[David Roth weiss]

[Lisa Olshanski] “Having the latest equipment, why would it not be playing back smoothly?”

There are a few reasons why you’re having issues Lisa.

First, you’re editing h.264, which is a very processor intensive codec, and you’re asking your laptop’s single processor to scale down almost every single shot in realtime from 4K to 1080p. That’s a whole lot of processing demand for a laptop processor.

[Lisa Olshanski] “I have a MacBook Pro Mid 2015, 2.5GHz Intel Core i7 Processor, 16GB Memory, AMD Radeon Graphics card, and a Lacie RAID 0 Thunderbolt drive. Mac OS X Yosemite and Premiere CC 2014.”

You’ve only mentioned the brand of RAID (Lacie), the fact that it’s RAID 0, and that it’s Thunderbolt, but you haven’t mentioned how many drives your RAID contains. I’m going to assume your RAID only has 2-drives. Like most users here on the Cow, it seems that you’re not really aware that a 1 or 2-drive RAID may not have the throughput required to playback 4K media seamlessly. You may need a 4-drive RAID, or even an 8-drive RAID, and the only way to determine what you need is to do the requisite testing and math to determine your RAID sub-system is generating enough throughput for the codec and the number of streams of audio and video you’re editing.

Your first step is to download the free AJA System test, then run it on your Lacie hard drive, then report the results back here. Once you do that I’ll help you by interpreting the results and showing you what your RAID is achieving vs what you really need a RAID to achieve.

In addition, you may want to rethink your workflow… You should probably consider transcoding your 4K h.264 material to ProRes HD before editing, as scaling h.264 4k on the fly on your laptop is just plain crazy. You’d actually do better to edit the 4K natively – right now you’re playing it back and scaling simultaneously, which is simply not what laptop processors are made for.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Well stated Tim…

Oh, and lets not forget, along with a subscription Adobe gives us all the free audio tracks we could ever desire.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Greg Walton] ”
No clean installs. Just the usual Mac upgrade path”

Therein lies the source of your continuing issues. Do a ground up install from scratch, otherwise your issues will most likely never go away.

Plenty of hardheaded people who finally took the time to follow my advice are back up and running without issues. I can’t guarantee 100% that you’ll have the same results, but I can guarantee that you’ll keep having issues if you keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing, and as they say, doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Greg,

Can you please tell us exactly how you got your computer configured to run Yosemite and Premiere CC 2015? In other words, did your computer ship with Yosemite installed, or did you install Yosemite, and if so, what steps did you take? Was it a clean install, or an upgrade/update from a previous version of OS X?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Warren Eig] “Unless you are in features and TV, and even there the studios grind your rate to shreds– no negotiating anymore, you really can’t make a living. “

Finally, someone gets it…

The fundamental misunderstanding here, that repeats itself over and over again, is NOT that the older guys here, myself included, are afraid of change and hate new technology, but simply that we have seen this business go from one where virtually anyone with talent could get rich, to one where almost no one can get rich.

There is no doubt the democratization of video and the tearing down of barriers to entry has benefited creativity and created many new opportunities, however, the older of us have been witnesses to (or victims of) the devaluation and commoditization of talent, which has made it far tougher for anyone in this industry to build and maintain a truly sustainable career.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Bob, everyone in this “business” shared the same wish, to become an artist, and now everyone is an artist, unfortunately starving artists. The old saying be careful what you wish for definitely applies to this “business.”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Simon Reichel] “??? That opens a Finder window.”

No it doesn’t – you didn’t follow my directions silly.

I said highlight the clip in the Premiere Browser – you highlighted the clip in the timeline – they work slightly differently.

If you highlight the file in the Premiere timeline, click on File>Get Properties For>Selection.

You owe me two minutes of life now Simon for not following directions and causing me to write an unnecessary post.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

For any file type, simply highlight the file in the Premiere Browser, click on File>Get Properties For>File.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[dean chapman] “Files are located directly on the hard drive.”

Dean,

It’s patently obvious from your post that you, like many other editors, do not give your hard drive(s) the respect they deserve as a major contributor to the performance of your editing system. And, if I had to guess, you’re most likely storing and editing your media files off of a single hard drive. Right?

So, let me clarify many things for you so you have a real understanding of how your hard drives drive the performance of your NLE. The following is an excerpt from a series of Cow articles I’m now writing on this subject.

The most important aspect about hard drive subsystems (RAID) that editors at every level need to wrap their heads around is “data throughput” — i.e. how much data per second can your media drive(s) reliably move to and from the CPU on reads and writes to disk at a sustained rate. Sustained data throughput for video applications is affected by a number of different variables that affect the overall performance of every NLE. (***Since the most important aspect of video editing is seamless playback of video files without dropping frames, it’s the read speeds that are most important in this discussion.)

What are the most important variables that affect the sustained throughput of a hard drive subsystem?

#1. The number of disks striped together in a RAID – a simple rule of thumb is, every time you double the number of spinning disks you double the throughput approximately. So, 2-drives striped together in a RAID will generate approx. 2X the throughput of a single hard drive. Likewise, an 8-drive RAID array will deliver approximately 8X the throughput of a single drive.

#2. Rated drive performance and RPMs of individual disks – older drives were rated at 1.5Gbit/sec, then 3Gbit/sec, and now we’re up to 6Gbit/sec drives. So, the drives themselves are now faster than before. (***7200RPM spinning drives drives are the standard for video editing applications because of price and performance, 5400RPM drives are too slow, 15,000RPM drives are too expensive, and SSD drives are also too expensive)

#3. Connection speeds – various connections have different max throughput ratings in this order: USB2, Firewire 400, Firewire 800, USB3, SAS 6G, Thunderbolt 1, and Thunderbolt 2. (***for our purposes consider SAS 6G and Thunderbolt to be approximately identical in terms of throughput)

#4. Video Bitrates rated in MB/sec – i.e. how many megabytes per second is required to play a single stream of a specific video codec (***4K varies significantly from uncompressed down to highly compressed proxies)

#5. Total number of simultaneous streams – i.e. how many streams of both audio and video at specific bitrates are to be played back at the same time (***streams of video equal layers – if you stack six layers of video and change the position or opacity of each, that equals six streams – if you stack six layers and only view the top track, that’s only one stream)

#6. Misc computer components – CPU speed, Bus speed, RAM speed and amount, Controller card speed, etc. (***all of these also play a role in the overall performance of your NLE and they impact the throughput of data to and from the hard drive subsystem.)

Determining the necessary specs of a RAID for seamless playback of 4K is not rocket science, but it is science nonetheless, and it first requires that you specify the variables mentioned in #3 thru #6 above. (***When specifying the video codec, always consider the predominant video codec you’re editing now, while always keeping an eye toward the future, because video files will only get larger and more demanding.)

If you’d like me to help you with the science to determine the best RAID solution(s) for your needs, please email me privately at drw@drwfilms dot com and I’ll be happy to help you. In addition, I consult with a number of different resellers, and I can offer you pricing that will meet or beat the best online deals you can find.

I hope this proves helpful to you and others here on the Cow.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Do you want the application to run fast, or do you want to be able to be able to playback video seamlessly?

The answer is, always use your fastest drive(s) for video storage. The issue you’ll have of course is that your SSD drive is your fastest drive and it’s capacity is only 240GB. So, unless you purchase a RAID you’re going to have to compromise, and distributing the cache isn’t really going to make a huge difference unless the video you’re editing is capable of seamless playback from a single drive.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.