The truth about Premiere

[Jon Barrie]

Hi guy.
Just because you have bought a Mac pro it doesn’t mean that everything will magically work.
I am working with a brand new Mac pro and fcp 7.0.3 and it’s crashing every 20mins.
Its using the ATI 5770 graphics card and it’s having problems with the apple controlled and developed software. No system is perfect. Sometimes you get bad hardware or installs.
Your experience is not common. I use a MacBook pro with cs5 and have been cutting DSLR at lower res for realtime effects based editing without any problems.
I have a feeling the new mac pro towers are a bit funky.
Add some more specs about your system & setup. Just because it’s an apple computer doesn’t mean it just “works”. We had to send back the latest tower as it was not booting and kept crashing in a loop.
If you want some help or advice then use this space for just that. If you want to spread your bad experience as gospel, you are just further showing that apples aren’t worth the bang for buck. Just my opinion.
– Jon

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter

[Todd Kopriva]

Did you install the Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.2) update? That update fixes a lot of bugs and greatly improves performance in many cases.

What operating system are you using? Mac OSX v10.6.4?

What is your hardware setup? How much RAM do you have? How many hard disks? (If you’re not reading your source files from one drive and writing output files to another drive, that can be a bottleneck right there—as with any NLE.)

What kind of footage are you using?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Richard Van den boogaard]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience.

Perhaps it could be the graphics card. The GTX285 is a card really made for gaming, not for dedicated video applications. In Adobe’s Hardware compatibility list it features at the bottom of the stack. I have decided to invest in a much faster nVidia card and sufficient RAM and Adobe CS5 shines.

My advice – if you depend on your workstation for a living, have it configured by a dedicated video systems builder with a thorough understanding of editor’s needs in terms of speed, stability and safety. You pay extra, but you benefit in the end.

Altogether, it’s definitely NOT Premiere Pro that is wearing you down. Go back to your Apple store and let them do a fresh install, if they provide such services.

Richard van den Boogaard
Freelance cameraman • Glidecam Operator • Editor • YouTube expert

[Guy Ross]

Hey Todd,

Thanks for the quick reply.
My experience spans 3 systems, all running the latest Mac OS X 10.6.4.
The footage, Canon 5D MVI files, was always read from either a 150 MB/s eSATA RAID or a 115 MB/s internal SATA drive.

The first system was an early 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core 2.8 with 6GB RAM and a GTX285.
The second system was a mid 2010 Mac Pro 8-Core 2.4 with 8GB RAM and a GTX285.
The third system was a mid 2010 Mac Pro 8-Core2.4 with 6GB RAM and a 5770.

The biggest problem with Premiere, in my opinion, is over confidence.
It doesn’t seem to know what it *can’t* play, and therefore ends up hanging and stuttering, even when playing back rendered sequences.

For an editor, even the smallest delay is extremely irritating. But these kinds of incessant halts and freezes are just debilitating.

I love the concept of CUDA and MPE, but they both seem to fall apart on the details.

Thanks,

G

[Todd Kopriva]

Did you install the Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.2) update? It addresses lots of issues, specifically several with CUDA acceleration and DSLR footage.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
———————————————————————————————————

[Guy Ross]

Yes, I have installed the update.

[Guy Ross]

Hey Jon,

I’ve actually had these issues on three different systems, and two clean installs.
Mac Pro 2008 2.8 8 core 6GB GTX285
Mac Pro 2010 2.4 8 core 8GB GTX285
Mac Pro 2010 2.4 8 core 6GB 5770

I’m very interested to hear about your experience cutting DSLR on Premiere.

Which DSLR footage are you cutting? 5D? 7D? D90?
at what frame rate / resolution?
how are you getting hardware acceleration on a laptop…?

thanks,

G

[Guy Ross]

Thanks Richard,

I have had these problems on three different systems, two of them with clean installs.

I don’t think the GTX285 is the culprit either.
It’s one of only 2 Adobe approved cards for the Mac on the Adobe compatibility list:

https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance/

The alternative, the Quadro FX 4800 is an older card (and significantly more expensive)

The GTX 285 exceeds the 4800 in key specs:

240 vs 192 CUDA cores
159 vs 77 GB/s memory bandwidth

although its RAM is admittedly smaller:

1GB vs 1.5 GB

thanks,

Guy.

[Todd Kopriva]

Regarding the difference in video RAM on those cards that you’re comparing, see the last point that I make on this page.

Note that the difference between 1GB and 1.5GB can be the difference between whether or not CUDA acceleration works for a specific case.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
———————————————————————————————————

[Jon Barrie]

I am not getting hardware acceleration with the laptop. And that’s kinda my point. I am having a great experience cutting and grading 550d 1080 25/24 & 720 50/60 footage with a c2d 2.66 4gig ram and a external FW800 drive. I understand the limitations of such a setup and am happy to work in 1/4 res playback/pause. The 550d is the same data rate as the 5d and the camera has comparable specs for video as the 7d. Have you tried the systems with mercury in software mode? Are you sure you have the hardware mode active? It is possible to have bad ram. Yes, across 3 systems. Very bad luck, but not impossible.
To be perfectly honest I have found my experience of OsX snowleopard to be sluggish when compared to the bootcamp run win7 & cs5. I am looking to get a grunt PC at the moment and save about 1/2 the money.
Apple seem to have dropped the ball in my experiences of late. 🙁
Good luck with your setup. Let us know what the system is like compared with software and hardware mercury engine modes. I am looking at the GTX470 on the PC. That has had some very happy posts related to bang for buck.
– Jon

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter