Choppy PlayBack H.264 CS4 and LightWorks

S

SunGlare

New member
Hi there,

This is my first post at this forum, Hello to everyone. :beer:

Comp specs.
Asus IPIBL-LB
Quad Q8200
8GB DDR2
AsusGT440 on 1GBDDR5 - new

HD:
Canon 550D/T2i - mov H.264 25fps 1080p

Soft:
Vista 64
Premiere CS4
Lightworks

Problem:
I just cant get HD playback on any NLE software. everythig grinds and stutter with native h.264 from canon. and other recompressed h.264 720p media

Noticed that when Lightworks transcode to semi-uncompressed avi everything goes nice and smooth.
But I cant transcode every project into 1000GB per shot (4min = 13GB on average).


I was told that my intel-on-board vga is bottlenecking playback. So I got GT440 to help, well 80GBP later not much is better. Except of the power consumption from 62/125Watts to 80/159Watts (Idle/Load)

I have found those online
http://www.divideframe.com/?p=downloads

and few other similar playback remedies, but forums are not happy with this solution as it fails and crashes often.


How to improve system? How to optimise to achieve fluent playback/scrub in CS4?

Please help.

Thank you.
 
CS4 was not well designed for DSLR media. You'd do well to upgrade to CS5.5.

Your CPU is waaaaay underpowered for effective editing of this media. Upgrade to a minimum of an i7 950 or i7 2500k (which will also mean a new motherboard and memory as well).
 
Thank you.

I'm not going to upgrade this equipemet, as it is not extremely slow machine. Please be reasonable.
I now that HD editing is within the reach because some formats (non h.264) are taken in nicely, and they playback fine before effects applied throughout running time.

But I understand that idea of editing h.264 clips straight from card, without pre transcoding is too naive.

Can you tell me how, and with what to pretranscode to free-up cpu.

In the Lightworks they have generic RGB compressor for avi, that is used for trascoding, and when I use those clips in the Premiere they run ok, but those are stripped of audio.

Thank you for reply.
 
Ok.

I managed to get this working with work-around.

This is a great forum, it helped me a lot. I just didnt realised that I need to post responses to my questions myself.

I could not get Cineform, I dont how it works because it did not allowed me to download try before buy software.

I had Qtime pro for some time now and exported my clips from h.264 to DV stream with 16/9 ratio.
Do not use avi with DV codek as it formats 960x540 (pal) and those do not play nice inside the premiere.

I've set up Premiere project to be HDV 1080p PAL, there is only one option like this so search under AVCHD.
Import all the transcoded YOURCLIP001.DV streams.
Select them in the project manager and go to CLIP -> VIDEO OPTIONS and check Scale to frame size.

Now you can drag them into timeline and edit, cut, effect in realtime. (Quad core Q8200, 8GB Ram)

Quality of the image is poor, because you are using SD strem, but Premiere handles it better. Color deviation is acceptable for my purpose.

When you are done editing, go and select all of the DV clips, righ click and make them offline.
Then select one by one and link them with proper H.264 HD 1080p files.

After a while when all the peak files will be refreshed, you can export this monster to any of your desirable formats with highest possible quality.

This technique is called PROXY, and you may have been using this before, or not, but since nobody here thinks that this advice worth giving I needed to invent the wheel again.
As I thanked before, all the credit goes to forum.


If you are like me who starts with HD editing, and appreciate this TIP, register (its free) and tap me on the back, here on this thread.

Shortly I'll post some progress info how to handle 50/60FPS, Im not to sure if this is possible now.

Qtime Pro is only 30 USD.

Tom
 
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