[Mike Jackson]

Maybe I’m dumb, but I’m not on Twitter and I can’t figure out how to contact you via posts on your blog. If you could send an e-mail to any address you want to invent, @steampoweredfilms.ca, it’ll get to me.

I just had a major diagnosis breakthrough though! As I theorized in a posting earlier today, it seems to be a very specific sort of memory issue – As long as I don’t make the system do anything taxing, it runs fine. A single stream of anything but RED footage will play perfectly – ProRes, DSLR, whatever. UNTIL… I tax the system. Three streams of ProRes, or hitting an unrendered Dynamic Link shot, and it’s like a bullet to the head. Premiere starts chugging, and ALL actions start to lag… FOREVER. Even the simplest actions no longer work. Going back to the sequence with a single stream, it no longer plays.

Occasionally I can wait 10-20 minutes and I might be able to play simple sequences again, but usually only killing and restarting Premiere will restore playback… *IF* I wait a good 10 minutes before relaunching.

So *hopefully* more RAM will fix this right up… but it sure feels like a memory management / memory leak type of issue in the code to me…?

[Mike Jackson]

I hear what you’re saying about drivers and the OS… and in a perfect world, I would of course always upgrade. But for the last few years, Apple has been in the habit of cutting features I use with every release of pretty much everything they make… so to me it’s usually a frustrating downgrade. Hence my reluctance. I also have almost a decade’s worth of Final Cut projects that I’ll always need to be able to go back to, and I’m just waiting in fear for the OSX update that breaks Final Cut for good.

To this day I maintain a WinXP machine with After Effects 5.5 on it, and probably do half my VFX work on it. Why? It has dozens of plug-ins that I use regularly that I don’t have for the Mac, many of which are no longer available, having been either discontinued, sold-off and changed, or the companies that made them folded.

I often do work at a Journalism school, and they’re still locked in on Tiger and FCP6, because their servers won’t run on anything more recent. And I once cut a show at CBS in New York, 2006 or so… and most of their edit bays were running Avid on Macs from 1998 or 99. Point being – it’s not a perfect world, and in this industry we can’t always just switch to the newest version. All THAT said, I’m certainly considering it here… I just need to weigh the gains vs. losses.

As far as the performance goes, maybe I’m old school, but I generally expect new software on a slightly beefier machine to be able to at least match the performance of older software on a slower machine. That’s not so unreasonable is it? 😉 And also, keep in mind that Avid ALSO plays back just fine on my current system, so I’m not just comparing the latest version of Premiere to legacy software.

But away from philsophical ramblings and back to the matter at hand: Regarding other software running at the same time – Usually I don’t have a lot else running. iStat has a tiny footprint, and often that’s the only other thing on.

However, I’ve been using dynamic link to AE a lot on one of the music videos I’m cutting, and no surprise, once both programs are running and start fighting over RAM, Premiere starts to grind (though AE still performs swimmingly). I’m sure the RAM is the limiting factor, and that’s fine, I can take my lumps. But even if I close AE, close and re-open Premiere and work on a completely different project with no dynamic links, Premiere will *still* grind, for anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour or even until a system reboot.

Now I’m not a programmer (though I did work in the game industry for many years), but that seems to me to have all the signs of a memory management issue. It’s like once Premiere fills up the RAM, even just for a second, for any reason, it never fully recovers. Of course, throwing more RAM at it would ‘solve’ the problem 😉

Still, so far the verdict from all the fine folks here seems to be – More RAM, move to Lion, and pray that solves the issue and doesn’t break anything else, because we don’t *really* know what the problem is…

[Mike Jackson]

Interesting. That makes me feel a lot less alone at least… and believe it or not, may be the first time I’ve heard anyone say something nice about upgrading to Lion or Mountain Lion.

[Mike Jackson]

Yeah, running in 64-bit mode brought my system to its knees. Even AE, which normally runs very well, started choking.

