Serious Playback Performance Woes – Hardware Advice Needed

[James Kumorek]

What version of Premiere Pro are you using?
How much memory does your system have?
Run the GPUSNiffer.exe program in a CMD window (the program is in the Adobe Premiere installation directory). Does it say it will use your GPU?
Instead of adding the GPU to the list, simply delete the file of supported GPUs altogether. Or make sure that the name the GPUSniffer program reports is exactly hwo you entered the name in the list.
What’s your CPU utilization when playing back? What’s your memory utilization when playing back?

[Ericbowen]

https://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

Download that and convert the files to Cineform. I assume since the playback is so poor you are using CS6. You will want to convert the files if so. I suggest you get a Black drive for video and use the Green for archive. You do not want variable spin rate drives for work drives.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Poo Yan]

[James Kumorek] “What version of Premiere Pro are you using?
How much memory does your system have?
Run the GPUSNiffer.exe program in a CMD window (the program is in the Adobe Premiere installation directory). Does it say it will use your GPU?
Instead of adding the GPU to the list, simply delete the file of supported GPUs altogether. Or make sure that the name the GPUSniffer program reports is exactly hwo you entered the name in the list.
What’s your CPU utilization when playing back? What’s your memory utilization when playing back?”

Thanks for the response.

CS6
32GB
Did the sniffer, it’s fine. Edited log, it’s fine. Erased log, still not too much love. Although during rendering I noticed that the GPU utilization went up to about 12%, so that’s better than nothing.
CPU = 35-50% on playback.
RAM is around 7GB on playback.

Intel i5-3570K
Nvidia GTX 660
32GB RAM
SSD for the OS
WD Green 1TB for Video.

[Poo Yan]

[EricBowen] “https://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

Download that and convert the files to Cineform. I assume since the playback is so poor you are using CS6. You will want to convert the files if so. I suggest you get a Black drive for video and use the Green for archive. You do not want variable spin rate drives for work drives.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager”

Thanks for the response.

I have that installed. I was actually trying to render my finished project to that codec and got a nag screen about not being liscenced with 64-bit, blah blah blah. Silly.

I’m am indeed using CS6. I sure wish it would use more of my RAM. I have 32GB available, after all. And it’s set to performance within CS6.

As for the drive, yeah, I’m going to get a better one, probably today. That being said, it doesn’t answer the mystery of bad playback from an SSD…

I’ll try your suggestion about converting the files. The GoPro records directly to .MP4. What will I be using the Cineform to record to, exactly? Or will that be readily apparent once I’m there?

Thanks again!

Intel i5-3570K
Nvidia GTX 660
32GB RAM
SSD for the OS
WD Green 1TB for Video.

[Joe Marler]

[Poo Yan] “video I recorded with a GoPro Hero 3 at 1080p and 60fps…When I play back files in Premiere Pro, it’ll usually play smoothly for a few seconds and then drop to maybe 2 or 3 fps…I decided to throw copies of some of the video files onto an SSD and import to the timeline… the performance issues remained”

I frequently edit 1080p/60 video from a GoPro Hero3 Black in CS6.05 without *major* performance problems. It is slightly “laggy” when doing rapid JKL editing, but absolutely no problems at normal playback speed. Whether monitor resolution is 1/4 or 1/2 doesn’t make any difference. I do not transcode to Cineform or anything else. My system specs aren’t too different from yours:

Windows Home Premium 64-bit, i7-875K @ 4 Ghz, 16GB RAM, GTX-660 2GB, 1TB 10k rpm boot drive, 2x 2TB 7200 rpm Caviar Black data drives in RAID 0. Apps and scratch disk on 10k rpm drive, video files on 2-drive RAID 0.

If I turn off Mercury rendering it is a bit more sluggish, so make sure you have that on and it’s working. Add an accelerated effect like Fast Color Corrector, and make sure the render bar stays yellow. If not, Mercury is not working.

During the slightly “laggy” 8x fast forward and rewind states, perf. monitor shows it’s a multithreaded CPU-intensive operation with about 35 megabytes/sec inbound from the disk. There is plenty of additional disk and GPU headroom, at least on my PC. All 8 virtual cores are about 70% in this state. The limitation is on the CPU side, which could only be alleviated with more or faster cores, or an improved algorithm.

