Jagged/Slowed playback in realtime .. intermittent behavior Premiere 5.5 OS X

C

colabean

Member
Hi,

I'm new to video editing, so apologies in advance if my answer is obvious.

On play back, sometimes the computer will play my composition smoothly in realtime. Other times, it doesn't at all.. going smooth, then clogging for a bit, then returning to solid real time playback.

What do I need to do to optimise? I tried both my startup disc and my video disc for the scratch disc. I'm in 64bit with 6.5GB available RAM to PP (8gb total in my MacBook Pro 2ghz i7)

I only have 15 video tracks (and have been seeing the same behavior on and off even when I only had 5) and at this time have only 3 audio tracks.
I am only using a few stock PP plugins (fast color, levels, and dissolve transisitions).

What can I do to optimise my machine, settings, or workflow to deal with this? Please help me understand the source of my trouble..
Thanks very much!
 
While the number of tracks itself doesn't matter, the concern should be how many simultaneous video streams you're trying to playback, especially with only 6.5GB of RAM and, I'm guessing, your startup disk is also your media drive - and possibly all of them are spinning single disks.

The first thing to look at is the colour of the render bar. Does it stutter over yellow and/or red sections?
Understanding the Premiere work area

If so you can fix that by doing a preview. I use the FCP keyboard map so I won't try to tell you what the keyboard shortcut is since yours may differ.

The trick will be to carefully find where your bottleneck is. Is it RAM, CPU, disk and/or I/O performance.
Optimizing for Performance but this is the jewel: After Effects & Premiere Pro performance workshop

When talking about settings, workflow, etc. It would also help to have more information about your already-in-place settings and workflow. What source formats are you working with? (Including frame size, code, fps., do you use external monitoring, etc.) What are your sequence settings? What is your destination format?

One thing to keep in mind is that there's often an inverse relationship with filesize and CPU/processing performance for HD codecs. That is to say that codecs like AVCHD might look OK at relatively low bitrates (25-35mbps) but are very processor intensive, while codecs like DNxHD and ProRes (between 115-220mbps) are very easy on the processor but are trying on the disks or I/O subsystems.
 
Thanks Pretros.

I am using AVCHD footage (.mts files) in a 1080p project. My media drive is separate (FW800, 7200rpm) but I'm guessing I need to transcode my footage if I want to get a bit more mileage without always rendering previews for every little change.

What is the ideal format, would you guess, that will give me better performance, balanced between CPU and disk needs? Or am I silly to see that as a "fix" and should just "learn to deal with AVCHD" and/or upgrade to a loaded PC w/ nVidea etc (damn would like to think my MacBook Pro i7 and iMac i7 were fine.. but.. )

I did realize I need to be conscious to disable clips hidden beneath other layers -- if they're not needed, disable, as they're straining resources for nothin.
 
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