[Kindari O’connor]

Hi Todd, and thank you for the note about the update. I was not seeing this in the update software (going to Help -> Updates while in Premiere). I tried to get After Effects 10.5.1 update, but there are no CS5.5 updates listed on the After Effects downloads page, only CS5 10.0.x. That shouldn’t be too relevant to this issue though.

With Premiere Pro CS 5.5 5.5.1, performance does seem somewhat better. Here are changes I’ve noticed:

– The render bar stays yellow now when I add a second and third layer of video.
– A single video plays back more smoothly, although it still drops frames here and there. 2 Layers of video plays back much more smoothly now.
– 3 layers of video, with the 2nd and 3rd layers at 50% opacity begins to play at about 10 fps, drops to about 2-4 fps after 7 seconds, and then begins to smooth out toward 15 seconds the end of the clips and plays at about 10 fps. This IS much better, but it still seems like it shouldn’t be this choppy. Here’s what my system resources are doing during this time:

Note – Memory is set to 18 GB available for Adobe out of the 24 total system memory. Both my main and video ram are slowly creeping up in usage, which seems to happen a lot in Premiere.

System Idle (project is open):
– CPU: 0% avg, 0% min, 1% max.
– Ram: 5.94G
– Disk: 0 KB/s
– GPU: 0%
– GPU Ram: 494 MB

1 clip:
– CPU: 12% avg, 10% min, 15% max.
– Ram: 5.98 G
– Disk: 9 MB/s
– GPU: 3-4%
– GPU Ram: 582 MB

2 clips (top layer at 50% opacity)
– CPU: 18% avg, 13% min, 27% max.
– Ram: 5.98 G
– Disk: 16-18 MB/s
– GPU: 4-6%
– GPU Ram: 565 MB

3 clips (top 2 layers at 50% opacity each)
– CPU: 20% avg, 16% min, 27% max.
– Ram: 5.98 G
– Disk: 20 MB/s
– GPU: 6-7 %
– GPU Ram: 574 MB

11 clips
– CPU: 15% avg, 10% min, 30% max.
– Ram: 6.15 G
– Disk: 13 MB/s
– GPU: 0-5% – about 2 avg
– GPU Ram: 900 MB

The lowest resource usage times are when the footage begins to get choppy.

I thought maybe it was the raid array. I moved about 6 GB of footage to an external drive to test it out.

The drive is a G.SKILL 120GB SSD. SATA II, connected to a USB 3.0 enclosure, and this is connected to a USB 2.0 port on the machine.

I noticed while transferring the footage (the same 12 clips used above), I had alternations between about 83MB/s and 24MB/s transfer rate. When moving a single large (2GB) file, I got the 83MB as an average rate, but the file transfer windows pauses at the “5 seconds / 41 MB remaining” point, and the disk activity monitor shows a long period of 25MB/s transfer before it finally finalizes the transfer. Perhaps it’s the raid?

A 1, 2, and 5 clip layer test gave similar disk performance results, but the CPU usage was higher, around 40%.

Next, I decided to try the system drive (SATA II, 7.2K RPM). Transfer from the USB drive to internal rapidly bounced between 34 and 81 MB/s.

It seems like the drives are capable of reading at higher speeds than they do when Premiere is using them. Not sure if it’s Windows, the drive, drivers, or Premiere?

Internal test results were again similar. with similar resource use, except CPU was around 30-35% on average during the 5 layer version.

My next idea is to build a raid array off the internal SATA ports instead of the Sans Digital enclosure, but I don’t know if the raid is the issue.

Any ideas?