Problems with CS4

[Eddie Lotter]

I have both ATI and nVidia. They both work. I’m not going to get religious about either of them. 😉

Cheers
Eddie

[Troy Murison]

[Eric Addison] “I’d be curious to know from some FCP users if you work on something longform and put it all on one timeline, how’s the performance?”

Eric,

I have edited in FCP and Avid with long-ish and complex (sometimes either one, sometimes both) sequences in projects that may contain 100’s or even thousands of clips and many more subclips. Yes, in both, the projects’ load times go up as you add clips and media to the project. And in my case, both are stable, responsive, and workable. In general I’m cutting in SD (sometimes even DV) at this stage, but in FCP I’ve used XDCAM HD 1080i 29.97 (not proxies) for entire projects, offline to online with no problems. I mostly use FCP at this time.

I use shorter sequences (segments) as I go, but near the end I work in full-length sequences without issue. I use color corrections, other filters, speed changes, lots of audio layers with waveforms on all the time, etc. It’s only at the ‘full’ sequence stage that I start fiddling with color and filters, and it remains responsive and stable (knocking on wood now). It can slow down if I leave a lot of sequences open or start doing things with large stills, particularly .tif files. Or have too much other stuff open like PS, AE, Illustrator, etc. But so does Avid, Pr, or anything else I know of. I almost never use multicamera sequences for what I do though.

I’ve completed projects successfully in Pr CS3 on both Mac and PC (not to mention earlier versions) with many projects of many types, but none as long as what I mention above, which are typically 30 min – 1 hour. The ease of moving back and forth to AE, which I use a lot in shorter-form projects, is tempting. That’s why I keep coming back to and trying to use Pr. For the last year though, I’ve pretty much given up and mostly use FCP with Automatic Duck for those types of shorter projects. The most I’ve ever tried to do in Pr is 10 min, usually much shorter, and many of those projects begin to suffer problems seemingly related to project file size fairly early in my process.

It seems to me that Pr project file size reaches a ‘critical mass’ around 50 MB (at least on the machines I’ve tried this on which vary in RAM, configuration, etc.) and that anything much beyond that causes severe impact to load times (I’ve seen 15 minute + load times for a project), stability and responsiveness. It seems related to the number of source files, sequences and render files present in the project, which makes sense. Deleting renders on sequences I’ve abandonded helps as does eliminating unused media. The length of the media doesn’t seem to matter as much.

Neither FCP nor Avid suffer from these specific issues to anywhere near the degree Pr does. Avid’s project/bin structure differs from the project paradigm of FCP & Pr so it’s maybe not a great comparison. FCP’s project file size for projects with many, many more assets, sequences, etc. doesn’t even come close to approaching Pr’s project file size for much, much simpler and smaller projects. Even a complete Pr project with all it’s assets and sequences imported into After Effects is much smaller (sometimes 10X smaller) than the original Pr project. And it’s responsive, faster to load and will always relink files intelligently, unlike Pr. But that’s another issue…

It’s my personal opinion, based on my experiences and my complete, non software engineer view, that there is something inherently wrong with Pr’s XML project file structure/method and until that is overhauled, Pr will always suffer from these types of issues. Just my best guess, and overly simplified of course. I’m sure that’s not a easy thing to do for Adobe or it would have been taken care of by now. I haven’t seen significant improvement on this issue myself since the original PPro 1.0. I know others say it’s better, and maybe it is, but it’s just not good enough for me.

Again, that’s just my theory and experience, others probably differ. And of course, FCP and Avid have their warts too, it’s just that Pr has a few more (like this one) that affect ME and my workflow in particular, so I use the other options I have available. I would like to see Pr take over the world as it has some really compelling features and ways of working within the entire suite. But for me, it has too many other things like this that add up to too much of a liability to use daily and in full confidence in front of clients with deadlines. It is getting better I think, and lack of OMF export was a huge stumbling block for me. So maybe it’s time to re-evaluate and try again with CS4, but posts like these don’t give me much hope that it’s any better yet on so many other fronts.

Good luck,

-t.

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Eric Addison]

Troy,

Thanks for the feedback. I guess part of my asking is that I’ve cut some HDV short films – 20-30 minutes in length with lots of footage, and I haven’t seen much in the way of stability issues with PPro (from CS3 and CS4).

I know someone who has cut 60-90 minute narrative projects (shot DV SD) with PPro, and I’ve talked to about his experience and he said he had no real stability problems. But he did break the project up into 20 minute reels after the first one which if I recall was all on one timeline and he did mention some slow down in performance occasionally.

I will say that load times do really increase in proportion to the amount of assets in a project. One large project I remember took a long time to load, but there’s a rumor floating around over on the Adobe forums that the soon to be released 4.1 update for CS4 will address this problem(https://forums.adobe.com/message/1739662#1739662).

Overall, I’m very happy with CS4. I know many are complaining about this or that, but my experience with it has been wonderful. I wouldn’t go back to CS3 for anything. But I think much of my experience is due to a great computer with some power – it handles SD and HD quite well.

PPro’s not perfect – but then what NLE is. But I’m with you in that I’d like to see Adobe make some under the hood improvements and see PPro really take over more of the market. The workflow and tool set is just so good.

—Eric

[Jared Scheffler]

Last year I edited our entire 120min. video on PPro 1.5(on 1 sequence) on a 2004 dell I had bought for $1500 bucks.

I’m currently working on a quadcore with a matrox rt.x2 I paid $7,000 for the system installed CS3 and I noticed when the sequence was getting longer than 10 min it started getting buggy. The footage was all native mp4. from Sony EX1. Now I recently updated to CS4 thinking the problem would be resolved and it seems to be worse!

