Stumped by Premiere Pro CS5 performance issues???

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Hannah,

Cuda drivers will not make a difference on a MacBook Pro. There are a couple of hacks around, but I found little difference on the MAC or Windows side without one of the supported cards (It doesn’t have to be a Quadro BTW).

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Hannah Radcliff]

Thanks! Yeah I’m hesitant to do any hacks on my machine. The only things I’ll download or try are straight from Nvidia–I’ve heard too many horror stories. I know that the graphics card I have sucks, but my point is that it shouldn’t be as bad as it is.

I had a 5BG clip with a 1hr running time. It was a 640×360 h.264, I just wanted to see if I could use Premiere to cut a montage from the video. The preview kept freezing and the program crashed after 5 minutes of spinning wheel of doom. For grins I tried it on the old G5 at work that was running FCP5.

I mean, FCP5 on a PowerPC with 2GB ram and a 128 MB graphics card cut through the footage like butter., and I was in and out in about 15 minutes.

So if that machine can handle it with no drama, seems like my laptop should be more than capable….

[Hannah Radcliff]

BG = GB, I’m dyslexic….

[Vince Becquiot]

By all means, Premiere should be able to handle these without issue, CUDA really comes into play with effects and multi-layered sequences.

I’ve edited 1080P H.264 on a MacBook Pro i7 (win7), and I didn’t notice any slow down with playback.

Were these files re-encoded by any chance? What type of drive are they stored on?

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Hannah Radcliff]

I’ve attempted to edit footage from my Canon 550D natively, which Premiere is supposed to do well. When that didn’t work I tried a few different compressions. I resorted back to my FCP workflow and encoded to Pro Res 422, which is usually uber sweet. Didn’t work. Tried exporting to DV res for grins, still no go. The Pro Res versions work great in FCP on my Mac Pro tower but still suffer from playback issues on Premiere even on that machine.

As for hard drives, I use an external drive to transfer files to my laptop. I usually just use the laptop for small edits and for multitasking when I have multiple projects going on at once. Anyhow, the built in drive is small but not bad. It’s a 5400PRM Hitachi–only 250GB but I keep it clean. When I’m using my Mac Pro I edit from a 2TB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda. Hard drives are probably not the issue.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Hannah Radcliff] “I mean, FCP5 on a PowerPC with 2GB ram and a 128 MB graphics card cut through the footage like butter., and I was in and out in about 15 minutes.

So if that machine can handle it with no drama, seems like my laptop should be more than capable….”

Possibly, Premiere doesn’t like that specific file format or codec, and doesn’t work with it as well as FCP.

If you can bring your project onto a known-good CS5 system, it would help – at least you will know if it’s a general Adobe Premiere issue, or a system-specific issue that you could try digging into.

If you are experiencing playback issues within first 10-20 seconds of a clip, would you be willing to make a short clip available for testing – e.g. upload is somewhere?

Alex
DV411

[Tim Kolb]

First up, no NVIDIA card with 256 MB of RAM will support PPro CUDA operations…you need at least a GB in my opinion, but I think the bare minimum is between 700 and 800 MB…

Second, The laptop you’re referring to will struggle with PPro CS5… Certainly not enough processor cores to handle H264. ProRes runs very well as it is 32 bit just like QuickTime, and just like FCP. PPro is 64 bit and needs a TON of RAM…4 GB of RAM is not really enough.

(Adobe’s minimum system requirements apparently indicate what you need to launch it…it’d be nice if they published a separate sheet for what it actually takes to RUN it.)

As far as your desktop system is concerned, I recently set a client up with CS5 on that exact machine…I can’t tell you why its performance is so inexplicably pathetic…but it is. I don’t honestly think any single processor machine is a good bet to run PPro CS5 with anything Hi Def…particularly on the mac side as QuickTime needs some updating to actually run fluently with a 64 bit application.

Most of the demos for CS5 are done with 720p P2 footage…which runs like butter on nearly anything… ProRes is pretty good as far as ease of handling, but it seems to me that QuickTime is the roadblock on that one. Adobe did some creative coding on the Windows side to work around the 32 bit QT architecture, and it seems to work pretty well. Maybe the same flexibility is not available on the Apple side? I don’t know.

I think Apple users seem to have a few more hangups with PPro CS5 than Windows users in my experience, but I also think that FCP’s ability to run as well as it does with ProRes…a 32 bit app running a 32 bit media architecture with a 32 bit codec…gives some Mac users a false sense of what it takes to actually handle some of these non-intermediate formats natively under 64 bit.

Also…ATI cards also seem to come up more often than NVIDIA display cards in Adobe issues in my experience…I really don’t know why.

I did some of my CS5 training material on a Mac like your desktop almost exactly, with the only difference being two quad-core processors like yours, and that machine seemed to work without much trouble, even without CUDA acceleration.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Hannah Radcliff]

Sure!

Here is the clip: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1344358/Spectrum%20Short%20Clip2.mov

I used QT7 to trip the original, well, the h.264 version of the still sub Pro Res 422 version of the original which was comprised of a mixture of DV and 550D footage. I can’t account for the quality or aesthetic of the vid, I didn’t shoot it. Just editing this one.

However, when I try to edit native 550D footage it is very irritating.

Also, FYI, here is a link to a demo of the issue: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1344358/Problem%20demo.mov

If you watch, you’ll see me try to scrub the preview window, then the preview freezes. You won’t see it on screen b/c screenium makes its own cursor apparently, but the spinning wheel of doom pops up for the last 5 secs of the video.

In this vid I show the file info and show it playing and scrubbing fine in the QT X preview:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1344358/Mouse%20Demo.mov

Also as an update I read on another forum that an option is to log in as the root user and open the application there, close it, then reboot as a normal user. Didn’t work!

Thinking you’re on to something with the compression compatability, although if it can edit DSLR footage natively, it should be equipped to handle a h.264 I’d imagine….

[Hannah Radcliff]

Yeah, hah, I whole heartedly agree with the QT aspect. I hope they’ll tie some of the issues up with the release of FCP8. I hated to see QT 7 pro go under the wayside to QT X.

This is part of why I tried PPro5 in the first place–I lost faith in the development on FCP 8. It’s very frustrating when you only have rumors to rely on. Thought I’d find an easy alternative, and now I’m back to square one.

Anyways, I’m reaching the decision that PPro5 is not going to be a solution for me, as long as FCP 7 is still doing its job. I wish I could be more ahead of the curve with a program that can work with DSLR footage natively and also has an already built in workflow for R3D files. Even Sony Vegas is surpassing FCP in some ways.

If I can justify the expense of a new video card, I may go that route. But at the moment my tower works fine for what I’m doing with FCP with a Pro Res workflow, save for longer render times. I think I’ll just stick to that at the sacrifice of mobility. Hey, it’d save a lot of headaches, and after all, the end product is more important than the process. And Excedrin is probably glad to have my business.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

What preset are you using in Premiere?