Premiere Pro CS5 stable enough for long-form documentary?

[Tim Kolb]

That is a tough question to answer knowing that answering it wrong could wreck your world for a project…

I’ll say this:

Factual:

Dslr footage is a handful and PPro CS5 can handle it, but the system you run on HAS to be a monster to make it work. Staying native will help by reducing the necessary drive speed and capacity, but you’d need a. Dual Quad-Core Intel with multithreading to make it seem responsive for a long form project IMO. Not to mention that 16GB or RAM should be considered minimum. PPro has the capability, but the hardware needs to supply the torque.

Anecdotal:

In my personal experience talking with users, PPro CS5 seems to give Mac users more quirks than Windows users… I’m probably going to get beat up on that one, but it’s just something I perceive (perhaps ultimately incorrectly) from my interactions with users… QuickTime is a limitation these days and I know that CS5 being 64 bit and the enduring dependence on QT 7.x codecs, even running under QTX remains a hurdle.

I won’t touch any Apple vs Adobe feud issues as I think both sides have their plans and they don’t necessarily face the same ultimate direction.

I guess I might ask a local reseller if they have a serial you could try PPro CS5 with on your system and test some dslr footage (no mpeg codecs are supported in the trial) and see how it works.

With native footage, there is an instant of “buffer” time when you hit the spacebar which I’ve heard some users say was enough to disrupt their flow. I haven’t found that ‘beat’ to be a problem myself, but I’m on Windows.

OK…maybe we can get some other opinions and experiences added here without having a flame war.

I think the key is to not respond to the question unless you’ve actually edited with PPro CS5 on a system that is actually spec’d to run it. Many users I’ve seen over the last handful of years seem to expect Quantel performance on machines designed for QuickBooks…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Bob Fleck]

Wayne
I have recently cut a half hour video on a Dragon Boat Festival where 7 different cameras were used, including extensive footage with a Canon 7D and that mixed on the timeline with HDV, full up EX1R 1920x 1080, GoPro 1920×1080 and some time lapse on a Nikon DSLR. NO PROBLEMS! All this with Premiere Pro CS5 on a system of ASUS P5B-Plus Motherboard, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 8G DDR-2 – 1066, 320 SATA hard drive w/ 16M cache, Radeon X-HD2600PRO 512M Video card, Matrox RTX2 w/ Adobe CS-5. I’m no techie, far from it, (in fact the last 3 lines are Greek to me), but it all worked just fine including output through Encore. I’ve made and sold over 200 copies all over the world without a hitch. So I’d say if you meet this standard, which is not all that high, you have no worries. I have since gone to Matrox MX02 Mini Max and Nvidia 4000 card, which I would recommend because they will boost your performance. Fear not, Adobe is with thee.
Bob

[Max Frank]

HI,

Thanks for the replies.

I’d likely be using an iMac i7 with 12GB+ of RAM – beefy enough?

Tx

W

[Tim Kolb]

Well…I think some of this is relative.

Can you do it? Probably so…

Would I recommend a single socket quad core for H264 DSLR footage?…

Hmmm…not if you are expecting Final Cut Studio with ProRes performance…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[David Dobson]

I have worked on one doc with 100’s of hours of footage starting on CS3 and up through CS5. I am currently working on a DSLR Doc with significant footage. (I am using CS5 on a 64bit PC: AMD QuadCore and the GTX285 Video Card with 8GB Ram and external SATAII drives in drive docs for footage.) I have used both FCP and PPro for short and long form documentary style (i.e. lots of interview and b-roll footage to start with and no script) over the last 10 years. And let me add that in general I prefer PPro over FCP and PCs over Macs – just so you know where I am coming from.

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.

But other than that, yes, if the hardware is up to the task, then the PPro CS5 is easily up to the task of a long form Doc and you do get to work in the native formats. You will have to suffer through the dreaded “Audio Conforming” process (but then you get to do serious audio mixing in the time line.)

The main problem I have with DSLR projects though is that the audio comes in separately (from another source) and syncing it leaves you with sequences and not master clips and editing from sequences into sequences, not something I have done much of, is a real pain.

[Todd Kopriva]

> 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.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[David Dobson]

I’ll try the memory option right now. More RAM when I can. Thanks. And I get all the updates automatically.

[Corey Sullivan]

I’m running into the same problem with the delay, and I’ve got 16 gb of RAM with an Intel Xeon W3565 @ 3.2 ghz on Windows 7 64 bit OS. Even with just a few minutes of video in the project, I get the delay. I’m also tied to a 24 TB SAN with an 8gb fiber optic connection… but I’m told that’s where my problem is… Adobe doesn’t recommend using a SAN with uncompressed video.

[Tim Kolb]

[David Dobson] “The main problem I have with DSLR projects though is that the audio comes in separately (from another source) and syncing it leaves you with sequences and not master clips and editing from sequences into sequences, not something I have done much of, is a real pain.”

This workflow has been on the radar for Adobe, as most user requests are…although I know they aren’t oblivious to dual system sound workflows as if they want PPro to move into higher-end parts of the business, it’s important.

I don’t work with documentaries and I guess when I launch the app, I’m doing lots of other things so I guess I don’t time it…though as I said, I only occasionally run into projects with 10 hours of media or more.

I had the last one in house when CS5 was released. It was XDcamEX footage…about 17 hours worth. 8 sequences with selects as it was all interviews…I don’t really recall it being remarkably slow to load, though PPro does traditionally take a bit longer than some other apps, but I’m not a programmer or software engineer, so I have no technical insight on it.

I do know that I think I’ve froze PPro CS5 on Win 7 64 a grand total of about 3 times since release.

So…I suppose taking a bit to load isn’t as big a deal to me if I only have to do it once at the beginning of the session…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,