I did try rolling back to an earlier version, but I only have my installers for 6.0… which runs better in some ways, worse in others. And running Update just moves me up to 6.0.2. Any idea how I can get to 6.0.1?

[Mike Jackson]

64-bit seems to make no difference.

One thing I *can* say difinitively – When I was on v 6.0.1, all playback was spotty, but usually only red bars choked it. Since going to 6.0.2, ProRes sequences with no colored bars above play more often, but even yellow bars stutter and cough.

[Mike Jackson]

32. I’ll try 64-bit on my next reboot.

Another clue – I just had about an hour of total stability and smooth playback, even with multiple ProRes clips stacked in my sequence. It was wonderful. Then I layed in a top layer for a mask (a PSD file with transparency) and got the yellow bar along the top for everything. Playback chugged and died.

I turned off the layer with the PSD, the yellow bar went away… but playback was still in the toilet. I deleted the PSD, no change. Premiere can no longer play a timeline that worked just fine a few minutes ago. Scrubbing sends black frames to my external monitor half the time, all operations are sluggish, even minimizing Premiere takes 20 seconds to complete.

And then, after waiting a few minutes and going back to Premiere, it plays just fine again.

Oh wait, no, it’s back to its old shenanigans. Intermittent and unpredictable playback.

Sigh.

[Mike Jackson]

BM Speed Test puts read and write in the 390-400MB/s range. It’s definitely not the problem. Which I knew was the case anyway, because Premiere is the ONLY program that chokes on playback.

One interesting new discovery – The most recent time the program started choking and freezing, I minimized it… and when I opened it again, it revealed it was generating peak files. Which it seems to do every time I open each project, again and again, and had just finished doing a mere 5 minutes previously.

So is Premiere getting busy with weird operations in the background, rather than prioritizing playback?

[Mike Jackson]

Well, deactivating the BMD card *improved* the situation, but didn’t fix it enitirely. Still dropping frames, just less frequently.

[Mike Jackson]

Oh, one other little tidbit. I don’t know if it means anything, but I have iStat installed on my Mac, so I get constant readouts of CPU and RAM use at the top of my screen at all times. When my system gets pissy and is at its most unresponsive (as it is at this very moment, can’t play longer than 5 seconds without picture freezing), my RAM reads at only 2/3 usage and all 8 cores are barely above idle…

[Mike Jackson]

Thanks for the response Dennis! I don’t post often, but I’ve been really appreciating your involvement in the forums for a long time. After the debacle with FCPX (and Apple in general), it’s been so refreshing seeing you and Adobe get directly involved with us, helping us when we need help, and really listening to our requests and concerns. Thank you.

What you’re saying about my particular issues has me worried though, as I’m limited in how up-to-date I can get my BMD drivers. I’m still on Snow Leopard, and BMD’s latest drivers are Lion only… but I have very little interest in updating my OS and risking having a lot of other software and functionality I use daily get broken. And I know I’m not the only person in the post industry who would prefer (or is forced, in order to maintain their servers) to stay on Snow Leopard, so it’s pretty frustrating to see the third-party support vanish. Not that that’s your problem of course, but still… worrying.

All that said, both the RAM and BMD suggestions have their problems for me. Fine on a trouble-shooting level (and I’ll try disabling the BMD just to narrow down where the problem really is), but the cold hard fact of it is I need the BMD card more than I need Premiere. I’d love to make Premiere my workhorse… but both FCP Classic and Avid give me smooth playback with my BMD card, so at this point they win. Which hurts me deep in my soul, hence my coming here looking for fresh suggestions for a solve 😉

On a philisophical note though, I do have to say I worry about any software that has trouble playing back a single stream of video on a system with 8 gigs of RAM. Makes me think that either a) something’s gone VERY wrong with my system, or b) something’s very wrong with the code. I’d also humby request that Adobe revise the tech specs listed in all the documentation, since it sounds like the ACTUAL recommended RAM spec is 16 gigs or so, not the 8 currently listed.

Anyway, thanks for the help, and I’ll start unplugging and deactivating things and see what happens…