Jerky Program Playback in Premiere CS6

[rossfinnie]

Hi there,

I've just been starting to get into using Premiere CS6, and I'm noticing something a bit untoward. Even with a very simple timeline (just under two minutes long, only one track), I'm getting extremely jerky playback in the Program monitor window. It'll give me full smoothness for about a second, then drop to around 1-2 fps, which is making editing completely impossible. I've tried a couple of different things that I thought might speed it up a little, but the effect is almost perfectly consistent, regardless of any changes I make. I've set my sequence settings so that it's only rendering at half resolution (960x540), I've switched my preview and scratch disks, I've tried a couple of render codecs, and nothing seems to make a difference. The thing that's actually most annoying is that the source files are playing absolutely perfectly, even though they're 1920x1080 @ 25p h.264 files straight from my Canon 600D/T3i, which I would think would be a lot less likely to play effectively.

With regard to my system, I'm certainly not running on the best setup on the planet - a 15" Macbook Pro from late 2009 with a 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM, on OS 10.7. The thing that's getting me is thinking that if my system was such a problem, the Source window would have trouble playing too, not just the Program window. I would've thought that since my render settings are much lower quality too, that it would be easier still.

Does anyone have any idea on why this is happening in one window and not the other?

Thanks.

 

[unadog]

Without answering about the separate playback rates:

Are you using hardware enhanced playback - using your GPU cores to render? This will improve speed by one to two orders of magnitude.

I am more familiar with hacking to enable teh CUDA cores on Nvidia cards. CS6 also enables OpenCL GPU acceleration on non-Nvidia cards:

http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2012/05/opencl-and-premiere-pro-cs6.html

While there are only two cards that are certified by Adobe for OpenCL, it is likely that almost any card with sufficient RAM and cores will work. For Nvidia, there is a hack that involves editing a text file to enable any card with at least 864 GB of RAM and 96 (?) CUDA cores:

This is the info for the Nvidia cards:

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

There might be information there under CS6 for OpenCL.


FWIW, I am running a low end GT 430 card with 1 Gig of RAM and 96 cores. Enabling teh GPU's reduces the render time on a test suite from about 11 minutes to 90 seconds. (Running the PPBM5 benchmark suite.)

http://ppbm5.com/

Good luck!

Michael

 

[unadog]

Here's a link on enabling OpenCL on non-supported cards. From Google cache. (I am not sure about trashing the file though - for Nvidia it is just a matter of ADDING the card you have to the list)


http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...15&t=59701&start=20+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us


OpenCL and Adobe CS6

Here's what it takes to get non supported cards to work with Premiere Pro.

Your card must have 768 MB of RAM or more. 512 MB will not work. Most recent cards are 1GB.

For Premiere 5.5 users, ATI/AMD cards are not supported as Open CL was added for version 6.

OpenCL ATI/AMD cards require Lion 10.7.3 . Adobe now recommends 10.7.4 as Apple updated the OpenCL
drivers and performance is near double.

NVIDIA cards will work with 10.6.8 or higher.Need OSX cuda driver.

3 Steps to enable OpenCL on non supported 1GB cards :

1. Goto the Application Folder and Right click on Premiere Pro and select Show Package Contents.

2. Open the Contents Folder and Look for a file called supported_opencl_cards.txt and move to
trash.

3 .Launch Premiere Pro and all should work. Remember , you need 10.7.3 or higher and recent 1GB card or higher(no recent cards have 768mb which is min)