[Paul Thurston]

Here’s something else,

If you captured the video via Firewire and your timeline setup is not for PAL DV video, the video will flicker on playback. PAL DV has the video fields reversed from NTSC DV video. So it you start with a DV timeline that is for NTSC framerate, the PAL video will playback with fields reversed even if the media is forced to playback at 29.97 fps.

If the video was shot in PAL and your timeline uses a DV PAL setup and upon playback it still jumps or appears as the fields are reversed, then you have two options.

1. Put the video on a PAL DV timeline and export the sequence. Edit using only the exported sequence.

2. Use After Effects to reverse the fields of the media and Edit using only the exported sequence in your PAL DV timeline.

If your computer has a video capture card, AJA Xena or BlackMagic, you captured uncompressed, you used a PAL timeline setup that works with one of these cards, and it still appears the PAL playback has fields reversed, customer service for the card is in your future.

Exporting video that has the field order reversed will greatly increase render times.

-Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Hi Jason,

I carefully read your hardware/software system. Some suggestions:

1. OS… you have CS4 on WIN XP system. That would do it. Even if it’s the 64-bit WIN XP… You have to install CS4 in Windows Vista 64-bit Ultimate. Don’t waste your time with other versions of WIN software… they can work, but you will suffer if you use those other versions.

2. 4GB of RAM for CS4 is too restrictive. The rule of thumb is 2Gigs of RAM for every processor the OS detects. Too little RAM will make you suffer… it will cause Premier to crash in well-understood programming subroutines too.

Also, is the RAM the right type? All most everybody gets this part right, but then again, you have to check. Some motherboards, believe it or not, have clear restrictions on what type, amount and slot position RAM is to be installed. Not all motherboards are designed to have RAM in all the RAM slots available.

3. CS4 seems to like a minimum of two physical processors installed in two physical slots. So if your motherboard has slots for two processors, you’ll be happy if you have processors on all those slots. If you have multicore processors in those slots, you will do even better.

4. You may have a great RAID-0 that gives you great bandwidth, but did you check the speed of your C-drive. CS4 resides on the C-Drive, and so it’s important to check how many MB/s is this drive giving you. You want a C-drive that gives you at least 50 MB/s. If the C-drive is slower than 50MB/s, you will suffer.

5. Finally, are the chassis, motherboard, power supply, fans, and other peripherals optimized? Some chassis are just not cool (meaning the internal air flow is restricted causing internal heat to build up… that’s bad news.) Is the motherboard designed for video editing? Some are and work wonderfully. Is the power supply able to handle correctly the amperage requirements of the electronics? In other words, can it supply the number of Watts required? Some power supplies have three or four rails (circuits) and if you connect all the high wattage stuff to only one circuit, you’ll be sad, quite often I might add. Are the fans helping keep things cool? Sometimes you wonder. Are all the softwares running with the proper software updates? If you installed QuickTime, then Premiere, THEN updated QuickTime… bad news. Once Premier is installed, you don’t update QuickTime. If QuickTime is set to update automatically, you’ll be sad and WILL suffer when it updates.

Regards,
Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Things to look for:
1) The motherboard (has a bottle neck that cannot be fixed)
2) The hardrive array (it’s not giving you at least 200MB/s)
3) The hardrive is connected to a controller that is defective by design (meaning the motherboard manufacturer used a chip in the controller that consistently fails under particular conditions, Non-linear editing is one of them.)
4) After all was installed correctly, the wrong Quicktime was installed or was upgraded (with or without your knowledge…)
5) Your RAM is incorrectly installed in your motherboard. Certain motherboards are designed to only have RAM sticks installed in ONLY slots 1,3,5, and 7. Other motherboards are designed to only have a certain maximum amount of RAM installed in a particular slot and your particular stick of RAM may have surpassed that amount.
6) Your ATi Radeon X1650 Video Card wants the same resources your Matrox hardware wants. (How this could possibly happen is a mystery, but a different motherboard model may fix this.)
7) Your power supply is to small (the wattage it supplies is less than what the hardware requires.) Or your power supply is wired incorrectly into the peripherals (modern power supplies have four or more circuits, and if you overpower one of those circuits, the power supply becomes too small for the wattage required.)
8) Your hard drives are SATA drives, they are past 50% full, and so their reduced speed causes the hardware to fail (a RAID 0 or RAID 6 may help… make sure you’re getting at least 200 MB/s)
9) You are using PP 1.5. The newer QuickTime Codecs & Drivers for certain devices are for more up to date editing systems (Premier Pro CS4) Premier Pro 1.5 was designed for what was available in 2003.
10) You have a worm or virus that keeps returning to your system. USB drives are usually the ones that make this happen.
11) The processors installed came from a bad batch (happens more often than what people think… from what you explain in your symptoms, I think this is the most likely cause of your ills.)

Hope this helps

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Great!

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the info. Have any free exhibits Pass Codes?

-Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Hi,

Vista Home Premium as well as Vista Home Basic, supports only ONE physical CPU, but multiple cores. These versions of Vista should not be used for CS4.