Summary of suggestions:

(1) As already suggested it’s always good to edit off higher speed drives, not variable-speed or 5400 rpm drives. Your SSD test seems to indicate that’s not an issue for this problem, but higher-speed drives are a good standard practice. You didn’t state the drive interface. Do not ever edit from a 5400 rpm USB 2.0 drive — they are just too slow.

(2) Update to 6.05. No known fixes for this, but you may as well

(3) Verify Mercury rendering is working and your GPU card name as indicated by gpusniffer.exe is listed properly in cuda_supported_cards.txt.

[Ericbowen]

Cineform allows you to convert the MP4 files to Cineform’s codec which decodes far easier than the Go Pro Codec. That should alleviate the performance issues you have. Just use the Cineform Utility to convert the files.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Poo Yan]

[Joe Marler] “My system specs aren’t too different from yours:

Windows Home Premium 64-bit, i7-875K @ 4 Ghz, 16GB RAM, GTX-660 2GB, 1TB 10k rpm boot drive, 2x 2TB 7200 rpm Caviar Black data drives in RAID 0. Apps and scratch disk on 10k rpm drive, video files on 2-drive RAID 0.”

Thanks for the response. And sorry for the late reply!

I think your specs are considerably different than mine. Very quick processor and RAID 0, so maybe my system, particularly the CPU, simply isn’t powerful enough to handle it. I’m running off the black 2tb drive now, so that shouldn’t be the bottleneck. I really think it’s my processor. It’s frustrating because I’m only utilizing between 35% and 60% or so when the video is chopping out at 2-3fps. I’d like to force it to use more. Poo. Setting Premiere’s priority via the Task Manager has no noticeable effect.

What are the chances that Premiere Pro is attempting to use the native HD4000 graphics rather than my GTX 660?

[Joe Marler] “f I turn off Mercury rendering it is a bit more sluggish, so make sure you have that on and it’s working. Add an accelerated effect like Fast Color Corrector, and make sure the render bar stays yellow. If not, Mercury is not working.”

Did that, the yellow bar remained, so I suppose it’s working. I’m surprised how little effect my card has, though. Maybe when I find and alleviate the bottleneck the card’s assistance will shine.

[Joe Marler] “You didn’t state the drive interface. Do not ever edit from a 5400 rpm USB 2.0 drive — they are just too slow.”

My work drive is internal. In fact, I never really do anything with external. I just back up over the network from time to time.

I appreciate the help that you folks are trying to give.

Intel i5-3570K
Nvidia GTX 660
32GB RAM
SSD for the OS
WD Black 2TB for Video.

[Poo Yan]

I forgot to mention that I haven’t yet encoded to Cineform, as I’m hoping to tackle these problems without having to transcode.

Of note: I just tried playing some 1080p picture-in-picture overlay action while watching GPU-Z. The GPU load didn’t move from 1%. The video, predictably, was a slideshow.

Intel i5-3570K
Nvidia GTX 660
32GB RAM
SSD for the OS
WD Black 2TB for Video.

[Poo Yan]

And yet another observation. This one is hopefully very helpful to you folks. I notice that when I’m playing back a section of timeline with only one video source, it MIGHT play back well, and use 10% or so of the GPU. When I’m playing a single video source and a second source enters on the timeline (like a picture-in-picture overlay) the GPU usage drops instantly to 1% or so and the slideshow starts.

I hope I helped you help me.

Intel i5-3570K
Nvidia GTX 660
32GB RAM
SSD for the OS
WD Black 2TB for Video.

[Poo Yan]

I’m currently running a conversion test for the clips, as mentioned above. We’ll see if that goes. I suppose this could be a hardware bottleneck, but we’ll see.

I appreciate the help so far; can anyone help me further? I know it’s a holiday weekend here in the US – thanks for any assistance!

Intel i5-3570K
Nvidia GTX 660
32GB RAM
SSD for the OS
WD Black 2TB for Video.