[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the reply, Chris. If anybody else has had good results from their Mac Pro and CS.5, I’d like to hear it. As is the case, usually these forums are chock full of people having problems, not the ones that are actually happy, so it is easy to get an unrealistic opinion of how well or badly a system works in general. I have yet to talk with ADT regarding the 30% “Mac Tax” because of the Mac OS’s bad architecture, but given that the Windows and Mac Hardware, when Mac Pros are newly released, are relatively equivalent for me this would be the biggest inherent drawback to me, if it’s true.

The ‘killer deal’ factor has a lot of other issues to go along with it, such as other issues perhaps not related to Premiere Pro, such as ease of use, the Apple ecosystem (which is pretty powerful and convenient for me.) Sometimes a good deal from a base hardware point of view can really be just part of the overall cost of operating the machine. For me, I would have to re-invest in a whole new set of Windows-based software at least, plugins, tools, etc.

Along with my Creative Cow Magazine was a whole other ‘magazine’ which was actually an HP advertisement, which extolled the virtues of getting an HP Z800 and the disadvantages of Macs, especially when producing video so there seems to a trend, at least in sponsorship and promotion, of moving away from the Mac.

Again, thanks for the info and others, please feel free to chime in. I am so interested in this subject and having an open and honest discussion about it.

[Keith Moreau]

Chris, would you be able to tell us what Mac Pro you have, the config, RAM, HD, graphics card, and why you are unhappy with what would be a pretty fast Mac using Premiere Pro CS 5 or 5.5?

It is very, very interesting and informative for me to try to get some real world info from Mac Premiere Pro users and why they are unhappy and contemplating, or have made up their minds, such as Tom, that Windows PC is the preferred platform for Premiere Pro.

While I see many complaints about PPro on this and the Adobe PPro forum from Mac users, I also see many more complaints from PC users complaining about similar problems. Even now it seems there are issues with Premiere Pro’s exporting of multiple audio tracks and compatibility with 3rd party I/O cards and broadcast monitoring.

My thought until now was the PPRo, like all the other NLEs (including FCP 7, FCP 10, Avid) are pushing the limits of computers and it’s easy to get into an unstable state with any platform. And sometimes what might happen, especially from the animus created by the FCP 10 debacle, that ‘the grass is greener’ syndrome might also kick in. In the end, it’s a tool but the ‘cost’ of switching to Windows PC is huge for me, I want to make the right decision when the time comes.

I also think it is informative to Adobe to see these types of discussions for them to base their commitment of resources. They have supposedly cashed in a bit from FCP switchers, but I’m not sure if those switchers are happy or not. There is still a great loyalty to the Apple / Mac ecosystem, like me it will be hard to get people to move over. Better to get PPRo to work equally as well on Mac as PC. I was a switcher pre FCP 10, so it wan’t a big deal, but I want more and more performance out of the native, real time PPro mercury engine.

Tom, thanks for your recommendations and information, I’ll follow up with ADK.

[Keith Moreau]

Tom,

Thanks for the honest reply.

I am so entrenched in Apple stuff that it would be hard for me to switch. At the same time, if Apple doesn’t come out with a new Mac Pro soon (I hear it will be after the next ‘Xeons’ are available from Intel), I may have no choice but to switch, at least for Video editing, to Windows / PC. I have heard a lot about the ‘bad hyper threading’ on the Mac vs Windows. Maybe you could point me to a reputable source for this info, as mostly I’ve seen it on Premiere Pro related forums from PPro PC users but not a lot to back it up in the Mac / PC general development community. (I have a software development background as well.) Not that I don’t believe it, but I would like to see some proof of it, and not just that it might be hard for Adobe to make Premiere perform on the Mac as well because of their common code base. And even if it is not Apple, but Adobe, that doesn’t really matter, because if the software is faster on a Windows machine, that’s the way it is.

I have even thought about using VMWare Fusion on a Windows PC to run Lion and the Apple stuff I need, but when I need IRON I use the Windows PC, a total role reversal from what I do now. (Fusion to run necessary Windows Apps.)

And since you’re on the same Mac as me, if you get anything modern, I would suspect you’ll get way more than 30% boost, maybe more like 500%. Probably after NAB there will be better Multi-processing Intels out so you’ll get even more of a boost. It’s very, very tempting. By that time if Apple doesn’t have a new Mac Pro, I’m there with you.

[Keith Moreau]

Tom, what are you thinking of getting? If Apple had a brand new mac pro today would you consider it?

[Keith Moreau]

I agree with Walter, have him export in something that FCP can natively use. However, with XDCAM EX, though FCP can actually edit those files well, you’ll need to either transcode them or use a plugin by Calibrated to fool the Quicktime system into playing the EX files natively. Depending on your final output, or if you are the final producer of the final output will determine the codec he and you use. You could try Animation Codec or DVCPro HD as well. It’s really too bad there isn’t a Prores Exporter in Premiere Pro PC.

Another solution is for him to export a FCP 7 XML sequence from his Premiere Pro, and provide you with the XML and the original 7D files. The 7D files will actually edit barely in FCP, if you set the 7D files as the sequence codec type. If you do anything that requires rendering it will bog down.