I personally don’t think it has so much to do with the sequence length. I think it has alot more to do with the project size… my current project is pushing 90Megs… I wish I had known this before I started building the project…

My only question is how does a person import all the sequences into encore and make the whole video flow without a glitch everytime you change sequences? I’ve seen videos that have the annoying pause and I hate it…

A person can have all the great tools and jazz that adobe boasts about, but if they can’t handle a project that’s over 20 min long before premeire starts closing what the hell good is it! At the end of the day I just gotta laugh cuz it’s as big of a joke as their $39 a question tech dept.

Hopefully adobe updates there patch soon… 🙂

[Deleted User]

Hello,

I am running a HP XW8600, with Dual Quadcore Xeon 3ghz, 8gb of ram, Vista Business 64bit, Nvidia 3700, with a Caldigit HDONE raid. Clean Wibndows Vista 64bit business, Windows udpates, Adobe cs4 prodcution premium and all updates, thats it. Does not go online or anything.

CS4 is running like glue, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, all are glitchy, media Encoder is hit and miss. The software feels clunkyand slow. I am getting problems like Premeire pro has encountered a serious error and has to close, when I am trying to play clips DV AVI, Uncompressed clips.

Slow load times of a Premeire pro project, slow shutdown of Premiere, slow to load up the Media encoder, then get a crash Premiere pro headless.exe and so forth.

Stopped responding errors, on Premiere pro, After effects doing the real basics.

I done all the nesscary things like turn off background processes, alter my paging file and so froth, turn off indexing services on Vista, System restore and such. Running Classic Vista layout, not Aero and I cant get it working at all.

I have now gone back to CS3 Production Premium, Premiere pro cs3 and After Effects cs3 with all the updates are stable, I am running Vista 64bit business and all is fine.

Un-till CS4 is fixed I am not moving back to it till then. Adobe and toehrs say it’s the system, but the system here I literaly have had so many problems with Adobe Premiere pro, After effects, it’s un-real. Tech support at Adobe just blame the computer.

If I was you go back to cs3, and all your issues will be fixed. Honestly the new features in CS4 are hardly not worth the extra hassle when you wnat to jsut edit and no care about the software and get the job done rather then all this hassle trying to work with a product you have spent over £1000 for.

Adobe should be fined if they release software with these bugs, I can understand why so many people are going to Final Cut pro, as they wnat to edit and work, not being a computer technician trying to get the software to work.

I have been using Adobe products since Premiere 4.2 on a Mac. It always had a rep for being awful, thats why as soon as Final cut pro came out, we ditched Premiere. Then when Premeire pro 1 came out, it was a lot better, but since every release I have found the stability to be egtting worse and worse.

If Adobe want to keep the Video editing market, and stop all the users they have who are disappointed going to Final cut pro then they better address and sort out these issues.

I think they are jack of all trades master of none, as they are targeting the “pro-sumer” market with these products. FInal cut pro for example, you can edit all day long for weeks at once and have no where near any problems like everyone seems to be getting with Adobe cs4 Premiere and After Effects.

DOES ANYONE actually have a computer PC based Adobe system, which works without crashes or all these problems everyone seems to have with cs4?

Leo
Not an Adobe Fan

[Eric Addison]

DOES ANYONE actually have a computer PC based Adobe system, which works without crashes or all these problems everyone seems to have with cs4?

I’ve got CS4 running great on an HP 8400 workstation. I’ve also got it running on my HP laptop which isn’t as powerful as the workstation.

I wish I had something to tell you, but it just may be something in your system. Are your drivers up to date? Do you have any extra codecs installed on the machine?

—Eric

[Deleted User]

Hello,

All the latest hp drivers, latest itunes/quicktime 64bit, all Windows updates, and all the latest cs4 updates as well. No extra codecs, just the OS, Windows updates, I wonder if the Realtek audio drivers for the HP could be the cause? ALso got the latest Nvidia Quadro fx 3700 drivers as well.

[Andrew Ford]

Regardless of whether there is or isn’t a problem with long form projects in Premiere CS4, 4GB of RAM is brutally low for Vista 64. Without CS4 installed and without any setting tweaking/adjusting, your system is going to use 2-3GB of RAM doing not much at all. 8+GB of RAM will help performance and will help you get what you paid for with Vista 64.

What mobo chipset do you have? What is the cache/bus speed? These factors make a difference. It also effects the efficient with your video card. By the way, the new Nvidia cards beat ATI in all benchmark tests that matter depending on the mobo and other factors they are coupled with.

[Troy Murison]

Eric,

Glad to hear of your success with CS4 and stability. I will have to try it out in earnest soon. Third party input-output card support on the Mac seems to have some vendors stuck though, so I’m still waiting on that.

I hope when I do get to it that it’s smooth. And I really hope there’s a 4.1 update that helps more. Go Adobe!

Thanks for your feedback,

-t.

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Todd Roush]

I’ve done all right with my Dell Studio XPS 435T i7.

I’ve edited a couple 2 hour DV projects and I’m currently working on a 90 minute HDV project (about 30 minutes in but I work with 1 hour (full tape) clips.

I think you almost have to build your computer around Premiere which is pretty sad but the Dell I got absolutely rocks and I got it for $1000 at Costco…$1200 with 24″ monitor and CS4 DOES utilize all 8 cores.

Best,

Todd

Todd Roush
Dreamscape Digital Media
Canon XH-A1’s – Dell Studio XPS i7, 920, 2.66 gig,6 gigs RAM (soon to be 12) 650 gig SATA, 1TB eSATA external, 3TB USB(storage). 512gig ATI video card, 28″ HannsG Monitor, 24″ Dell Monitor.