Stumped by Premiere Pro CS5 performance issues???

[Hannah Radcliff]

I tried a number of them–web, NTSC, and DSLR (since it’s an h.264, I thought it was worth a shot). But the problem happens before I get the clip into the sequence.

I think I’m going to call this bunk and stick with FCP on my Mac at home 🙁

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Hannah Radcliff] “Here is the clip: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1344358/Spectrum%20Short%20Clip2.mov“

Plays and scrubs very smoothly on my Windows CS5 system using an AVC-Intra 1080i50 preset.

Alex
DV411

[Alex Gerulaitis]

So it does in Bootcamp Win7-64 on a 2009 17″ MBP with 4GB RAM. The preset is DSLR 1080p30 @29.97.

Have you trashed your Premiere Pro preferences? (Reinstalling CS5 doesn’t do it.)

Alex
DV411

[Hannah Radcliff]

Hrm……..not recently. I’ll try it and get back to you to see if that works.

[Keith Moreau]

I have a 2007 Macbook Pro with 4GB of ram with absolutely no CUDA and edited much more challenging stuff than yours, I think, multiple combinations of DLSR (5D, 1D, 7D) AVCHD, SonyEX1 all on the same timeline. I’d remove all the hacks you added, they could be detrimental.

Here are a couple of thing I noticed:

PPro CS5 hates ‘wrapped’ MTS files. I ‘wrap’ a lot of my MTS files in quicktime using Clipwrap, it’s the only way to use AVCHD files in Quicktime apps (FCP, compressor, anything on the Mac) without having to ‘transcode’ them into bloated prores. If I put that type of file into Premiere pro, it bogs way down to the point of what you experienced. It plays back the original MTS avchd files very well, however.

Another thing: Sometimes PPro would get into a ‘state’ where I’d get spinning beachballs. I would use a program called “Cocktail” to clear the Mac system cache files, and reboot, this seemed to help.

Also upgrading to the latest PPro helped. Having more RAM helped. Having faster hard drives helped. I wouldn’t use the internal HD, too slow. I used an external firewire 800 HD.

I still use FCP, but mostly as a ‘utility’ to get stuff to work, like using it’s media manager if I need to transcode (Premiere Pro’s isn’t as good as FCP here) and to use effects I don’t yet have or don’t exist on PPro. The XML cross platform support is pretty good for simple things.

I think FCP is ‘smoother’ if you get all the footage transcoded first into prores or a lightweight MPeg2 (HDV, EX) format) I hate the 1/2 second ‘lag’ I get with PPro when I do anything, FCP is instant.

But if I had to use FCP to do the last project, I’d still be transcoding to Prores now and would have several terabytes of prores media that I’d have to deal archive. Premiere Pro is much less wasteful this way.

[Hannah Radcliff]

I got the “hack” removed straight away. It’s not there anymore. I’m gonna do a clean install of OS x this evening and try to reinstall premiere under the root user. All the reading I’ve been doing suggests a number of issues may be occurring. Some say it’s actually an audio driver issue, some say it’s disk permissions, and some say that the files were not put in the right place during the installation.

FCP seems to be ok as long as I’m not in a hurry. I’m rendering out a burlesque performance shot on my T2i right now and used some third-party effects plug ins to make it look all neat-o. It’s like a third-party Rock Horror Picture Show rendering nightmare at my house! Good time to go out and get some coffee.

[Shawn Champagne]

Did you ever get this issue worked out? Im planning on getting the current generation 13inch Macbook Pro for CS5…