For 64-bit computing on Vista OS and CS4 consider only Vista Business or Vista Ultimate. These versions of Vista support up to TWO physical CPUs. CS4 apparently expects TWO physical CPUs installed in your PC (Most professional Video capture Cards also have that expectation.)

You should be able to upgrade a 64-Bit Vista Home Premium to 64-Bit Vista Business or 64-Bit Vista Ultimate

So what about the other versions of 64-Bit Vista such as Enterprise, 2008 Server, Korean and European versions of Business and Ultimate? Will 64-Bit CS4 software run in these versions?

Vista Enterprise is like Vista Business (Not available through retail or OEM sales, as it’s made available only through Microsoft Software Assurance. The Korean “KN” and European “N” versions of Business and Ultimate do not include Windows Media Player (so in those versions you will not get the codecs that come with WMP.) 64-bit Windows Vista Server 2008 is REALLY nice software. You probably should not consider 64-Bit Server 2008 for a CS4 install, (it’s kind of expensive software $$$$. For the money, 64-bit Vista Ultimate is probably the best option.

The RAM issue:
Please remember that for every processor core installed, you should consider TWO (2) Gigs of RAM. If you have TWO physical CPUs installed and each has four cores (you have a total of 8 cores… 8 processors) you should consider 16 Gigs of RAM for your computer. In such a computer, 64-Bit CS4 software will apparently use only 6 Gigs of RAM.

Other things to consider:
For storage and editing, get a RAID… Something that has at least four large 10k hard drives. SATA drives work. SAS drives work even better (hint, hint, hint.) External RAIDS work the best, but internal ones can be made to work well also.

Some media playback issues are a direct result of hard drives getting full or not running fast enough under certain conditions, bottlenecks in motherboards, incorrect RAM type or RAM installed in a way that causes a bottleneck under certain conditions. Excessive internal heat will slow your processors down (Intel ones that is) and a power supply that is not appropriate (wattage wise) or miswired into the motherboard will also eventually cause sudden, no warning, computer turn-offs.

But then again, many media playback issues are caused by codec issues(related to QuickTime upgrades and or application updates.)

You asked: “Basically, what i’m saying is, will 64bit 8Gb be much better that 3Gb 32bit with the CS4 software?”

ANSWER: YES, much better because in a 64-bit OS, the additional RAM available to the OS makes Premier run better (that is, only if you get the right version of Vista 64-bit.)

(Parts of this info came from WIKIPEDIA.ORG)

Regards,
Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Hi,

Vista Home Premium as well as Vista Home Basic, supports only ONE physical CPU, but multiple cores. These versions of Vista should not be used for CS4.

For 64-bit computing on Vista OS and CS4 consider only Vista Business or Vista Ultimate. These versions of Vista support up to TWO physical CPUs. CS4 apparently expects TWO physical CPUs installed in your PC (Most professional Video capture Cards also have that expectation.)

You should be able to upgrade a 64-Bit Vista Home Premium to 64-Bit Vista Business or 64-Bit Vista Ultimate (if you have a Dell computer, consider contacting them for this purpose.) All others may need to purchase the actual Business or Ultimate OS DVD.

So what about the other versions of 64-Bit Vista such as Enterprise, 2008 Server, Korean and European versions of Business and Ultimate? Will 64-Bit CS4 software run in these versions?

Vista Enterprise is like Vista Business (Not available through retail or OEM sales, as it’s made available only through Microsoft Software Assurance. The Korean “KN” and European “N” versions of Business and Ultimate do not include Windows Media Player (so in those versions you will not get the codecs that come with WMP.) 64-bit Windows Vista Server 2008 is REALLY nice software. You probably should not consider 64-Bit Server 2008 for a CS4 install, (it’s kind of expensive software $$$$. For the money, 64-bit Vista Ultimate is probably the best option.

The RAM issue:
Please remember that for every processor core installed, you should consider TWO (2) Gigs of RAM. If you have TWO physical CPUs installed and each has four cores (you have a total of 8 cores… 8 processors), then you should consider 16 Gigs of RAM for your computer. In such a computer, 64-Bit CS4 software will apparently use only 6 Gigs of RAM.

(Parts of this info came from WIKIPEDIA.ORG)

Regards,
Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Hi Paul,

The Sony Handycam DCR-SR80 is an NTSC frame rate product. This standard definition camcorder runs at 29.97 frames per second interlace and records the video onto a hard drive as MPEG-2 video.

Regards,
Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Hi Don,

Normally two routes are followed my most organizations that want to do what you need done.

1. You have a local person, a video engineer or somebody who has integrated equipment before, visit your studio and discuss what exactly you want to do (money wise, time wise, noise wise, dust wise, electrical wise, and specific brands of manufacturers.) Then you have this person make you a budget based on your expectations. Then you accept, reject or modify the budget. Once the budget is approved, work begins based on your previous conversations with the integrator.

2. You have somebody in your staff, or yourself investigate all this out and you “in-house” all the work.

Non-local people can be good choices too, but this route is only recommended if you just can’t find somebody near you that can do this work.

We usually find “the right” people at local media events or at video equipment reseller events.

-Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Paul Thurston]

Thanks Dylan,

So in this computer setup, you do not have a video capture card… Is that correct?

-Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile