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Video and audio skipping in CS 5.5 and 6 – have tried every imaginable fix to no avail
First, the tech specs: imac 27″ mid-2011
2.7 GHz Core i5
20 GB RAM
Radeon UD 6770M
OS 10.7.5
Premiere CS6
Promise R4 RAID 5 attached via Thunderbolt
Blackmagic UltraStudio Express====
About a year or so ago, I bought CS 5.5 as a FCP switcher. Installed it on a brand-new iMac, along with Avid 6. I found I was consistently having problems with sync “hiccupping” during playback, so I back-burnered my transition to Premiere, and kept working on my old Mac Pro with FCP.
When the upgrade to CS6 came along, I thought “Okay, maybe that’ll fix the problem.” It didn’t. I started working with it on small projects where the client wasn’t in the suite, and the skipping/stuttering wouldn’t drive me too crazy. Over time, I’ve tried everything imaginable, and nothing has solved the problem. I’ll list some of the things I’ve tried below:
Uninstalling CS5.5
Uninstalling Avid
Switching from AJA to Blackmagic
Trying different drives
Trying the Promise on a different Thunderbolt port
Making sure the Promise is the first peripheral on the daisychain
Seeing if file format makes a difference (it doesn’t — even ProRes 422 won’t play smoothly for long)Both audio and video have occasional glitches, though the video glitches are far more obvious. I’m posting a screencap on YouTube (no audio) that shows the video stuttering quite clearly. The worst examples are at :26, 1:02, 1:45, though you’ll see small glitches at other spots, too.
Audio and video do not tend to glitch at the same time, and there’s nothing repeatable about when the skips/repeats occur.
In terms of possible software conflicts, there’s very little on my machine, and everything on there is pretty standard-issue edit suite stuff: Microsoft Office, RED Cine X, PluralEyes, etc.
Screencap is on YouTube at
https://youtu.be/ji2RnBzGq-MAnother problem I’ve had –which I’m not demonstrating in the screencap– is audio sync drifting more and more out of sync on playback of RED 5k .R3D files, even when playing back from a direct-attached Thunderbolt RAID and RED Rocket card (in Sonnet Echo external chassis). When I hit the space bar and re-start playback, it starts off in sync, then starts drifting out again. This despite the fact that Premiere touts its ability to work with R3D (in lower-res mode) without even using the Rocket card.
Any suggestions will be appreciated. Ahem… Walter?😉
Scott Auerbach
Sputnik Pictures / Atlanta -
3 Replies
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Hi Scott,
May or may not have anything to do with the issue, but a Core i7 is far preferable to an i5, and an iMac does not support an Nvidia display card that would provide GPU-accelerated playback. So just saying, you’ve got two strikes against you from the start, regardless of the nice Thunderbolt storage drive, the machine is on the low-end for RED editing and even some HD formats could be problematic due to the overhead needed for codec decompression.
With sync issues, check sequence settings against source footage, make sure it all matches up, for instance 23.976 versus 24 frames.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Can you please screen pic the CPU Activity here during poor playback?
example – https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4180
Please switch to per thread.Are you using the Blackmagic or Aja with playback that is drifting? What is the sample rate of the media and sequence?
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Will do… might be a day or two before I can post it. When I’ve checked, I haven’t been maxing out any of the cores. Seq is 29.97. At most, there might be one short bit of 23.98 media on the timeline. I’ve had it happen on sequences without mixed framerates, so that’s definitely not it.
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