you will likely need to look into buying a RAID array. We routinely work with 500+ clips and loading takes about 20 seconds.
If you are seeing conforming, this may be due to the fact that you are using an external drive. Is the drive letter staying the same?
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
[Vince Becquiot] “With that amount of footage, you will likely need to look into buying a RAID array. We routinely work with 500+ clips and loading takes about 20 seconds.
I’m curious then why Vegas is able to load it in 20 seconds and Premiere takes 10 minutes. Is Premiere only capable of loading files fast with a RAID array while other NLE’s have found away around this, or would it be something we have configured wrong that’s preventing it from loading all those files fast? I assume Adobe would not have released a program with this kind of performance issue, and that it’s more likely something is wrong with our particular installations here on multiple computers, although I don’t know what at this point.
If you are seeing conforming, this may be due to the fact that you are using an external drive. Is the drive letter staying the same?”
The drive letter is always mapped to the same letter, and in fact it also happens if we use an internal drive. Just to be clear, as far as I know it isn’t conforming the audio every time we open the project, just the first time the clips are imported. What it’s doing is opening the project and then taking forever to load 2,000 files, which I’m just assuming are all the conform audio files since the project is about 400 clips with 4 tracks of audio and 5 x 400 = 2000. Could this not be the cast and those other 1600 files are something else?
Thanks for the tip about the audio importing though. I guess Vegas just always detected there was no content on the extra 2 channels and didn’t bother importing them.
-
Vegas and Premiere have a vastly different architecture. Maybe Todd from Adobe can explain why Premiere needs to reload the files everytime. But my best guess if that the load time is directly linked to drive seek time and transfer rate.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Would you mind checking how big your Premiere Pro project file is? The first release of PPro CS5 had a bug that if you had a lot of media, whether it was actual media or media created by rendering, that the project file would bloat, sometimes to 1 or 2 gbs! The 5.0.2 update fixed this problem though. Have you updated to this version? Hope that helps.
-
I use XDcam EX files (which are not MXF…they’re MPEG4 wrappers, only disc-based XDcam is MXF), and I never have four audio tracks come in…
That’s an odd bit of behavior.
How are you importing the clips into your project?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
First to answer Tim’s questions, yes we do have 5.0.2 and the project file is like 30mb.
[Tim Kolb] “I use XDcam EX files (which are not MXF…they’re MPEG4 wrappers, only disc-based XDcam is MXF), and I never have four audio tracks come in…
That’s an odd bit of behavior.
How are you importing the clips into your project?”
We’re using Sony’s XDCAM Browser and exporting the footage to “MXF for NLEs” which is what I’d always use in Vegas. I think one of the editors decided to go with that over just dragging the BPAV folders in because then you don’t have to have all those thousands of little files and folder structures, and if you switch between pc and mac you can easily replace them with mov files of the same number.
-
The XDcamEX workflow for Adobe Premiere Pro is to simply import the BPAV files as “Import Folder” or…a series of BPAV files. PPro sorts out the metadata and the clips show up in the bin…no conversion necessary. I’ve been editing XDcamEX since CS3 this way.
It would eliminate a bunch of pre-processing and data duplication for you.
What edit sequence settings are you using with this converted media? The XDcamEX settings or the XDcamHD settings?
I’m wondering if this conversion has something to do with the problem you’re having as it certainly isn’t the most streamlined workflow for XDcamEX and PPro…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up