Premiere’s PC Desktop performance is dismal Any ideas on what I can do?

[Tim Kolb]

Lots of stuff in there that I don’t understand of course…

On the GoPro ProTune streams…I’m not that familiar with that process…is that running during all this? I know that some processes in the free version of GoPro Studio do not multi-thread the last time I looked at it.

have you looked at CPU usage (and I’d like to know what it’s doing per-core, not just overall percentage) when exporting something without GoPro ProTune footage?

Your processor clock is fast…which is good for H264. The 660Ti has a decent spec…

How is your sequence set up? Are both GoPro streams being scaled down to 720p AND being frame-duped to 59.94/sec, or are the GoPro streams being scaled and the Nikon footage is dropping every other frame for a 720p29.97 output?

You have the frame rates all synced at least right? You don’t have 30p and 29.97p on one sequence set one way or the other? I’m not familiar with the kinds of files Nikons record. If you have 29.97 and 30fps and/or 59.94 and 60fps mixed together, you’ll definitely increase your render times…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Adrian Lyons]

Hey Tim, thanks for taking the time to give your thoughts.

The CPU load is spread evenly across all cores they just don’t break a sweat at all.

After further research and testing, I discovered that conforming al the footage to NDxHD would be the best route to go. Sorensen Squeeze 9 does that and in a batch to boot. That was the beginning of another journey through frustrationville!

Sorensen does a great job, is written well to take advantage of multithreading and hypertheading, it also utilizes the CUDA cores in my GPU so encoding a bunch of files is fast as hell. The problem is, PP does not recognize the MXP files created by sorenson! As a workaround, I can encode the GoPro streams into one file on a timeline within PP and export that to an MXP that PP can read!

Not sure what Sorenson is doing differently that PP doesn’t like. I can’t even play those MXP files in VLC.

I’ve checked msinfo32 and looked at installed codecs and funny enough, the Avid NDxHD codecs don’t show in the list. But they are available within PP.

Anyway, testing a conformed clip on the timeline and PP flies through it without any stuttering, like it should with the hardware I have.

I’ll reply with the process in total of what I did in order to get this going with some acceptable performance.

[Adrian Lyons]

Ok, so here we go.

I’ve completed the project and delivered to the client. Here’s the run around I needed to go through in order to get it done.

I initially tried editing with the raw files out of camera (2 GoPro’s and a Nikon D7100). That was a lesson in frustration as the native codecs (h264) do not lend themselves to editing with any fluidity or ease in PP.

I searched and searched and learned that I needed to transcode all the files to an edit friendly codec. DNxHD was the hands down winner. I used Sorenson Squeeze 9 to re-encode all the footage to MOV’s using DNxHD 75 8bit.

I then discovered after comparing the native files to the recodes that the colour and gamma were massively shifting. No matter what I tried everything looked flat. As it happens, it was an issue with Sorenson Squeeze. I did the same conversions using MPEG Streamclip and the recodes were perfect (shame on sorenson for f’ing with the footage).

Once all that malarkey was concluded the edit process went fairly ok. I say fairly as I was having fun trying to colour match the GoPro’s and the Nikon together. I did some research and learned of the BlackMagic Decklink and Intensity cards. I picked up an Intesity PCIe which was a little overkill. All I wanted to do was take advantage of the Mercury Transmit out to a TV for colour grading in Speedgrade. Of course it was only after buying and installing did I come to learn that even in SpeedgradeCC, Adobe has yet to support Mercury Transmit for the BlackMagic family of products!. Works fine in PP CC, just not Speedgrade.

I had to resort to doing all colour grading across the three cameras in PP CC. Time consuming to say the least but I managed to get through it and get it done.

My takehomes from this project;

1. Pull all the source clips into Bridge or Prelude and go through all the footage to pick out the shots that you are going to use.

2. Conform all the footage to the same codec (not necessarily the same framerate in the event you want to pull off some twixtoring {slo-mo})

3. Keep it simple. I had numerous timelines all nested in other nested timelines. Made hunting around for master timelines fun.

4. Dynamic linking while fun and allows for tweaking after the fact, seriously slows down render times and adds on another cause of crashing. Export out clips to AE, make your comps and render them back out to conformed clips. The amount of time it takes to render in AE compared to the amount of time PP takes to render them out is a huge difference.

5. Keep learning and trying. Don’t ever give up. I am really happy with the project and so was the client. So what the client was my brother! lol. It was a 1 week notice job that I feel I pulled off to perfection (as close as perfection as possible).

Hope that helps other newcomers to the fun of video production.

A.