[Mike Molenda]

Thanks for the advice. I think using CBR might be the culprit, as I didn’t get any complaints on earlier versions, when I was using 2-pass VBR. Still doesn’t necessarily explain why it works on my systems but not others, unfortunately.

[Mike Molenda]

Sometimes it can take a while, especially if you’ve got a long clip. When you import the clip, Premiere has to do things like generate waveform data, index the clip for searching, etc.

This happens in the background, so you can start editing your clip immediately after import, but sometimes things like conforming the audio will take a while. If you quit out of Premiere while this is happening, then the process is terminated until you relaunch the application.

I generally give the system a few minutes to process after an import. There should be a small yellow progress bar in the corner of the screen indicating the status. This is time well-spent naming your clips, sorting them into bins, etc.

[Mike Molenda]

Thanks Tom.

One of the first things I did when setting up the new MBP was to disable automatic graphics switching as the article suggests, because I had read that it affected performance for those trying to run DaVinci Resolve, and those trying to use GPU acceleration with the Premiere cuda_supported_cards.txt “hack” in PPro 6.0.0 and 6.0.1.

Seems that by doing this I was able to avoid crashes and kernel panics, and disabling graphics switching sounds like it solved the crashing problem for Carlos as well.

Where we’re stuck now is that eventually the video previews will start showing a black screen during CUDA-accelerated playback. Even after rendering.

I’m going to try to play around with different footage formats (right now I’ve only tried the CUDA acceleration with QuickTime) and different display configurations (I’ve only used 1920×1200 scaled mode on the LCD with an external monitor running through HDMI). If I can figure out what’s causing the problem I can submit a bug report to Adobe and/or Apple.

[Mike Molenda]

Glad that disabling graphics switching stopped the crashing. Do you still have problems with playback in the source/program monitors? If not, you’re doing better than me.

Are you using Premiere with your computer in “Retina mode” or do you have one of the scaling options turned on?

[Mike Molenda]

Carlos,

I’m running 6.0.2 on OS X 10.8.1 and having similar problems. I’m on a 15″ Retina 2.7GHz with 16 gigs of RAM.

Haven’t had an outright crash yet, nor any screen distortion. But occasionally the Program monitor will either display no video, or scrub/playback with a long delay and then go black again once I park the playhead on a frame.

The only fix for this is to restart Premiere. Software-only MPE and OpenCL acceleration are perfectly smooth (in fact I was unaware that I was using OpenCL acceleration for about a week after installing the update!)

The footage I’ve tried with CUDA MPE was a mix of 1920×1080 23.976 ProRes(LT) and H.264 QuickTime running off of a USB 3.0 Lacie Rugged Mini. So I doubt this is an issue with the disk. What kind of footage are you experiencing this problem with?

Like you, I also have the problem regardless of whether I am using the built-in display alone, with a secondary monitor, or running in clamshell mode to the external display alone. I’m connecting to my external monitor via the HDMI out. I’m running the latest CUDA drivers, and I’ve got my display set to 1920×1080 (“More Space” Scaled Mode) with Automatic Graphics Switching off.

I wonder if it could be an issue with the order in which the CUDA drivers and Premiere were installed? I installed the CUDA drivers well after I installed the 6.0.2 update. Maybe doing a hard preference reset (hold Cmd+Option+Shift while launching Premiere) could remedy this? Did you install the CUDA drivers before or after installing Premiere?

I, too, would appreciate any insights from the community on this issue.

[Mike Molenda]

A lot of what these previews show can be done pretty easily with the built-in tools in After Effects, or Premiere’s Title Tool (which can handle things like shapes, type on path, gradient fills, etc), or even using the connectivity with Photoshop.

People tend to forget that last one all the time: anything you can create in Photoshop can be brought into Premiere, and remains editable at any time thanks to Dynamic Link.

These look like a collection of presets, which may be useful to you if you’re all thumbs in Photoshop/AE, or have to get a lot of these done very quickly. Unfortunately there’s nothing exactly like this for Premiere.

However, there are thousands of shapes and presets available for Photoshop and AE. You can probably find what you’re looking for as a custom shape (arrows and word balloons are pretty common), and find an animation that suits you among AE’s behavior presets. You could even create and save your own presets, and use them again and again.

And if you absolutely have to have the map animations, those can be generated in iMovie 😉

[Mike Molenda]

No problem.

Oh, and if you still want to use S as split clip, don’t forget you can set custom keyboard shortcuts!

[Mike Molenda]

I’m going to second Walter on getting your footage named and organized before it comes in to the project. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I get a project file and every clip is named 00000.THIS and 00001.THAT, and the sequence is called Sequence1 or New Sequence or whatever. This introduces just as much room for human error as it does the potential for software that organizes media by file path to screw up.

One of the things I like to do when I transcode to QuickTime is to use Bridge to batch rename the MOV files – including things like date, card #, and scene/shot/take directly in the file name, so that every name is absolutely unique. And I make sure to write the original file name into the metadata, just in case I have to go back to the original recorded media for some reason.

I used to do this in FCP Log & Transfer, as well. I’m not in front of my CS6 machine at the moment; does Prelude allow you to rename files as you ingest? If not, that sounds like a pretty darn good feature request to me.

Can you give us some more information on what happened with the original mis-link? Like what is the proper file path vs. the one Premiere pointed to? This sounds like it could be a Prelude issue as much as a Premiere issue. For instance, maybe something got lost in translation from the Prelude project to Premiere.

I have issues with Premiere’s bin management (bringing in duplicate master clips with XMLs, clips in a sequence being directly dependent on clips in the bins, etc), but I’ve never had a file relink improperly without doing something crazy like screwing with the project’s folder structure. So I’m curious to know what might be going on here…

[Mike Molenda]

The Levels effect in AE and the Levels effect in Premiere are not the same thing. In Premiere, the Luma Corrector effect (or the levels control on the Fast Color Corrector) is closer to how the Levels effect in AE works. Give that a shot.

And split clip in Premiere is Control+K (split on active tracks) and Shift+Control+K (split across all tracks).

[Mike Molenda]

That’s not too bad, it’s the sort of thing Premiere is pretty much built for. I just ask because I occasionally have the same problem with files running off a G-RAID RAID0 connected over eSATA. I’ve had this problem with AVCHD footage in Premiere, and a similar problem with HDV in FCP7, where it will play back audio, but loop the same five or six frames of video over and over.

Haven’t had this happen with footage on an internal drive, or a drive connected through FireWire. And it only seems to be one specific drive. I’ve got other G-RAIDs that work fine. So my thought was that maybe it’s the disk.

Anyway, a simple restart of the software fixes the problem for me every time. Did it work for you?