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

[Kevin Monahan]

The other thing is that I’ve heard certain eSATA RAIDS have trouble with Premiere Pro. Please try and copy your media to another drive and see if that alleviates your issues.

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

[Tim Kolb]

Snow Leopard was introduced in…2009? CS6 is 2012 software. (I know…Adobe lists the 2011 10.6.8 patch as an acceptable OS…)

I suspect that this, combined with 8 GB of RAM are contributors. While I agree that Adobe’s printed minimum system requirements are optimistic…it’s very typical across the board for NLE manufacturers to look at scenarios where a school might use the system to teach editing and utilize very low overhead media types, and to try to be conservative. FCP7’s minimum RAM requirement was also pretty unrealistic for heavy work when I compared them one day…

All that said, I agree that ProRes should run like butter (on a Mac)I think that you have to consider what else is running on the machine as it sounds like there is a fundamental conflict there somewhere.

With the inconsistent performance you note, what background apps are running that may be fluctuating in how they are interacting with the system? Is QT updated? (I don’t know how the QT versions tie out to the OS versions, so maybe 7.6.6 or later is already in there automatically?) How about the iStat app you mention? Have you tried to kill some of this stuff and run PPro?

I know that a FCP user would say that PPro should run the same on their system as FCP does, but FCP7 is basically 32 bit, 2007 software with some updates in 2009.

Premiere Pro CS3 was current in 2007…Premiere Pro has released 4 major versions since then and 3 significant release versions since going 64 bit. If your OS version can’t even run the Black Magic drivers released for this version of PPro…

I think even if you can get some of these issues cleaned up, you have to grant that it would run better on the newer OS versions and hardware drivers which would be contemporary to its release.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Mike Jackson]

Interesting. That makes me feel a lot less alone at least… and believe it or not, may be the first time I’ve heard anyone say something nice about upgrading to Lion or Mountain Lion.

[Mike Jackson]

I hear what you’re saying about drivers and the OS… and in a perfect world, I would of course always upgrade. But for the last few years, Apple has been in the habit of cutting features I use with every release of pretty much everything they make… so to me it’s usually a frustrating downgrade. Hence my reluctance. I also have almost a decade’s worth of Final Cut projects that I’ll always need to be able to go back to, and I’m just waiting in fear for the OSX update that breaks Final Cut for good.

To this day I maintain a WinXP machine with After Effects 5.5 on it, and probably do half my VFX work on it. Why? It has dozens of plug-ins that I use regularly that I don’t have for the Mac, many of which are no longer available, having been either discontinued, sold-off and changed, or the companies that made them folded.

I often do work at a Journalism school, and they’re still locked in on Tiger and FCP6, because their servers won’t run on anything more recent. And I once cut a show at CBS in New York, 2006 or so… and most of their edit bays were running Avid on Macs from 1998 or 99. Point being – it’s not a perfect world, and in this industry we can’t always just switch to the newest version. All THAT said, I’m certainly considering it here… I just need to weigh the gains vs. losses.

As far as the performance goes, maybe I’m old school, but I generally expect new software on a slightly beefier machine to be able to at least match the performance of older software on a slower machine. That’s not so unreasonable is it? 😉 And also, keep in mind that Avid ALSO plays back just fine on my current system, so I’m not just comparing the latest version of Premiere to legacy software.

But away from philsophical ramblings and back to the matter at hand: Regarding other software running at the same time – Usually I don’t have a lot else running. iStat has a tiny footprint, and often that’s the only other thing on.

However, I’ve been using dynamic link to AE a lot on one of the music videos I’m cutting, and no surprise, once both programs are running and start fighting over RAM, Premiere starts to grind (though AE still performs swimmingly). I’m sure the RAM is the limiting factor, and that’s fine, I can take my lumps. But even if I close AE, close and re-open Premiere and work on a completely different project with no dynamic links, Premiere will *still* grind, for anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour or even until a system reboot.

Now I’m not a programmer (though I did work in the game industry for many years), but that seems to me to have all the signs of a memory management issue. It’s like once Premiere fills up the RAM, even just for a second, for any reason, it never fully recovers. Of course, throwing more RAM at it would ‘solve’ the problem 😉

Still, so far the verdict from all the fine folks here seems to be – More RAM, move to Lion, and pray that solves the issue and doesn’t break anything else, because we don’t *really* know what the problem is…

[Tim Kolb]

[Mike Jackson] “I generally expect new software on a slightly beefier machine to be able to at least match the performance of older software on a slower machine. That’s not so unreasonable is it? 😉 And also, keep in mind that Avid ALSO plays back just fine on my current system, so I’m not just comparing the latest version of Premiere to legacy software.”

