shuddering in playback.

W

W.bat

Member
Hi. I have been messing with my video production for a while now and have encountered a problem I have not seen before.

Two things have changed. Firstly I have changed my camera settings to 720/60p using a shutter speed of 120.

I am editing in premiere. Previously in i-movie.

When i play the footage in the program viewer it has a flicker in that it seems to be jumping and catching up to itself and areas of the image are breaking down into oversized pixels then jumping etc. I am sure it is something simple.

I am shooting on a D800.

Thanks in advance.

Tony
 
Adobe CS6 absolutely sucks. It is the worst NLE I have ever used and I have used them all. Adobe should be ashamed of this trash. Fix it or move on to something you can do Adobe.
 
Paul Hudson said:
Adobe CS6 absolutely sucks. It is the worst NLE I have ever used and I have used them all. Adobe should be ashamed of this trash. Fix it or move on to something you can do Adobe.
Click to expand...

Wow! Something has really made you spit the dummy Paul.

Feeling better now?

What is THE prefered NLE ?
 
Paul Hudson said:
Just about anything but Premiere. Hell, give me razor blade and glue. I can make it work better than Premiere.
Click to expand...

Problem solved just like that.

Use the glue in a well ventillated space ....or otherwise ... :Drogar-Dum(DBG): ....and keep some bandaids handy.
 
We've been comparing FCPX (latest version) to Premiere Pro CS6 a LOT in the last couple of months trying to decide if one suits certain types of projects more than others, and which is fast overall on a project by project basis. I'm eagerly awaiting the next updates (CS6.5 / 7 and 10.0.8) to see the direction each company is taking.

I have to say that the GPU you are using makes a HUGE difference in how each one performs.

We have been testing with 3 primary machines, all with 16GB ram, two with i7 and one with 8 core xeon.

The amazing thing to me is that given Adobe's claim that the Mercury Playback Engine was all new 64 bit code designed to play everything, it's really not very well optimised. It does run on the MacPro better with the GTX285 card (CUDA enabled) than with the ATI 5770 by a long way, so if you're using an ATI video card you're probably suffering quite a bit already. CPU and RAM usage on Premiere Pro is totally out of control compared to FCPX. I ran tests only today where Premiere Pro (CS6) took a freshly booted machine and used 99% ram and 98% CPU within seconds of starting to play a relatively simple timeline. Taking the same project in to FCPX (via 7toX) resulted in FCPX using only 17% of the ram and 24% of the CPU. FCPX was playing totally smoothly, whereas Premiere Pro was stuttering all over the place. This was on a 16GB machine, so we aren't exactly short of RAM!

On the same machine, but with a GTX285 card, Premiere Pro again used all the RAM and CPU time, but at least it played back without stuttering. FCPX also played perfectly (same sorts of RAM and CPU usage as before) but alas the drivers (latest available) for the GTX285 seem to be incompatible with FCPX because it crashes pretty frequently, to the point I considered it unusable for heavy lifting. Hence I replaced the GTX285 with the ATI5770.

We also have a Hackintosh that was put together more as a fun/research project (GTX570 or ATI5770 as appropriate). When run in Windows mode (windows 7) it runs Premiere Pro a LOT smoother than it does in OSX mode. I don't have enough information to say if it's Adobe's code, GPU driver code or the OS that really makes the difference, but there IS a difference.

Depending on your system configuration and project type, FCPX may be a much better choice. On the last couple of long form projects (a 50 min documentary and a series of short training videos) FCPX has saved us significant amounts of time accros the entire project workflow, including ingesting (no need for the silly conforming of audio), edit time (much quicker to edit some sections), colour grading (the colour tools in FCPX leave Premiere Pro for dead) and export (14 mins for FCPX vs 3hr 19mins for Premiere Pro). All in all, I think we saved an entire day on the documentary edit by using FCPX.

However, Premiere Pro has some significant advantage, including the audio mixer and the much lauded integration with After Effects and Audition. I don't care for the speedgrade integration and Prelude is still too early in it's development to be of major use to us. We're leaning towards FCPX going forward, but I'll be honest and say it's not been totally pain free. The multicam edits like butter (Premiere Pro is laggy at best), but the audio finishing is still it's weakest link. We used to have to resort to 3rd party apps for colour grading when using Premiere Pro but the colour in FCPX is so good that we haven't found the need to go outside FCPX for any of the recent projects.

Collaboration with multiple editors is still easier in Premiere Pro and 'Adobe Anywhere' certainly looks interesting. I'm hoping Apple have their eye on the ball on this one too.

As ever, YMMV.
 
Last edited:
My system is a macbook pro.Is it the system or how I am importing files or something in the processes I follow?
 
W.bat said:
My system is a macbook pro.Is it the system or how I am importing files or something in the processes I follow?
Click to expand...

The same rules apply to the MBP too. Our MBP (which has Open CL support in Premiere Pro) runs a lot better with FCPX than Premiere Pro. Just accept that Premiere Pro is a major resource hog. It will use all the ram you give it and all the CPU you give it, and even then may not play back smoothly for absolutely everything.

It runs better on Windows than Mac on the same hardware. It doesn't mean that Windows is better than Mac, it just means thatAdobe code is better optimised to the Windows platform. FCPX on Mac runs a lot better (smoother) than Premiere Pro on either platform, provided of course you have a supported machine.

FCP 7 wasn't quite as demanding, but you almost had to use ProRes media for it to be smooth and render a lot more often.
 
"It will use all the ram you give it and all the CPU you give it, and even then may not play back smoothly for absolutely everything."

This is my guess but am completely new to this. I come from a stills background.
 
Exact said:
Just accept that Premiere Pro is a major resource hog. It will use all the ram you give it and all the CPU you give it,
Click to expand...

I monitor my RAM and CPU occasionally when using PP.
Never seen it use much RAM.
CPU use only kicks up high when rendering.
 
nwstudios said:
I monitor my RAM and CPU occasionally when using PP.
Never seen it use much RAM.
CPU use only kicks up high when rendering.
Click to expand...

So, let me get this right..... you can play unrendered timelines without the CPU 'kicking up' but when you render them it somehow uses more?

What happens when you have a red line and playback unrendered?
 
Exact said:
So, let me get this right..... you can play unrendered timelines without the CPU 'kicking up' but when you render them it somehow uses more?

What happens when you have a red line and playback unrendered?
Click to expand...

Rendering pretty much maxs all my cores.
Not usually during playback.

Not sure off the top of my head. I will play with some 4k footage later today or tomorrow and see what happens.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top