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Premiere Pro and stuttering playback / dropped frames during playback
Hi All,
I’m having a very basic problem with the smoothness of playback in Premiere Pro CS6. Any time there is fast smooth continuous movement in the frame, there is a noticeable stutter during playback.
Is there a way to lock the playback frame rate of Premiere Pro CS6 and insure it actually plays back at that frame rate?
This happens both in MPE software and MPE hardware mode, with and without my Blackmagic card enabled. In every input and render codec i’ve tried, AVCHD, Cineform, etc.
It simply cannot playback without stuttering. Even when I render preview files for a basic clip – the previews don’t reliably play back smoothly, regardless of preview format. Sometimes they play better sometimes they play worse, but they almost always stutter on clips that have large area’s of motion.
Presently I’m working on a well equipped Windows 7 system, and this has happened on every one of the 4-5 Premiere systems I’ve used in the past 9 months.
One thing I LOVED about FCP was that it could lock playback and would tell you when it dropped frames during playback. And if you set your system and media up right, frame drops were very rare.
Is there any such functionality in Premiere Pro? I would be very concerned about laying off to tape or running an edit for a client if the system can’t sustain playback of even basic material without dropping frames while it plays.
Regards,
Mike -
3 Replies
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Something sounds screwed up. You should be able to playback with few problems.
My desktop machine has an i7 920 processor with 27 GB of RAM, a really low end GT 430 graphics card (upgrade on the way),, and slow hard drives (fast 2TB for RAID on teh way.)
That thing plays perfectly.
I can even edit and play back with very few problems on my i3 laptop with only 8 GB of RAM and a single 500 GB hard drive.
You can turn on an icon that will show Green-Yellow-Red if you are dropping frames. You roll over it and it will show exactly how many frames are dropped.
Everything should play perfectly if you render the work area and then play.
Can you post specs? Computer, video (Canon 5DII, etc.) You are running teh 64 bit version of Premiere with adequate RAM?
You definitely need more than 4GB of RAM though.
Michael
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Hi Michael
I agree this does sound strange!
To be clear, the stuttering is often subtle with only an occasional frame drop, like watching a hulu stream, but its nowhere near as reliable as watching the same media under FCP.
Where is the status indicator for how many frames drop, etc?
Specs-wise, my primary setup is a custom Windows 7 64bit machine:
Gigabyte Tech Z68 Logic Board
i7 2600K Quad Core CPU at 3.4GHz
8 GB RAM
GTX 550 Ti Display Card
Blackmagic Intensity
Areca RAID card that sustains 270MB/secI’ve run into the same problems on an i7 Quad laptop with 8GB of RAM, a boot-camped Mac Pro with a GTX 285 and 8GB of RAM, etc.
I almost always run with the MPE in Software-only mode, running the MPE in hardware mode has no effect on the reliability of playback.
The source media is generally AVCHD, ProRes, DNxHD or Cineform with previews rendered to AVCHD or Cineform.
-mike
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You can enable the dropped frame indicator in the program monitor settings. It’s the twirl down menu that’s in the upper right corner.
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