CS6 is choking om most mundane stuff

S

sewolla

Well-known member
I have a pretty decent system that now seems to have been brought to its knees by CS6.
My machine is an HP built for editing. It has:

intel i7 990, with 3.46ghz processor (6 core) 24 gb's ram, a Nividia GTX580 video card, and about 10TB's of attached storage. Of course all programs are on drive C, projects go onto an external WD 4TB raid 0 drive, and it is backed up to a 8TB WD NAS "Sentenal" drive.

I had been running Adobe CS5.5 with just fantastic results. But the cost of an upgrade seemed so low for what I would potentially get, that I went and did it.

Well that apparently was a mistake. Now I cannot play anything back without major issues. For example when trying to play back a single track of video (AVCHD shot on my AC160) I can hear the audio just great, but---the video is unmoving. clips may change (by the audio) but my video image is from the clip playing 5 minutes ago.

That's what is happening when I try and start a new project. When I open an earlier project from April, which was done in CS5.5, with three video and audio tracks, there are red lines all over the top of the timeline. When I attempt to render the timeline, it comes back and says "104:38:15 remaining"!!!!!!! For a project that is 45 minutes long!

Now when I installed CS6, it was as an upgrade to my CS5.5 Production Premium, which was an upgrade to my CS4 Master Collection, which was an upgrade to my CS3 Master Collection. Could that be an issue?

Currently I am transferring files for a couple critical projects to my "backup" editor that is still running CS4 Master Collection.

Is there a way that I can cleanly delete CS6 and go back to running CS5.5, or...is there something I need to do that I am not doing, in order to restore my system to its former strength?

I litterally cannot work at all in Premiere CS6 the way it is. My computer is effectively useless for video editing, at this time. Before installing CS6 I had no problems whatsoever.

Has this happened to anyone before? What did you do to resolve it?

Thanks in advance,
SW
 
Chances are you've got the CS6 AVCHD bug. It happens with longer clips, usually over 20 minutes or so.

Because Macs can't natively read/write to the superior NTFS file format, and because Macs have an inordinate predominance in this industry, camera makers force us to use the inferior FAT32 file system, which has a 4GB limit per file. So when you shoot a longer take, that clip get's broken out into multiple files on the card. Metadata can tell the NLE that those individual files should appear as one long clip, and PP understands that and shows it to you as such. But a bug appeard in CS6 that was not there before when dealing with these spanned clips. The symptoms are as you describe.

The solutions are twofold, continue using an older version of PP with that media until Adobe corrects the issue, or convert that media outside of PP to a single file.
 
Thanks for the fast response, Jim.
Wow, I never knew that there was such a bug before. I will try going back and openiung the files I am working on in PP CS5.5, if that is still a possibility. I hope that Adobe issues some sort of patch, or update for this 'cause it's killin' me.
 
If your video card is not officially supported by CS 6 for Mercury Hardware Acceleration, you have to do a very small text hack to enable GPU acceleration.

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

You can veryify whether GPU acceleration is enabled if you look at the Project settings.

Also, check to see how much memory you have available to CS6. I forget if that is in Project or Sequence settings? Storage of files is also there.

Look at a system memory & CPU monitor to see how much is actually being used when you are running.

Are you running 64 bit CS6? 32 bit would really limit performance.

I have basically the same PC (I know you have a MAC) and it is great! i7 920, 27 GB of RAM, 2x 2TB Seagate Barracuda in internal RAID 0. External 6TB NAS for backup. GTX560 2 GB DDM5.

I just added a 120 GB SSD as a scratch disk.


CS6 is much faster than CS5.5 for most people. Up to an order of magnitude faster in some cases.

You can benchmark your machine and compare it to the specs in the ppbm5.com database.

http://ppbm5.com/

That includes benchmarks for CS6. Just download the suite and run the 4 tests according to instructions. You might have to do some manual calculations on a MAC (there is a script to gather timings that may only run on a PC, not sure.)

If you have CS5.5 installed still, you could also benchmark that.


Finally, I know all of my machines just downloaded an update in teh last couple of days.

Good luck!
Michael
 
Hi Michael, thanks for the links for the benchmarking. I will try that today.
I am running Windows 7 Proferssional 64 bit on an HP, and man, it ripped like nobody's business, until the CS6 upgrade. It was suggested also that my C drive may just be too full, so I am transferring old files off of that, now.

