Premiere CS5 performance problems

[Dennis Radeke]

[Jürgen Hackl] “We just got our new MacPro (12core, 48GB RAM, Radeon HD5780). I tried to use multicam in Premiere CS5 with three XDCAM EX (35Mbit) streams and surprisingly the system can’t playback the 3 streams and starts to juggle. Then I tried the same thing in Final Cut and it worked perfectly.”

Hey Jürgen – Two possibilities (well, one certainty and one possibility). You are starving your CPU for RAM. If you have 12 cores but only 4GB of RAM, you basically have only 3GB of RAM to play with and then spread that across 12 cores, you basically get 250MB of RAM per core. We generally ask for 1-2GB per core.

The other idea is that you may be trying to use ProRes XDCAM and your drive throughput may not be fast enough. If you provide some more details on your system that might help. Still, try to get a bunch more RAM and try again.

[Jon Barrie]

Last night I did a quick stress test with FCP 7 encoded XDCAM HD and working with that format on a mac version of PProCS5. Although the XDCAM mov files work pretty well in FCP on a MBP laptop, using the same clips in PPro has very poor performance. I converted some of the media to ProRes HQ and PPro ate it up. Multicam editing like a breeze.

The bitrate and HDD is not the problem, it’s the XDCAM format that FCP makes that is not decompressing in PPro clean enough to get performance. I would say, as this is not an open codec, whereas ProRes is available outside of FCP for decoding, the crunching on the CPU is enormous.

PPro was much better at the multiclip editing using thr ProRes media versions than FCP 7 and the XDCAM mov files as it kept crashing in multiclip editing.

The difference when using the “open” codec was amazing! Boo to apple for being so “closed”. At least sell the codecs via iTunes.

– Jon

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
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[Jürgen Hackl]

Hi Dennis!

… its 48 GB of RAM and RAID 0 … the system is not the problem. I already know that PR cannot handle XDCAM clips that are transferred with XDCAM Transfer. I stick with FCP.

[Jon Barrie]

Hi Jürgen,

I am sorry your experience was not what you expected. Adobe have a differnet way of working to FCP and now that editors are at a point where true native format editing saves time and quality control along with GPU support via nVidida cards the need to look and learn a slightly different way is too hard to ignore.

Regarding any of the Proprietary codecs from FCP if using another NLE product where the media being decompressed is not as clean as the original code that was designed then there will be problems no matter what scale system you work with. As long as it is not being used in the App it was made for (as it would have the perfect decompression code for it) such as FCP codecs in FCP ONLY.

Personally I have had much more trouble with using the FCP multiclip interface in version 7 that its worth. Most of the other cutters I know just cut it old school with multiple tracks and cutting the 2nd track (cam) to switch when they feel the edit deserves it using multiple cams as PIPs. Using Plural Eyes to gain sync. This is a terribly slow way to work with Multiple cameras.

PProCS5 still has some ways to go in some areas, but with the native file support and right codecs it is a much smoother process than FCP 7 in my opinion. You just need to know the ways around how to use the Multcam window to edit MC really fast. Playing the the timeline with the MC Window open allows you to switch at whatever playback speed you feel comfortable with.

When it comes to the audio I have the original audio in the seq I am MC editing and set the audio selection of the MCWindow to a track that has either nothing or is locked.

Holding the shift key and tapping L to move in smaller fwd speed increments allows a small increase in speed from RT upto full FFWD. I can move faster than realtime (RT) while previewing my angles and still hear the audio crystal clear for cut points at a speed near 2x. Tapping J while holding Shift will pull the speed back a touch & finding the right speed can cut the workflow time in half by switching on the fly instead of stopping and cutting only to work in RT again to find the next edit point. Then the switching off a clip to show the underlying clip. FCP can’t edit faster than RT as the 1st level of speed past RT audio get crunchy and horrible, there is no way to increment the speed down so I am left having to sift through 1hr in RT plus stoppages to cut down to 24mins for TV.

Its not the tools, but how you use them that can make a massive difference. FCP was the benchmark. CS5 with Native and GPU support is gaining on it, but the tricks I’ve out laid here have been there since CS2.

