Thanks, Joe, for the help! It seems to me this is a weakness of Premiere Pro, a lack of a viable compression format. I’m not an editor but sometimes some simple editing is required and I own the CS5 production bundle so I figured I’d rely on Premiere but it certainly has its drawbacks.
That being said I turned down the playback resolution to 1/4 and it’s helped. I also realized my media wasn’t on my RAID drive so moving it over helped as well.
Again, thanks for the advice.