If you need speed, you could take his files, in your timeline, and use FCP media manager to transcode them to prorees and create a new sequence. Then use that sequence to edit, as you would normally do.

[Keith Moreau]

Well, I’m using a Mac and use Premiere Pro and Media Encoder to export stuff all the time for Windows machines. The Youtube Preset in Premiere Pro is a very high bitrate file. There is a possibility that your client’s computers don’t have the throughput or horsepower to play them back. Those presets are optimized to upload to Youtube (or similarly, Vimeo) because they then re-encode the file to a much lower bitrate so they can stream over the internet well.

I would use the iPad or iPod or even the AppleTV settings, those are lower bitrate and might work better.

Regarding the conspiracy about PPro not working as well with Macs, at least in this regard, I think Media Encoder runs rings around Compressor. If they can just get Media Encoder to be a bit more stable (it seems to hang pretty often) that would be great. I never use Compressor anymore unless I have to.

Keep at it, I think you’ll find the correct setting.

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Rick

I use dealram.com to find the best prices, usually I go to Other World Computing, macsales.com to purchase the RAM, they have good RAM and a good warranty which I have had to use once. They also have a trade in for old ram, which might be of some benefit. RIght now I have 24GB, this seems to be right for my situation. I also have a SSD startup drive and this makes things a lot faster as well. They are expensive but really improved the perceived speed of the system.

I upgraded to Lion a couple of weeks ago. I’m always wary of major upgrades, especially since Lion obsoleted a lot of things. However, the main reason I wanted to upgrade to Lion was that it was reported to fix the PPro ‘laggy timeline’ problem where dragging clips in the timeline would have a latency. There was a whole discussion here and on the Adobe Premiere Forums about that.

Anyway, yes, I upgraded, and at least in that way Premiere Pro 5.5.2 is better. I had some PPro instabilities and I’m still having them, such as occasional crashes in Premiere Pro. This might be due to either plugins in Premiere Pro, or some non-Lion compatible Quicktime plugins.

I removed at least one that was causing Quicktime to crash and re-launch every few seconds. I’m still investigating a OGG component that Premiere Pro seems to complain about loading (in the Mac system logs). At this point for the timeline issue it’s probably worth upgrading to Lion. I would backup your startup drive completely before upgrading, if at all possible.

What I’m finding is if the Premiere Pro Project starts getting bit large, Premiere Pro begins to get more sluggish and unstable (crashy.) I was just working on a project yesterday that was crashing. It was a 200MB project, mostly because within the project I had backed up many sequences to preserve states of the sequences before I made major changes. I also had multiple but related sequences within the same project file. I trimmed the project to remove the unneccesary sequences which reduced it down to about 35MB and it worked much better and didn’t crash after that. Most of the work I’ve done in PPro on the Mac to date has been 30 minutes or less. I’m wary of working on a long form project, over 1 hour, I feel I’m going to have to baby it, like I had to do with FCP 7, to keep it stable. I hope Adobe addresses this in the near future.

Good luck with it and report back with your progress.

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

I don’t know if there are benchmarks on Macs like there are on PCs. I have a Mac Pro 2008 8 core with Quadro 4000. I think the benefits of the CUDA are evident mostly on having the CUDA enabled effects being able to be rendered in real time. The CUDA is also used on these effects for exporting, either via Premiere Pro, or Media Encoder. If I wasn’t able to use CUDA acceleration via these NVidia cards, Premiere Pro would be a lot less appealing to me.

That being said, I also feel I could benefit from a more modern Mac or PC with more cores and faster clock, I think Premiere Pro really tries to use all the power it can and if your system isn’t powerful enough you’ll experience various forms of sluggishness. I can’t wait until Apple releases a new line of Mac Pros, and I pray they don’t discontinue them.

[Keith Moreau]

I have a similar spec Mac, an 8 core 2008 Mac. However I have a lot more ram (24GB) and I use an NVidia Quadro 4000. I also use very fast eSata RAIDs for my media that can pump around 200MB/s or more as well as a SSD boot drive. While I’d love for things to be faster, I get tolerable performance in most situations now.

Premiere Pro CS 5 and 5.5 is pretty resource intensive. It can handle native H.264 (your Canon codec) but if your Mac isn’t high end, performance might suffer. The Nvidia 4000 for me is to render real time effects, for those that are CUDA compatible, it probably isn’t the source of your beach balls.

The beach ball is usually an indication that the Mac has run our of RAM and is swapping ‘virtual RAM’ on the hard drive. If you’re hard drive is slow and also doing other things, the beach ball results. Switching to and from applications compounds the problem.

Use the Mac’s built in ‘activity monitor’ to see if something else is running that’s affecting things, but I think you have a combination of low RAM and slow startup and media drives. You should also try to keep the media separate from your Startup / applications drive.

You might also have something ‘crashing’ and relaunching in the background that might be slowing things down. I recently upgraded to Lion and I was confounded by slow PPro performance. It turned out to be that I had an old Quicktime plugin, 3ivx, that was crashing every few seconds, and it was affecting PPro performance. I used the Mac’s built in ‘console’ app to see what error messages were being spit out.

Good luck.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the reply, however I want all the lines to have the same font size, so I don’t think this is a workaround for my problem.