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SSD & PPro CC
Hello folks
I am a recent premiere pro convert editing on a 17in Macbook Pro with AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1gb video card (Mercury enabled). I have Seagate Hybrid 7200rpm 750gb drive for the OS and apps with a partition for the project and cache files. All the media is in an esata RAID 0 array (17in macbook pro allows me to use esata express card). I would like to improve the realtime playback of the system and am looking adding an internal SSD into the mix by replacing the DVD drive I rarely use.
Here’s what I am trying to figure out and need some advice: should I replace my system hd with the ssd and make the existing hybrid HDD a second drive for cache, previews etc. or should I make the ssd the second drive for the cache files?
I have read numerous posts but there was no consensus on what actually sped up the editing and playback process. Some suggest ssd for the OS + apps and spinning disks for the cache, but others make the argument that ssd for OS + apps helps fast boot up and program start up times but does not help the actual playback performance; they contend that fast read times of the cache files are what make noticeable difference in the playback performance.
I would really appreciate some enlightening on this front. I apologize for restarting a topic that has been discussed before but I will say that I tried looking through them. Maybe I just wasn’t savvy enough and may need further simplification 🙂
Thank you
Vik Narayan -
8 Replies
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Gentle bump
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[Vik Narayan] “I would like to improve the realtime playback of the system and am looking adding an internal SSD into the mix by replacing the DVD drive I rarely use.”
Vic,
The general suggestion is to use the faster drive for caching, but it’s a general one – and may be useless in your specific circumstances.
When you say, “improve the realtime playback of the system”, what do you mean? Is the playback choppy? Pauses too long after hitting “play”? Scrubbing too jerky?
— Alex Gerulaitis | Systems Engineer | DV411 – Los Angeles, CA
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Good questions Alex. I should be more specific. I am getting choppy playback overall. I can understand this for parts of the time line that are red (with multiple unrendered effects) but it is somewhat choppy even in sections that are yellow. This behavior is somewhat inconsistent – sometimes, it will play smoothly but if I stop for some reason and start again, it will get choppy even though I did no modifications to the edit.
Since I have 16gigs of ram, a mercury enabled graphics card, an i7 processor and am working on compressed media mostly (5D, P2 AVC Intra, XDCam), I am thinking the culprit should be the HDD bottleneck, especially having the OS, app and cache on the same physical drive.
Vik N
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[Vik Narayan] “Since I have 16gigs of ram, a mercury enabled graphics card, an i7 processor and am working on compressed media mostly (5D, P2 AVC Intra, XDCam), I am thinking the culprit should be the HDD bottleneck, especially having the OS, app and cache on the same physical drive.”
What happens if you pre-render a portion of the timeline and try to play it back? Have you tried running Activity Monitor to see how your CPU, memory and disk activity is pegged?
Does it become even worse when you set MPE to software-only?
What are the sequence settings?
Working with compressed files usually makes the CPU the culprit, not the hard drive although if you consistently use multiple video layers on the timeline, you could stress the hard drive, too.
All the codecs you mentioned have fairly low bitrates and should not stress the hard drive even with multiple layers.
The CPU however is likely to be stressed especially with 5D’s H.264 codec.
— Alex Gerulaitis | Systems Engineer | DV411 – Los Angeles, CA
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[EricBowen] “What model CPU and video card do you have?”
I7-2720QM or I7-2820QM if I am not mistaken
[Vik Narayan] “AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1gb”
— Alex Gerulaitis | Systems Engineer | DV411 – Los Angeles, CA
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I’ve got a Macbook Pro Retina and I’ve had issues on and off with the playback being choppy when working with HDV footage. It’s also pretty heavily compressed like what you mentioned. I’ve found that sometimes I get better results with the highly processed stuff by turning off the mercury playback engine and just using the CPU. This means that it’s not trying to do as much realtime and instead will render things out more. Without doing that, some edits I’ve done have been horrible to work on but switching to the CPU they’ve been nice and smooth.
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