[David Gaudio]

Have experienced exactly the same problem on a new iMac with 12 gigs of RAM and a 2gb video card, a Thunderbolt media drive…updated to the latest version of Premiere (6.0.1) and BMD drivers (9.6); still having the same problem. Constant video stuttering, and audio that keeps on going after the video has frozen.

Quite frankly, this makes Premiere useless to me in a professional environment, and I really want to migrate to it soon from legacy FCP (which does just fine with the BMD drivers, of course). I just have no hope of using an external monitor this way.

I hope something can be fixed soon…Premiere is too good an app for this to continue.

And, yes, I’ve filed an email message with BMD about this. Have heard nothing yet from them.

[David Gaudio]

Hello all,

Okay, just got the 4TB MyBook Thunderbolt Duo in, copied my media, started PP6,and reconnected with no problems.

Unfortunately, all my video stuttering remained. Argh.

I noticed if I switched from Full res to 1/2 things played back a little more smoothly, but I’m still getting plenty of stuttering. That’s after I completely deleted my preview files and started afresh, as it were. The dropped frames indicator doesn’t stay green for long on the program monitor; it changes to yellow almost immediately.

Using the Blackmagic Speed Disk app, I can see the new 4 TB Thunderbolt drive is plenty fast (averaging about 240 mbits/sec), so that’s not the problem.

I’m working with 1920×1080 DSLR footage captured with the H.264 codec at about a 50 mbit data rate. When I switch to the H.264 codec for preview renders it looks awful. When I switch to the Blackmagic 10 bit or ProRes (HQ) codecs it looks dandy, but the stuttering problem persists.

I know I’m not taxing the system very much (again I’m working with a 3.4 ghz Intel i7 27″ iMac purchased back in January with a 2gb video card and 12 gigs of RAM). I only have one video track and six audio tracks playing. I have the UltraStudio 3D box from Blackmagic as my external monitoring device, with the latest driver (9.5.3).

Any ideas? At this point, I’m thinking of uninstalling and reinstalling to see if that makes any difference…

Thanks again for any assistance.

Cheers,

David

[David Gaudio]

Thanks for the tip – but it didn’t seem to make any difference in my situation. I’ll wait for the TB drive and report back…thanks again for your help.

[David Gaudio]

Hi Tom,

I’ve gone ahead and splurged on a new Thunderbolt drive (remember, unlike you I’m still on a Mac – an iMac, actually so eSata won’t work for me). B&H had the Western Digital 4 TB MyBook Thunderbolt drive for $479 – it’s a little slower than some of the other TB drives out there but what I liked about it was the fact that I can swap out drives easily (it acts like an enclosure). Anyway, it arrives here next week, and I’ll post my experiences with it.

Again, many thanks for your help and advice!

[David Gaudio]

As Tom mentioned, it is probably the limitations of my FW 800 throughput. Thanks for your help – I’ll have to spring for that Thunderbolt drive after all (and just back up on bare SATA drives)…

[David Gaudio]

Hi Tom,

You may indeed have hit upon the issue – I’m working with H.264 1920×1080 footage that’s been encoded with a 45 mbit data rate.

Of course, FCP won’t play this back happily either; it would need a transcode to ProRes for that to happen. I did try a ProRes transcode with some of the footage in PPro, but it’s not optimized for that codec the way FCP is and it still stuttered.

If a RAID or a Thunderbolt drive is the only solution to this, I guess I’ll have to spring for one. However, I don’t recall seeing any warnings from Adobe regarding this requirement.

Thanks again for any advice…

[David Gaudio]

Hi Tom,

Sorry – you’re right I didn’t mention that. I’m just running a single FW 800 drive, no RAID. As I said, I don’t have any such stuttering issues with FCP 7 and my Blackmagic device there. I’d be shocked, however, if the only way to solve this problem would be to get a RAID or a Thunderbolt drive…

Thanks for your assistance. You’re always very helpful to people on this forum.

[David Gaudio]

I have a 27″ iMac purchased in January of this year (3.4 ghz Intel Core i7), 12 gigs of RAM and the 2 GB AMD Radeon HD 6970M. Have the Blackmagic UltraStudio 3D box – all newest drivers for both BMD and Adobe. Am having exactly the same stuttering problem, and it might be a dealbreaker for me with CS6 if it’s not resolved (I don’t have this problem with FCP 7). I’m just playing a simple video track and ONE audio track, not doing anything but watching, just one take with no edits, and suddenly the video starts to stutter and the whole program becomes unstable. What is going on?

[David Gaudio]

That hardly seems like a hack it’s so minor..! I have an iMac with the same 2gb card and I just got CS6. Looking forward to seeing that OpenCL working! Thanks!

[David Gaudio]

Thank you – I was hoping that would be the case!