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XDCAM EX and Premiere Pro nightmare
Hello,
I recently received footage on external harddisk from a camera man who used XDCAM EX to record the event. I have never worked on a 1920 x 1080 project or on a tapeless media before so I was pretty excited about editing this project for him.
After I transferred over all the files to my internal disk (7200rpm), I imported them in to Premiere Pro using Media Browser. The problem starts then. If I save the project or switch windows, the project hangs for a very long period, sometimes causing Premiere Pro not to respond. I am hesitant that once I start editing this 3 hour long project, Premiere Pro might freeze on me again causing me a loss of lots of valuable time.
I tried to look around for solutions for sometime (such has turning off anti virus), but that doesn’t really help much.
I have a pretty decent desktop. It’s a 64bit Win7 Ultimate, i7 with 16gb of RAM. I have the nvidia 560 ti graphics card on this machine and I have the production premium suite 5 installed.
Like I mentioned, this is the first time I am editing a “real” hd project, and I am already so bummed. 🙁
Any help troubleshooting this will be very helpful.
Thanks,
Sagar.
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11 Replies
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Hi Sagar,
Do you have a separate hard drive for the video? Using the C: drive will hurt performance. The GTX 560 is not officially supported by Adobe for adding the Mercury Engine GPU-acceleration. There is a way to enable this card here: https://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm
You don’t really need to read and digest all of the information – go to lower left of 2nd page of info and there is an .exe file that you can run that will enable the card and this will really help performance by using the GTX 560 hardware to speed up Premiere.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for the response. Yes, I have a whole separate drive for videos. Nothing get’s stored in the C drive, including cache files.
When I was doing my research, I came across a post where you’d have to go to Premiere Pro’s folder and open the .txt file (not sure which one it was) to see if your card was added to list of supported cards. I am guessing this is not the same information.
I will look in to this once I get home as I am currently at work. I hope this will fix the issue.
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A RAID 0 disk can help HD editing. Makes it smoother. Believe it or not I increased my memory from 16 to 24 and most of the delays/hangups disappeared. And that machine already had a RAID 0 for video. In other words, for HD editing, spruce up in any area you can. Do you have more than one video stream, or just one?
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Sorry 12 to 24GB, I think!
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Jeff, I have already tried this work around before I posted on here but that didn’t solve the problem. Any more ideas?
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I tried moving the project over in a SSD drive. It was 120 GB and the project was under 30gb.
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Make sure your xdcam-ex sequence settings exactly match the fame size and frame rate and codec of the source video.
If you’re going to try and render long clips with resource-intensive effects like color correction you’re looking at long render times. And big render files, make sure those are being stored with the project and your disk has space.
Watch out for canceling while rendering if you haven’t saved first. I’ve gotten some crashes that way. Haven’t seen crash on save or on switching programs though.
I don’t know if PC PPro can deal with .mov wrapped xdcam-ex files (as opposed to native bpav-folder wrapped files). If windows-PPro doesn’t like those, that could be a problem and you’ll need to get the native bpav folders.
–Shayne Weyker
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The original video is 1920 x 1080, 59.94 fps and it has 4 audio channels.
My sequence is XDCAM EX 1080i60.
I haven’t done any rendering or editing yet. This problem is so severe that when I change windows or save the project after dragging the clips on the timeline, PPro freezes.
I believe I was given the files straight off the card. I do have the CLPR and BPAV folders. They are in mp4 format and I put them on the timeline from media browser.
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XDcamEX has been my staple format since the later stages of CS3. It runs quite easily on even lighter configured systems.
If you have the actual camera footage, I would ask the videographer how the material was transferred. It really should be transferred with Shot Put or the Sony EX utility.
The BPAV folder should be the overall directory and inside that, you should have folders named “TAKR” and “CLPR” and two XML files named “MEDIAPRO” and “CUEUP”. If the data isn’t arranged like that, the total file structure is not intact.
If the media is solid, then I’d try a reinstall of PPro and make sure you get all the updates.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Thank you, Tim. Your post really helps me put things in to perspective. All this time I was thinking my hardware was insufficient to handle these clips.
I have 3 projects that I am editing in total. Each of these folders are named “1” “2” “3”. Each of this folders have another folder BPAV. The BPAV folder has CLPR, TAKR, Mediapro.xml, and Cueup.xml. In addition to that, there is a folder named “General”
The only question here is how the media was transferred. I would have to get in touch with the videographer but the sequence of the files and folders seem to be intact.
I will try to reinstall PPro if anything, but I have the authentic Production Premium suite and all the softwares are running on latest versions (PPro @ 5.0.3)
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