[Paul King]

Not sure these are so relevant with the way Premiere effects operate.
When motion is selected, you can direct manipulate both position and scale. Both are visible when you twirl down motion and these are not really as useful directly in the sequence as they are in AE’s comps.

[Paul King]

Eli

Is the issue during preview rendering or export?
If it’s export, try exporting to Mpeg2 CODEC, it’s much better on multiple CPUs in Premiere.

Have a look at CPU while it’s doing it, you should get 80% usage.
If not, you may have an issue reading and writing to the same NFS is.

[Paul King]

Hi Luke

Sorry but you have received a big bunch of not very helpful answers.

Try this, switch CODEC to MPEG2 and retest. You will see your system resources used much more heavily.

I have the following spec:
Dual 3.1Ghz 8 core
64GB RAM
GTX TITAN
40TB RAID6 – 2300MB/sec

I cant encode QT or H.264 much faster than you.
AME or Premiere direct encode can only use multiple CPUs well with some CODECs. Unfortunately QT and H.264 are two that have poor multithreading in AME.

After Effects – has multithreaded rendering (good when it works and doesn’t crash).
Premiere Pro – multithreading hit and miss depending on CODECs.
3D apps – great multithreading
Various AE plugins – some are great and other are poor.

I’m really glad you brought up this issue because software has been behind the available hardware for a very long time. Only 3D apps have been giving us value for money on our hardware.

However GPU acceleration has complicated the issue. Premiere is pretty good at using GPU when preview rendering but so during encode (which I thought it was supposed to do). I put a Titan in for Premiere and AE and got significant benefit for GPU based stuff. Sapphire is great at using both GPU and CPU – the best I’ve seen. If your doing heavy AE stuff a Titan is now mandatory for the 6GB or RAM (my GPU plugins regularly use 2.5GB).

[Paul King]

Hi Bill

Turn off the BM SDI out card and recheck the performance.
If you have mismatched settings between the project settings and the output settings it will choke your performance.

[Paul King]

Multithreaded rendering is also buggy.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have issues with it (stalling, crashing AE) even when it is setup correctly.

[Paul King]

Paul

What issue have you had that keeps you from using DL?

[Paul King]

Not all the apps will use be able to use CUDA if it’s not the primary display adapter. I wouldn’t bother with the the Intel, more prudent to get a dedicated card for a new build.

[Paul King]

The other thing about old systems is the footprint.
I cant think of a single operation today that I would want to do on 5400 Xeon. They were hot and noisy.

Old systems take up space, power and more importantly, a valuable software license.

But I do understand some customer workflows support an older system.

[Paul King]

Hi Alex

We use Intel for single socket as opposed to Asus or Gigabyte.
Intel have been 100% reliable. We have used every manufacturer over a 14 year period and Intel by far are the best.

The Intel go in standard cases, but we use the Xigmatek Elysium. Best case we have ever used (and we have used every case on the market, including Mountain Mods, Supermicro and Chenbro).

[Paul King]

Sorry Jeff, your post was not there when I replied.

Dual Xeon would be ideal for Premiere if Premiere CODECs were fully multithreaded. However it’s all very hit and miss.

We use Matrox cards and their CODEC is very multithreaded. However when exporting to QT or MP4 Premiere is woeful at using CPU. Conversely MPEG2 export is full multithreaded and you get 80% CPU utilisation on dual Xeons.
The single i7 will beat them on QT export, especially when overclocked.

Considering we all get decent rates for editing a dual xeon makes more sense. Sadly Premiere and even AE are not great at using multiple CPUs.