Premiere Pro CS5 + P2 Media + SAN environment

[Alex Udell]

Hi Corey…

I made that comment before I knew you were using Facilis. As Direct attached fibre virtual volumes there’s no metadata controller in the picture here. These should be seen and perform just like local drives. So that leaves me scratching my head a bit.

You describe the problem as “when you jump out of premiere and then back in again.” so this is more like when switching applications? Not dropping frames once playback has started.

Check memory prefs of Premeiere….it may be hogging all your ram…so when you switch out and then switch back again your doing a disk swap of huge chunks of ram just to bring the app to the foreground again. This is due to the 64 bit architecture of the app. There was a thread on the cow on this, but I can’t seem to find it.

Please let me know what you find.

Alex

[Alex Udell]

Here’s the Thread:

”
Re: Premiere Pro CS5 stable enough for long-form documentary?
by Todd Kopriva on Jan 3, 2011 at 8:26:27 pm

> The ONE problem I have with PPro is that when your project has a lot of footage in it (even just 10 hours), it takes a long time to load (5 to 15 minutes) and if you click off the program to check email and the click back on to edit, there is often a delay of a minute or two while the project reloads. Now, I have only 8GB of RAM so it’s possible this delay time would go away if I upped my RAM, but I don’t know and I do know that FCP does not have this problem.

It sounds like you don’t have quite enough RAM for both Premiere Pro and your other applications to be running simultaneously. I am guessing that what is happening is that the contents of the RAM are being swapped to the hard disk so that the email program (or whatever) can load its information into RAM; then, when you switch back, the Premiere Pro data has to be read back into RAM from the hard disk. This can be greatly slowed down by virus-protection/security software that aggressively checks each write operation.

So, what might help? Getting more RAM is the obvious first suggestion. Turning off your anti-virus software is another option (though be careful if this computer is connected to the Internet at the time!). Another option—and I know that this is going to sound counterintuitive—is to reserve more RAM for other applications in the Memory preferences. By telling Premiere Pro to not use quite so much RAM, you’d make it so that the email program (or whatever) has enough RAM to itself already, so the OS won’t be forced to swap RAM contents to the hard disk to switch contexts to the email program.

Oh, and be sure to install the recent updates. There are a lot of performance and stability improvements in the recent updates.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support”

[Corey Sullivan]

The “waiting” pinwheel pops up for 15 – 40 seconds when I switch out of Premiere Pro and then try to re-enter the program. So if I’m working in After Effects, then try to pop back into Premiere, there’s a delay. It doesn’t happen if I move everything to a local drive.

As for the RAM, we’re working wth 16 Gb of RAM, 12 gb dedicated to Premiere, and we have no e-mail programs running on the system, it’s just a straight production box.

As for the 5 – 10 minute delay when you first open Premiere Pro, we get that too, and the time we wait seems to be based on the amount of footage that’s in the project bins. Even more RAM doesn’t help here because I think Premiere goes and checks for changes in each clip before making it accessible.

[Alex Udell]

Out of curiosity, have you tried any other flavors of media PPro supports on the SAN besides media from P2? I just want to know that it’s specific to P2.

Alex

[Alex Udell]

I pinged a contact a Facilis to see if he has any suggestions.
I’ll let you know what I find.

I’ve also used Terrablock with great success. Their virtual volumes should be understood by your system to be “local” drives, so I’m really puzzled as to why it makes a difference.

Just as a test, have you tried any other codecs on the SAN?

Also out of curiosity, when you mention that everything works fine on your local drive, is this local drive also your “startup” drive? Are you Windows or Mac OS?

Alex

[Corey Sullivan]

We’ve tried loading projects up with DVCPro 50 footage (from tape), and haven’t had a problem with that. But as soon as I added 7 gb of P2 footage the delay issues returned. When I deleted the P2 media files, once again, there was no delay. Then I brought in about 7 gb more of DVCPro footage to see if it was a space issue, but I didn’t have any problems.

Corey

[Alex Udell]

DVCProHD or AVCIntra?

Alex

[Corey Sullivan]

We’re working with PC’s and they’ve only got the one drive installed, so I used it as a test. I had no problems working off the C: drive, even with P2 footage.

I’ve been chatting with our vendor (who’s also been on the line with Facilis), and they think that the way Adobe maintains a constant path to the media could be making it hard to handle P2 footage in a SAN environment.

[Alex Udell]

Facilic specific question:

there is a function in the Terrablock where you can map all your volumes on a path through the C: drive. It creates a “volumes folder.” This was implemented by Facilis so that when you move volumes from box to box and they sometimes end up with different drive letters, the path would always be consistent (i.e. C:/Volumes/name_of_volume)

are you using this method or just importing to PPro from the lettered volume of the mounted facilis volume?

ask your reseller/facilis about this…

Alex

[Corey Sullivan]

Yes, we’ve used the C:/volumes function and run into the same issue. It doesn’t seem to make a difference whether I’m mounted to C:/volumes or to a letter designated volume.

And I tried testing with DVCPro50 footage from tape vs. DVCPro 50 footage from the P2 card. DVCPro50 from tape was fine when editing, but from the P2 card I had the delay.