• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Unable to use effects on large 1+ hr project

  Posted by Jonathan Wilson on June 16, 2006 at 12:46 am

  I’m posting this for my Editor. He’s working with a large project, more than an hour – 1:15, I think. It is comprised entirely or stills, and 3 or 4 audio tracks. Most of our effects are panning, zooming, and cross fades.

  We’ve used quite a number of computers to work with this show in the last cuple years, including an Athon 65. The show gives the comptuers a good workout.

  We originally made the show in 3 sections, in order to give the computer a break (I know a show with that many files in it is alot for a computer to handle, nd we had a lot of recomendations to work on it in smaller sections).

  Just last month we bought a new Dual CPU/Dual core (i.e. Dual CPU, each CPU is a Xeon Dual-core).
  From everything I understand this should be a very, very fast computer. The specs are:

  Dell Prescision 670
  3.12 GB of DDR2 RAM (that’s what it says in the System Properties in WIndows – I thought it actuall had 4GB of RAM, not sure if Windows is reporting it wrong or if there’s just less RAM than I thought.)
  Intel SerialATA RAID card with 4 drives making a 1TB RAID 0 array — used for source material
  Serial ATA drive – used for C: drive, OS and applications – project file on this drive too.
  nVidia Quadro Video Card – I forget which one exactly but I looked it up in the past and its in the list of cards that Adobe recommends on their web site, and I’ve seen it recommended in these forums too.
  FW800 card, and a Media G-RAD external FW800/RAID 0 hard disk (this isn’t used right now)
  Windows XP Pro, Service Pack 2

  Since we bought this “enormous” computer, we merged the 3 seperate timelines into one big hour-long project. It plays fine, it renders fine, we can export MPEG files for DVD with the Media Encoder, just fine.

  Hoeever, what doesn’t work is, we are unable to use the mouse to manipulate the effects settings on a image, for example a motion effect.

  Now I don’t know all the proper technical terms for what I’m about to describe, so please bear with me.

  If you select an image, and start to apply the motion effect – let’s say we’re trying to get a zoom-and-pan effect – you start with a keyframe marking a certain point in “time” – what the image first comes on – if you want to start off “zoomed in” halfway, you are supposed to be able to use your mouse to drag the little “handles” around the image and zoom in or out as much as you want.

  Then you should be able to move to the last keyframe and select, for example, a different percentage or view, or a different part of the picture (pan).

  However if we try to use the mouse, there is about a 30 second to one minute delay between the time you click-and-drag the mouse and the time the compute actually /does/ what you’re telling it to do. In the minute while you are waiting, premiere kind of “freezes” – not badly, but you can’t do anything else while you are waiting.

  Now of course, if you are actually trying to get your effect “just the way you like it” on an individual image, most editors will probably adjust it 4 or 5 times before they decide they like it.
  Since each adjustment takes 3 or 4 manipulations witht the mouse and each manipulations can take a minte, it’s each to reach the point where it take 15, 20 mintes per picture to do something that should really only take 1 or 2 mintes.

  Now, the funny part is, for each control you can manipulate with the mouse, you can type the values into the controls 9instead of using the mouse. When we type values in the computer makes the adjustment to the effect instantly. No delay.

  So can anyone tell me – why is the computer so slow when using the mouse, and so snappy when typing in values with the keyboard into the same effect settings? Is there anything we can do about it.

  Is there any known problems with Prrmiere Pro 2.0 and Dual CPU/Dual-Core systems? I’ve been checking for updates on Adobe’s site but nothing has come out yet.

  I have tried importing just a handful of the images into a new, empty show and tested the same thing – the mouse works fine in that case.

  So perhaps with a very large show the computer just can’t handle it, but if that’s true, why does it work so fast when we type in the values with the keyboard?

  Any advice or solutions would be appreciated.

  Jonathan Wilson replied 19 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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