Question About System Setup

[Tom Daigon]

For great performance its best to have all media related files on a different drive then your system drive. At the very least a separate internal drive dedicated to media will do depending on the codec/format of the media you are editing.

For faster speed an external raid is really ideal. The more disks the more speed . You can get away with USB3 for some stuff.

I use a Dulce DQg2 raid system which is PCI-E based. Wonderful speed and performance.

The trick to getting PrP to sing is to keep it happy. What makes it happy are fast CPU(s), lots of ram, powerful graphics cards and fast media playback.

Im not familiar with GTech from first hand experience, but it sounds like a viable way to boost the speed of your media .

A more modern graphics card with enhanced CUDA will help when using certain effects, scaling images , frame rate adjustments, etc.

I would speculate the drive might be the biggest boost for your buck.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Ally Shore]

Tom,
Thanks for the feedback. The internal drive I’m running now is exclusively for media. My system and is on a separate disk and my project is on yet a third internal disk.

As for a faster graphics card, there isn’t much out there for the older MacPro and I agree, I’m thinking best bang for the buck in terms of increasing performance would be at least a two drive Raid0 through esata (haven’t heard anything good about USB 3, not even sure if the MacPro 4.1 would take a USB 3 card).

As long as I’m asking, I ran my activity monitor and it only shows 2gigs of memory going to PPro. Does that seem low to you?

Ally

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Doubtful your hard drives are the bottleneck, especially if you’re only working with one stream of video.

What version of OSX are you running and what version of Premiere?

Your processor seems a bit on the slow end, but it is hyperthreaded which makes me think it might be fine in your situation. What does your system monitor look like in terms of CPU percentage used when performing video playback?

Also, it may actually use less CPU to edit in 1080p natively and just scale during export. A more suitable GPU could take the scaling work off the hands of the CPU if you do choose to upgrade.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

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[Ally Shore]

Angelo,

Also, it may actually use less CPU to edit in 1080p natively and just scale during export. A more suitable GPU could take the scaling work off the hands of the CPU if you do choose to upgrade.

I think that’s the issue. I have always been able to take 1920×1080 footage in FCP and edit in a 1280×720 sequence with no issues. I do a lot of interviews, and since I only have to deliver most of the projects in 1280×720, it allows me to get both a medium shot (68% size of original) and a close up (100% size). Looks like Premiere doesn’t like that, so it’s making me render every single image clip that is 1920×1080. Really? I hope that’s not it, because if it is…that blows. Also, it seems that when you sync your sound using ‘merge’, the new ‘merged clip’ doesn’t act like a normal clip. You can’t use comment markers, you can’t export EDL and there seems to be a few other issues. They do get that the main DSLR workflow involves syncing right?

I hope I’m wrong on this, I was so excited about PPro. AHHHH

Ally

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Well with Final Cut, I assume you were using a ProRes workflow where you were converting your 5D files before editing? You can still do that in Premiere, and maybe you should for the sake of performance https://blogs.adobe.com/VideoRoad/2011/08/a-prores-workflow-end-to-end.html

Also, merged clips are a pain in the butt. The problem with EDLs is that it uses the clip name in the timeline. With merged clips, the audio isn’t “audio.wav”, it’s the merged clip’s name like “movie.mov – merged”. I have an in-house tool that goes through and sanitizes names to match their source file names before I move to generating an EDL. I may release this tool after Premiere Pro Next (I assume CS7) is released in a few weeks, to see if this issue persists or if it’s a legacy issue.

If you know you have to go to EDL, it’s best to avoid multicam and merged clips.

You can add comment markers to merged clips, how are you attempting to? I just open the merged clip in the source monitor mark it, and then edit the marker to add text comments.

https://www.fallenempiredigital.com/blog/2012/12/27/adobe-premiere-pro-cs6-merged-clips-within-final-cut-pro-xml/ should be helpful understanding how merged clips work if you ever need to move a project back to FCP.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

Posts by FallenEmpireDPS

[Chris Tompkins]

Older macs and Pr are a bad combo. IMO.
You need a fast raid to make Pr happy. Helps.

And a really fast screaming computer, especially with card/tapeless media/native files.

Being a Mac guy for decades (outta my cold dead hands)
I’m starting to look at a Win box for editing w/Pr.

Chris

[Tom Daigon]

Ally, before switching to a PC, I ran CS5 & 6 on a 2008 Mac Pro.

Now granted I was on Lion. And also had an esata external 8 disk array and a Quadro 4000 card, but I got great performance when editing H.264 on a single layer video timeline

Heres some info on memory allocation from Adobe.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/memory-storage1.html

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Ally Shore]

Tom,
I was up to 2am but I think I know my issue. I think Premiere doesn’t like it when you work with 1920×1080 files in a 1280×720 sequence. In FCP (since everything was transcoded to ProRes) it wasn’t an issue. But now in PPro, it’s making me render every frame because it’s scaling every clip. I’m not sure that even if I use a Raid0 on my current system, it will that make it fast enough that it doesn’t care about the scaling.

So here’s the $60,000 question…is there a workaround if you want to create a 720 sequence but use 1080 footage?

Ally

[Tom Daigon]

Ally, If you had a more powerful CUDA card that would not be an issue.CUDA can accelerate scaling dramatically.

But, working with what you have I would-

1. Drag one of your media clips onto the timeline and let it build a sequence based on the clip parameters.

2. Cut the sequence.

3. When you export from PrP tell it the format you want it to be.

I suggest you do a quick test on this workflow. Good luck!

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Ally Shore]

Thanks, your response above popped up on my email two seconds after I made the other post. I’ll look into a fast CUDA enabled card for my machine.

ally