Hope your editing time is mostly editing and not troubleshooting. That just plain sucks no matter what NLE your on!

Take care.

– Jon

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
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[Charles Mcintyre]

“FCP was the benchmark. CS5 with Native and GPU support is gaining on it, but the tricks I’ve out laid here have been there since CS2.”

Did you mean gaining related to FCP’s enduring reputation?

Chuck

[Jon Barrie]

Yes chuck. I meant it in the context of reputation and available paid work in post production for Indy, TV and some feature work. PPro has been in market catch up mode for some time.

Positive Stability and userbility were very much renowned and synonymous with FCP and price point. However the QT structure of FCP has fallen behind to innovation in compression for pro video and GPU acceleration with apple “needing” to write their own drivers for video cards.

PPro is still not quite as mature as I am sure it will get in it’s current form. It’s evolved with the markets formats and codecs whereas FCP being QT on steroids still says, “see that file your camera made, I’ll take that and apple-fy it for you”.

I’m a happy cutter on either within their proper conditions. Overall I bleed premiere when I cut. 😉

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter

[Tim Kolb]

[Charles McIntyre] “Did you mean gaining related to FCP’s enduring reputation?”

To some extent, FCP is surviving on that reputation, which needs to have some renewal with some refreshed capabilities.

In this thread, we have an individual who has disqualified PPro because it can’t easily parse the proprietary wrapper that FCP puts on XDcam material. FCP wins that round not because of superior capability, but because of being the only thing backwards compatible with itself.

If the user changed to PPro, they wouldn’t be duplicating media through the importer process, and the files would stay camera native for any other use through post, but that’s a significant change to make in procedures and file management if you’ve gotten accustomed to the FCP rewrapping process and you want to not drop FCP completely and switch over (which I doubt any FCP user would want to do from a common sense point of view.)

Avid survived their down years because of the same sort of thing. Once you have some market dominance and a closed system, you can lag behind for some time before you will drive users to have to make a move as their infrastructure is not that easy to change over night.

I’m quite aware of FCP’s reputation, and I wouldn’t say it’s undeserved…however I think that PPro CS5 may have some who have disqualified it from high-stakes workflow situations reconsidering whether it belongs in the group.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Keith Moreau]

I have a couple of different questions related to Multicam Editing and XDCAM EX Files:

Is there a way to ‘gang’ the playback in the Multicamera Window with the Timeline and the Program window? I can ‘scrub’ and get the Multicamera window to chase but when I play the timeline the Multicamera window freezes. If I stop on the timeline the Multi-Camera Window with then ‘chase’ to the stopped frame. I really would like to be able to do edits on the timeline and actually see all the cameras playing at once. I can do that within the Multicamera window’s controls, but it makes it less efficient. FCP is better at this part unless there is some PPro setting I’ve missed to accomplish this.

I also like the way that CS5 deals with native formats rather than having to go through the time consuming process of either wrapping or transcoding native files into Quicktime files. For FCP use Calibrated Software’s QT plugin that fakes out Quicktime into thinking XDCAM EX files are Quicktime files and this is how I bypass the wrapping or transcoding process when having to use Quicktime or FCP.

However, sometimes for my workflow I need to export FCP XML and it seems that PPro is ‘helping’ with the XDCAM EX files and putting all the files together if they are spanned into the first clip of the set of spanned clips. Then when exporting XML the sequences only refer to the first XDCAM EX file and misses the other XDCAM EX files. Is there any workaround or setting to keep CS5 from combining the clips?

Another Question: Is the new Quadro 4000 Mercury Engine enabled for the Mac and CS5? Is it better than the Quadro 4800?

I am finding that I’m using PPro a lot more than FCP nowadays mostly because of it’s handling of native codecs better than FCP.

Thanks for any answers.

[Tim Kolb]

I’m not sure I completely understand what you’re asking for with the multicamera view…

How does FCP do it differently in your experience?

Yes, the new 4000 is a new architecture and it is significantly faster than my already out of date QFX 4800 -sigh-

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,