When you say that all your machines just downloaded an upgrade....was that to CS6 Production Premium, what version would it be? Maybe I need to do that, as well.
Thanks again!
SW
 
Sorry, for some reason I thought you were on a Mac! My mistake.

So our machines are very similar. Most people have noticed a very good speed increase from CS6.

Yes, CS6 Production Premium. Almost every component had an update on one machine. On another that gets used just about every day, there were updates for Premiere Pro and ** I think** Speedgrade in particular. They were "dot" versions. Thought maybe if you did have a bug there was a fix.

What camera are you shooting?

I have not had any trouble with an old GT 420 low end card, two "Green" Project and Media 1.5 TB drives (that I borrowed from my RAID), and a regular old 640 GB 7600 OS drive before I rebuilt my machine.

Render files were stored with project on a "P" drive, one of the green drives.

Good luck! Let us know what you find.


Best,
Michael
 
unadog said:
If your video card is not officially supported by CS 6 for Mercury Hardware Acceleration, you have to do a very small text hack to enable GPU acceleration.
Click to expand...

Hardware acceleration has nothing to do with straight playback. That is entirely dependent on the CPU. Only things like effects, scaling, deinterlacing, etc. get accelerated.

Are you running 64 bit CS6? 32 bit would really limit performance.
Click to expand...

CS6 only comes as a 64 bit program, and can only be installed on a 64 bit OS.
 
Well so far I have cleared a lot of junk off my C drive, although it is still 75% full. Biggest item there is .PRV files under a Premiere Pro CS5.5 folder. Do not want to move them off yet, as I will have some on-going work for the projects they support.

So I went and got a larger C drive, but have not installed it yet. The idea being that if I cannot cut down on the content that is on there now, maybe a larger drive would be more responsive as it would, after transferring all my data, be only 53% full. Does that make sense to you guys.

I am trying to knock out a couple of "Hot" projects now with my system bogged down as it is, tghen I will look at replacing the C drive with the larger unit, swapping out a suspect projects drive with a new G-Raid unit, doing an Uninstall and trying it again, etc.

I am not giving up hope. Once I get this little hic-up squared away I will be set for some serious editing.
 
Is your "C" drive your only internal drive? EIther way, THAT is the only thing that has ever really bogged down my system. It snuck up on me in the midst of working on a project. I work with more than one internal drive just to keep scratch, programs, and work separate. Then off-load to storage as needed.

I hope you checked with the Adobe Forums. Todd Kopriva, (there and here too) as well as a slew of others are very helpful in sorting out these kinds of issues.
 
Well, its been a hard week over here...I tried to finish 2 projects before trying to replace my C drive. Could not finish, the video clips would never fully "load" into Premiere, so I had audio but no, or severely delayed video.

My wife got tired of watching me struggle and called a consultant familiar with Adobe software. Checked out my system, and he said the computer was fine, the installation, somehow, must be the culprit.

So we uninstalled CS6, re-installed CS5.5 Production Premium, and problem solved!

My system just really cooks now. I finished up those two jobs ( couple of multi-track concerts I was cutting down in to "demo reels"), and now have my life back again.
I did go and pick up a couple drives for C drive and its internal back-up drive. I am also aggressively copying some files from there onto Blu Ray, and deleting others that will not be needed anymore.

With respect to CS6 Production Premium, I still don't know where or how the install went wrong. This coming week I will copy over C drive to one of the new drives, and replace it, then look at trying it again.


Maybe I will start by upgrading everything but Premiere to CS6, while looking at the possibility that I may have some sort of hardware mismatch somewhere.
One thing that comes to mind is my graphics card. Its a Nvidia 580GTX, when I bought it , it was certified by Adobe fdor use with CS5.5. Not sure if it really is good with CS6, I did not see it listed on Adobe's latest list that I saw. Could that be a factor?
 
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The GTX580 should be a great card for CS6. If it is not officially approved, you can complete a small "hack" - really an edit - to enable GPU acceleration.

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Most people have found CS6 considerably faster than CS5.5 and previous.

If you want to benchmark your machine before and after you make changes, download and run the 4 benchmark tests from ppbm5:

www.ppbm5.com

You can run it in CS5 and then later in CS6.

I have benchmarked my box at each step as I tested hard drives, etc. I have an i7 920 CPU.

I searched for only the older i7 9xx CPUs in the database. My box now runs close to the best i7 980 listed at PPBM.

On my phone now, hard to type. Basically I have 27GB of RAM, GTX560, two 2TB HDDs in RAID 0, and an SSD.

