Premiere CS6 – Much to love… but the performance is killing me

[Chris Borjis]

run the black magic speed test on your e-sata, post the results

You should definitely have at least 16gb of ram installed. minimum for octocore.

I’m pretty much on the same setup with 2 systems running snow leopard and
both run great for every day use.

[Mike Jackson]

BM Speed Test puts read and write in the 390-400MB/s range. It’s definitely not the problem. Which I knew was the case anyway, because Premiere is the ONLY program that chokes on playback.

One interesting new discovery – The most recent time the program started choking and freezing, I minimized it… and when I opened it again, it revealed it was generating peak files. Which it seems to do every time I open each project, again and again, and had just finished doing a mere 5 minutes previously.

So is Premiere getting busy with weird operations in the background, rather than prioritizing playback?

[Michael Gissing]

Is SL running in 64 bit or 32?

[Mike Jackson]

32. I’ll try 64-bit on my next reboot.

Another clue – I just had about an hour of total stability and smooth playback, even with multiple ProRes clips stacked in my sequence. It was wonderful. Then I layed in a top layer for a mask (a PSD file with transparency) and got the yellow bar along the top for everything. Playback chugged and died.

I turned off the layer with the PSD, the yellow bar went away… but playback was still in the toilet. I deleted the PSD, no change. Premiere can no longer play a timeline that worked just fine a few minutes ago. Scrubbing sends black frames to my external monitor half the time, all operations are sluggish, even minimizing Premiere takes 20 seconds to complete.

And then, after waiting a few minutes and going back to Premiere, it plays just fine again.

Oh wait, no, it’s back to its old shenanigans. Intermittent and unpredictable playback.

Sigh.

[Mike Jackson]

64-bit seems to make no difference.

One thing I *can* say difinitively – When I was on v 6.0.1, all playback was spotty, but usually only red bars choked it. Since going to 6.0.2, ProRes sequences with no colored bars above play more often, but even yellow bars stutter and cough.

[Chris Borjis]

I’ve done that as well, booting the 64 bit kernel makes no difference
and is actually unnecessary as premiere doesn’t require you do that
to run the app in its native 64 bit.

It sounds to me like you should revert to 6.01

I’m still running 6.01 and have none of the issues you are having.

I heard about a lot of problems mac users were having with 6.02
so I’m skipping that version altogether.

[Mike Jackson]

Yeah, running in 64-bit mode brought my system to its knees. Even AE, which normally runs very well, started choking.

I did try rolling back to an earlier version, but I only have my installers for 6.0… which runs better in some ways, worse in others. And running Update just moves me up to 6.0.2. Any idea how I can get to 6.0.1?

[Chris Borjis]

you can download the 6.01 update here.

https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=98&platform=Macintosh

It’s the most trouble free version on mac in my opinion.

[Andrew Fallon]

I’ve been testing Premiere at the office with the idea of switching from FCP. Our main systems were Snow Leopard at the time I started and the performance was problematic. It wasn’t nearly as bad as you describe, but I have a 12 core mac with 32 gb of RAM. Our other octo Mac with 8 gb didn’t work out so well. The program lagged a lot, especially in the interface/timeline, dragging clips around, etc.

I upgraded our computers to Lion and Mountain Lion and the performance on both computers got instantly better. Realtime performance is great and only minor complaints. Still haven’t fully switched over, but the OS upgrade definitely helped.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Mike Jackson] “Thanks for the response Dennis! I don’t post often, but I’ve been really appreciating your involvement in the forums for a long time.”

Hey thanks. I really do believe in supporting the community and the Cow is a great place to help out. It’s nice to know I’m appreciated! 😉

[Mike Jackson] “I’m still on Snow Leopard”

Sure, I see where you’re coming from and appreciate that not everyone moves up to the latest/greatest right away. That said, most of the Mac users I’ve dealt with including large enterprises have moved or are moving to Mountain Lion successfully. Maybe the rest of the software you use daily has caught up.

As for BMD, I haven’t read the rest of the thread since your reply here but will do so. While not likely, if you have the ability to test out another machine that is Mountain Lion with RAM and BMD, it would be interesting to see if the experience is very different.

[Mike Jackson] “On a philisophical note though, I do have to say I worry about any software that has trouble playing back a single stream of video on a system with 8 gigs of RAM. Makes me think that either a) something’s gone VERY wrong with my system, or b) something’s very wrong with the code. I’d also humby request that Adobe revise the tech specs listed in all the documentation, since it sounds like the ACTUAL recommended RAM spec is 16 gigs or so, not the 8 currently listed.”

I used to play 4 streams of HD video back on my 8GB Mac laptop without difficulty, so I know that this is not the issue. Also, there is a big difference between minimum and recommended requirements. I like to be very real (and candid) and have found that RAM is good for computers all around and that 32 or even 64GB can be downright useful today in editing and content creation.

I think we have a confluence of events that may be contributing to your problem. If you want to hit me on twitter (@TheGenesisProj) or post a comment on my blog (https://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/), I can try to get you some answers or on with a tech support person.

Dennis – Adobe guy