What you’re comparing however, is 2 legacy workflows that convert all sources to some uniform format before editing…and unless I’m mistaken, they’re both 32 bit applications…they can’t even address more than 4 GB of RAM maxed out…and with QT 7.x being 32 bit yet…they don’t have to run the adaptation to make 32 bit codecs work in a 64 bit editing environment like Adobe does. Again…the applications. media structure, OS and hardware are a fit for those programs.

Adobe takes everything you throw at it, flops it on an edit timeline, and if you have the torque…doesn’t have to render anything. Neither Avid or FCP are designed to do this. Even AMA isn’t really the same thing.

Adobe’s edit sequences aren’t even tied to a codec (you set the preview codec independent of source formats)…they’re just frame rate, frame size, and pixel aspect ratio…and I’ve even mixed those together along with mixing codecs and color subsample structure…

Premiere Pro just decodes it all to 4:4:4 32 bit float and plows through it. Non-video framesizes? No problem, just make up settings…portrait? Web banner? Whole number non-video framerates? Easy. (Do you know how much screen-grab FCP training is edited on Premiere Pro? 🙂 )

However, this capability does require some hardware power and that’s why FCP7 and ProRes will run beautifully on a Mac laptop that will choke and die editing much smaller, but far more intense-to-decode DSLR h264 video in Premiere Pro.

The system demands are just vastly different for a 64 bit application and a “decodes anything and cut it” workflow. I have 16 GBs RAM and a 2 GB Quadro card in my Lenovo i7 laptop…and I cut RED R3D on it with out much bother at all.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Mike Jackson]

Maybe I’m dumb, but I’m not on Twitter and I can’t figure out how to contact you via posts on your blog. If you could send an e-mail to any address you want to invent, @steampoweredfilms.ca, it’ll get to me.

I just had a major diagnosis breakthrough though! As I theorized in a posting earlier today, it seems to be a very specific sort of memory issue – As long as I don’t make the system do anything taxing, it runs fine. A single stream of anything but RED footage will play perfectly – ProRes, DSLR, whatever. UNTIL… I tax the system. Three streams of ProRes, or hitting an unrendered Dynamic Link shot, and it’s like a bullet to the head. Premiere starts chugging, and ALL actions start to lag… FOREVER. Even the simplest actions no longer work. Going back to the sequence with a single stream, it no longer plays.

Occasionally I can wait 10-20 minutes and I might be able to play simple sequences again, but usually only killing and restarting Premiere will restore playback… *IF* I wait a good 10 minutes before relaunching.

So *hopefully* more RAM will fix this right up… but it sure feels like a memory management / memory leak type of issue in the code to me…?

[Mike Jackson]

Ahhhhh, thank you. You’ve given me a piece of information I needed in order to understand what’s going on, and why seemingly simpler tasks perform worse. Of COURSE, if Premiere is transcoding everything in realtime into 4:4:4 32-bit float, that’s going to take a HELL of a lot of horsepower!

Even when I have mis-matched codecs in FCP, it usually only has to transcode into 4:2:2, 8-bit or 16-bit, which is all I need while cutting. I save 32-bit float for when I hit color correction (or occasionaly VFX rendering).

It does make me wonder though, if Premiere might benefit from being able to set a per-sequence preference for how high-quality that realtime transcoding is. Or is that what the sequence settings for ‘maximum bit-depth’ and ‘maximum quality’ are all about? I had assumed that referred to the quality of preview renders, not general playback…?

Mind you, turning those off doesn’t seem to bring my performance back to life once ‘the wall’ gets hit. Overtax the RAM once, and Premiere is dead until a relaunch…

[Dennis Radeke]

I think you might have enlightened me as to what part of the problem could be. Are you using the fractional resolution playback capabilities at all?

This video touches on it as part of a basic CS6 overview: Redesign Source and Program Monitors

If you stack a ton of ProRes and performance starts to sputter, you can down-res during playback so you get a real-time performance. At 1/2 res, you’ll be shocked at how good the video is at. Even 1/4 is usually usable given the source material.

Here’s where it gets interesting. HD codecs only go down to 1/4 because 1/4 of 1080 is 270 lines – nothing great, but not bad. With RED, we allow you to step down to 1/16! however, even 1/16 of 4096 is 256 which is about the same. However, if put a RED clip into a HD timeline, you can only step down the RED material to 1/4. My laptop doesn’t have a problem with RED at 1/4 but perhaps this is part of the problem. If nothing else, it’s good to know about this stuff.

[Mike Jackson]

The project that’s giving me the most trouble was largely shot on the RED Scarlet, and so I did originally start with that, using 1/2 res playback to check my dailies and organize the footage. It worked great, and it was only when I started actually cutting that everything fell apart. So I moved to ProRes transcodes, but things didn’t get much better.

In this particular case though, 1/2 (or lower) res isn’t an option. We shot this music video with a lot of wides and no guide track, so I have to sync everything by eye. Which I’m normally very good at… but I need to see the singer’s lips clearly 😉

And of course, add stuttering playback and audio drift, and I’m just pulling my hair out…