CS4 is killing me.

W

WpgCameraMan

Well-known member
Very bummed out. Using CS4.1, and it's soooo slow with AVCCAM. My system is Quad Phenom2 3GHZ, 8200GS 512MB, newer Asus board, 8GB DDR2, and SataII everywhere.

I use CoreAVC and that made playing clips back in Media Player Classic much faster, with CUDA going. I went from 31% CPU use in ffdshow to 10% with Core.

But nothing I've tried has done anything for Premiere. I've tried the Avid DNxHD codec, ProspectHD, Uncompressed. All just result in much larger files, but CPU use in playback on the timeline is still just as bad as AVCHD.

I have played around with converting to a very high bitrate Mpeg2 FullHD format, and while file sizes are still larger, they seem to play back with very little strain on the CPU (I think Premiere gets the GPU to kick in). My worry about this format is I'm getting a faster system but generation loss is still an issue.

Is there a PCIx hardware fix to deal with this crap? I really just want a more responsive editing system. Drives me crazy.

Also looked at ways to disable Premiere's rendering engine, that doesn't work... CoreAVC never shows up, I think that path is a dead end.

This isn't fun.
 
Have you tried transcoding to DVCProHD? Panasonic offers the MainConcept transcoder for the HMC150.

Also try yoinking your internet connection and disabling any Firewall or Antivirus applications you might have running. This significantly improved performance I recall (Trend Micro). Also try grabbing the freeware app "EndItAll" to see if running absolutely nothing except Premiere will increase performance. If so, reboot to restart all those apps, then disable them one-by-one to see which is slowing down your machine.
 
TigerFX said:
Have you tried transcoding to DVCProHD? Panasonic offers the MainConcept transcoder for the HMC150.
Click to expand...

From what I recall, the software tool needs to have the original folder structure from the SDHC card, and this prevents me from bulk-renaming my footage with my specific parameters.

Plus, If I'm not interested in going down in image size. Trying to keep my operation FullHD wherever possible.
 
One option is cineform (cineform neo), which is "visually lossless", but not free. This is probably the most common route

Another option is to use an encoded MPEG2 "proxy" and use the replace footage function when doing final render.

Another option is to use software that allows GPU acceleration of CUDA enabled cards e.g. divideframe (I haven't used this but have heard many bugs - I would check their forum to see if issues have been fixed yet)

Another option is to get a faster computer
 
PDR said:
Another option is to use an encoded MPEG2 "proxy" and use the replace footage function when doing final render.
Click to expand...

This is an option I think I could handle. Would have to work around a few things, like keying and level issues. But.. Hmmm...

I need the proxy footage to look at least somewhat good, for client test renders. I wouldn't want to use the original stuff until the very last stages.
 
Just FYI DVCProHD is the codec used in many HD news stations these days. I wouldn't write off the huge speed improvements without giving it a shot.

If Panasonic's MainConcept transcoder doesn't work for you, use the Adobe Media Encoder. It's painfully slow to encode, but allows you to export to P2. Give this a shot and see what you think. It's basically a great, high-speed, high-resolution "proxy" that edits like butter on my upper-mainstream Core 2 Duo 2.5Ghz laptop. Except instead of going back to your source footage at the end, you just export the P2. Looks awesome.
 
But one serious disadvantage of DVCProHD is your loss of 33% horizontal resolution. It results in an 1280x1080 resolution, 1.5 PAR. It's quite lossy compared to the original, and the losses are compounded by the pixel stretching. You can demonstrate this by PSNR tests and visually by difference masks. Cineform and Prores HQ are much cleaner/less noisy.
 
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