I am going to do a clean reinstall with 2x 120GB SSD in RAID 0 for my C:, 2x 2TB HDD in RAID 0 for Media, and 1x 120 GB SSD for Scratch.

All backed up to an external 8TB RAID 5 over Ethernet.

The 120 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD were $50 after rebate at Buy.com last week.

Good luck!
Michael
 
There is also a "clean install" tool at Adobe that will remove all traces of previous installs before you upgrade.

I am going to deactivate CS6 and Lightriom, then restate my machine from scratch - clean install of Win 7, etc.
 
Well....after really cleaning out my computer system so my 2TB C drive has C drive has only 300GB, and all systems are running perfecetly, I went and re-installed CS6 Production Premium. I was forced to un-install CS6 3 weeks ago and go back to using Premiere Pro CS5.5, because CS6 freezes up on playback to the point where video is uneditable.

Now when I play back video on a timeline, at tghe start everything is just fine. But if I drag the CTI to another clip, the audio only will play, and the video will remain frozen on the first frame of that clip. It will not move.

This is my second attempt at installing the upgrade version of CS6 over my CS5.5. It is just not working out. Are there any software upgrades that I am not aware of that address this situation? Any suggestions would certainly be appreciated.
 
sounds like you need to do a fresh install of everything. That means a format and re-install of Windows and all of your programs. Computers get bogged down to a crawl due to useless background processes and old program registries that build up over the years. Also spyware and adware can use up resources.
 
I agree with bimbas also the OCZ Agility 3 SSD are not as good as the Vertex 4 they are faster and better. but with a SSD you are not giong get any improvement with speed of projects , just with loading the program it self.To improve your setup to will need to have Page files directed to another drive. Have a look at this link http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972?tstart=0 . I am disappointed with CS6 preformence , It seem everytime Adobe release a new version of their product it cost you to upgrade to higher spec hardware. Where as Edius which I use also works very happily on a lower spec PC in realtime, with no bumps or hassles. Just exsample , I shot a 20sec bit of moving footage 1920x1080 50P MTS , put in adobe , it took 20mins to stables and I then had to readjust as the footage and render, in Edius it took 20sec and no readjusting, other test was a Ken Burns effect on a picture zooming and panning down a valley , with Edius it was fast , no renders and playback smooth , in CS6 it was a pain just to do the effect and I still needed to render out the effect. I only keep CS5.5 and CS6 for certain projects , other than that ,Edius . just my 2cents
 
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Have you tried turning GPU acceleration off? Sometimes that fixes things for me, though it's completely random which AVCHD/H.264 clips that helps and what it does not. But before you try doing anything else, change it to the software engine and see what happens.

Frankly, I find CS6 performance to be on par with CS5.5 on my Core 2 Quad 3.2GHz with 8GB of RAM and a GTX280 desktop system.
 
JIm, in my case, with CS6 installed I can no longer open anything in CS5.5.
So if I open a project just completed last week in CS5.5, and have to open it today with CS6 installed, it will only open up in CS6. Adobe will "convert" my CS5.5 Premiere Pro files to CS6, so I can no longer go back and work on projects done in CS5.5, in CS5.5.

Gary, no I have not yet tried that but will do it today.
Just spent 3 hours on the phone th Adobe, trying to find a solution. We tried looking at user settings, checked out my drive's performance, down-loaded the latest drivers for Premiere Protc...
The tech is now down-loading a clip we were looking at via File Zilla so he can try it and see if he gets any different results.
What's odd now, is clips that edited with zero issues in Premiere Pro CS5.5 are now showing as either green or red, on occasion. Adobe said that was a sign of a bad clip, yet that issue never ever showed up in 5.5....the thing is, it does this with all my clips that I try and edit in CS6.
 
When you open an older project in a newer version, it asks you to save with a new name. So long as you do that, you can continue to open the old project in the old version.
 
Wow, I am so happy now. Spent about 1.5 hours on he phone with Adobe on this video freezing topic. Their tech said that the problem might be that I also had CS4 Master Collectrion plus CS5.5 Production Premium on there. That is because I believed that upgrade version needed to have the previous version in place to modify.
I was wrong. We un-installed both CS4, and CS5.5, and re-insatalled my CS6 Production Premium, and wow....it works! No more freezing up of video in Premiere Pro.

I wanted to share this outcome, in case anyone else was experiencing the saame issue, and to say thanks to all of you who helped out with your very valuable input. It really did help out!
 
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