Premiere CC Lags with large projects

[David Roth weiss]

A single hard drive is simply not going to have the throughput to playback the heavy demands of video, especially a complex timeline. The hard drive subsystem of your NLE is one of its major engines, unfortunately seldom appreciated my most users, who simply fail to understand that a RAID with a great deal of extra overhead is NOT a luxury for smooth playback with video intensive applications, but a necessity.

Unfortunately, because most people in this business today are REALLY cheap (blame the democratization of video that has made it so difficult to make money), most discussions about media drives come at the matter from the standpoint of the minimum necessary requirements, never mentioning the enormous benefits of extra system overhead.

In summary, keep this important rule of thumb in mind: “Every time you double the number of spinning disks in a stripe set (a RAID), you effectively double the throughput.”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Busse]

Thanks David,
Fortunately for me, we just finished constructing a RAID 10 server and are troubleshooting it right now so we will be off of single drives soon. I also ran a quick test using the server and the playback was definitely better.

In the mean time I also discovered that while working with this project Premiere was using 600-750% of my CPU. I am experimenting now to see if proxy files will help reduce that load on my computer.

[David Roth weiss]

Proxies will help, but will not be necessary with your new RAID installed.

Actually, let me revise what I wrote above…

What are the specs of you sever? How many drives? Connectivity? How many client machines attached?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Busse]

Hey David, thanks for the response…I missed your revision originally.

I did some more experimenting and I ended up needing to create proxies for my 4k footage. Even when working off a RAID 5 that was connected through USB 3 my computer couldn’t handle the 4k footage.

Specs:
FreeNAS 9.3 Stable
Xeon E3-1231V3 3.4GHz
16GB DDR3
4x4TB Disks + 1 Spare
Configuration equivalent to RAID 1+0 (mirror first, stripe second)
ZFS format + LZ4 compression
Dual 1GB ethernet links, bound together with LACP
Users: 1-3, but problems occur with even 1 user

[David Roth weiss]

Hi David,

I think part of the issue is that you striped your array as RAID 10 – that’s not recommended for video – RAID 0, 5, or 6 are the recommended RAID sets for performance, especially when 4K workflows are the goal.

For future reference, RAID 1 and RAID 10 are really best reserved for direct attached storage, and for files such as photos and documents, but not for the high throughput demands of video on a shared storage system.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Gerald Prost]

I wonder if your graphics card is contributing to your woes. I originally bought the Mac Pro and it had a lot of playback issues with multicam. I returned it assuming it was defective and got another one but I got the same result. I bought a MacBook Pro with an Nvidia card, now everything works dandy. Because you cannot swap out your graphics card, I don’t know what to suggest. Obviously a RAID will make a difference but it may not solve all your issues. Gerry in Calgary.

[David Busse]

Thanks David. I’ll see about changing the RAID to one that is better for video.

[David Busse]

David,
I consulted with the guy who built the server and he said this:
“RAID 0/5/6 is designed for high capacity and throughput. RAID 1+0 was chosen to favor multiple users accessing the server at one time.

With a four disk setup, RAID 1+0 or 0+1 should outperform RAID 5/6 since it has four disks providing data instead of two or three. (There’s no checksum/hash disk.) If the array was larger, say six or seven disks, RAID5/6 could be faster.

It doesn’t really matter though – one of the server’s disks (without any RAID) is faster than the network connection feeding your computer.”

Though after running off my RAID 5 directly connected to my computer more I think that this could be a problem with my iMac not being capable of the type of editing I want to accomplish. I seldom go more than 20 minutes without Premiere crashing on me when working with 4k(proxy files or not) between premiere and AE.

[Jake Rose]

Is RAID really necessary anymore with the advent of PCIe SSDs? The specs of these new SSD’s are so fast, it seems like why bother with the complexity of RAID anymore.

[David Roth weiss]

What’s so complex about RAIDs, and SSDs are still prohibitively expensive.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.