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What is taking so long?
In both CS3 and CS4 – Premiere Pro – with a project with a lot of clips – HDV clips or DVCPro Clips – it is taking Premier Pro forever to become operable when you return to it from another application. I can hear the Disk drive whirring feverishly while the hour glass cursor mocks me. In one project – in PPro CS3 – it would take 15 minutes to do whatever it was doing. In CS4 it’s only marginally faster and that’s probably because I installed CS4 over a clean windows install. In another project – with over 100 HDV clips – it takes a minute just after changing the name of a clip (in PPro) to work – again the furious whirring of the drive (a different drive, by the way) and 5 minutes or so to come back after using another app.
What is going on? What is PPro doing when the application becomes active? It clearly has something to do with the large quality of clips in the project and seems worse with HDV then it ever did with DV – but I’ve never had this much time loss waiting for program to be usable.
(The system is a AMD Athalon 64X Dual core 3.0 (6000+) with 4 GIg Ram and the drives are external SATAII dives (in docks). XP-SP3 32bit)
Is this normal?
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17 Replies
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It can sometimes take a bit of time, but 15 minutes is ridiculous. I’d have assumed it crashed and restarted. In the Task manager, does it say it’s running or that it isn’t responding?
How full are the drives?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
How Much Ram?
XP or Vista?
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv -
Well – when it’s doing whatever it is doing with drives – the screen often won’t refresh and the task manger will in fact say PPro is not responding, but then when it’s done with the drives the task manager returns to normal – and sometimes the screen refreshes, when there is slight break in the sound of the drive being read (or written I don’t know which, though I presume it’s being read) and then won’t refresh for a while as the drives start working again.
On the VERY large project – that takes 30 minutes to load and 15 minutes to respond when returned to from the explorer or another application – I have 3 500GB drives – 2 are nearly full (less than 50GIG left on each and the third one – where the project is saved — has 300 GB free. SO were talking some 50+ hours of DVCProHD footage. I’ve given up working with that project fully loaded and am trying to break it into pieces.
On the HDV project – the 500GB drive has 61GB left on it.
The really strange part was that it took anytime at all to change the name of clip already imported into the project. And the longer the clip the longer it took for the program to give me back control after the name change. It’s almost as if it has to re-index the file (but it’s not taking that long.) Or that the all the files in a project have to be “loaded” into memory each time the program is activated? Or that PPro just doesn’t handle large qualities of clips well. And bear in mind that HDV project doesn’t even have a time line yet.
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“(The system is an AMD Athalon 64X Dual core 3.0 (6000+) with 4 GIg Ram and the drives are external SATAII dives (in docks). XP-SP3 32bit) “
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David – Your problem is caused by the fact that your hard drives are way too full. A hard drive used for video editing should never be more than 75 % full. his cause the Windows OS to have problems accessing virtual memory ( swap files ) – for more info – go here – https://www.windvis.com/using-a-partition-for-your-swap-file
and here – https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,887795,00.asp
Any questions – feel free to email me.Dave
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I think it’s a two-fold issue.
1. Your drives are pretty full…one is nearly at capacity. That’s a problem. There is no room for PPro to write changes and updates to the clips and almost without question, and
2. …that drive is (and likely all of them are)likely very fragmented (files are written in pieces all over the drive, making them difficult to access and index).
Defragmenting is the first point of order here…you need at the very least to have 15% free to give the system enough ‘swap’ space to work with, and as the drives get bigger, the process gets more taxing. For the really full drive, I might try to transfer some data from it to the ‘least full’ drive after it’s defragmented to free up enough space to defragment it. Or, better yet, get another drive and move all the data from each drive off to the new drive, then put it back on. It may be quicker and when transfered data is written to an empty drive, it’s written contiguously, effectively ‘defragmenting’ it but a little less tediously…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
PPro CS3 does have limitations with large HD projects. It simply runs out of memory. When that happens, the system uses paging files on the hard drive as a backup, which is a vastly slower process.
If you have CS4, I’d install the 4.01 update, that supposedly improves memory management. You might also want to consider updating to 64-bit Vista.
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Another consideration.
Premiere has always struggled with large project files. Typically I would keep projects under 50mb in size. I was hoping cs3 would change this but doesn’t seem to.
Right now an associate of mine had premiere crashing etc with a project size of 100mb. we broke it up into smaller bites and it runs fine now.
Lance
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Hi David…
Nice to see you…
Is this to say you should do his on ANY attached volume?
OR
you need one for the system on C: to swap things in and out of RAM?
Thanks,
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv -
thanks – I will clear up some space and then defrag. While I sleep. I think part of the recent problem was also the recent UPGRADE that seems to have changed the HDV codec somehow. It’s still slow in the same way – but not nearly as bad now that I have deleted the index files and they have been re-indexed. (Audio too.) I also wonder if the TRANSCRIBE feature adds load time to files – all that meta data has to be considered…then again it’s just text.
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