Why I can smoothli play DSLR footage on i3 viuth VLC and not with Premiere?
- Thread starter tarr
- Start date
tarr
Active member
Ok, but it seems bullshit. If VLC, and all other video players can smoothly playback DSLR H264 footage on a low end machine, why is Premiere (who is a much more powerful and expensive piece od software) not capable of doing the same?
CS4 on a i5 PC plays DSLR videos so jerkily that it seems unnatural... Are Adobe programmers stupid or is there some other reason (which I hope) ?
Hi
Without having knowledge of Adobe's inner workings I can offer that a player engine and an editing engine are very different. Recent CPUs have discreet circuits that play MPEG4 back with extreme efficiency and hardly touch the rest of the system. Adobe needing to perform so many other functions likely does not touch this super fast part of the CPU. Some players use the GPU for playback. There are many optimizations that can be used at many different point to accelerate video playback. Check this out -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API . Adobe has almost certainly written their own engine from scratch and it is optimized for editing. I would guess that After Effects and Premiere share a common basis. Others please feel free to correct any of the above or add to it. I am trying to keep things in general terms and making some guesses where perhaps I shouldn't.
Without having knowledge of Adobe's inner workings I can offer that a player engine and an editing engine are very different. Recent CPUs have discreet circuits that play MPEG4 back with extreme efficiency and hardly touch the rest of the system. Adobe needing to perform so many other functions likely does not touch this super fast part of the CPU. Some players use the GPU for playback. There are many optimizations that can be used at many different point to accelerate video playback. Check this out -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API . Adobe has almost certainly written their own engine from scratch and it is optimized for editing. I would guess that After Effects and Premiere share a common basis. Others please feel free to correct any of the above or add to it. I am trying to keep things in general terms and making some guesses where perhaps I shouldn't.
swopiv
Active member
This is quite right. CS5 or above would be better for native H264 playback. If this is not possible, transcode your files to something CS4 will play nicely with. Some sort of AVI would be best. You can use MPEG Streamclip or 5DtoRGB for this.
El Director
Veteran
Here's a tutorial that may help. The same principle can be applied to CS4 or any NLE that can't handle the codec.
Kevin Monahan
Active member
If it's a QuickTime file, that may be the difference. Is it? QuickTime is in a 32 bit wrapper. VLC comes as a 32 bit and 64 bit application. Perhaps you played back a 32 bit QuickTime file in a 32 bit VLC application?
Premiere Pro is a 64 bit application, and therefore works best with media that is also 64 bit. It's best to stay away from QuickTime if you can avoid it.
Premiere Pro is a 64 bit application, and therefore works best with media that is also 64 bit. It's best to stay away from QuickTime if you can avoid it.
I just LOVE that you said that.
For this media, you really don't.
Thomas Smet
Veteran
This is not bad programming. Premiere handles native H264 playback better than most other NLEs. You are comparing two pieces of software that have nothing in comen at all. Sure video moves forward frame by frame but thats where the similarity ends. Because an NLE has to look at things like layers, and the potential for effects and keyframes and just a different way of processing each frame one at a time it has a bit more overhead. Video doesn't just play when you hit the spacebar but things happen in the background. Just the way it is. VLC does one thing, moves video forward without having to worry about what else could potentially be done to the video during playback. It has no engine to add stuff and therefore doesn't have that overhead.
No Premiere cannot switch engines during playback of raw footage. This would be an example of bad programming and make the worlds worst NLE. Sure if you just slap a single video in the timeline and do nothing to it it may seem cool but as soon as you do anything to the video including cutting the program would fall apart and likely crash constantly. How would it deal with five seconds of video with effects and then it hits thirty seconds of raw video? It would have to switch engines on the fly during playback and that is just not possible.
The way to make a NLE function for decent playback even with layers and effects is to build an engine that is ready for that stuff so playback can try to keep going regardless of what it hits on the timeline.
Even FCP users worked with a intermediate format like ProRes when they only had dual core laptops. Up until FCPX this was the norm and native H264 editing was not an option. Native H264 editing even in FCPX is a beast on slower dual core machines. Yes it can be done and it can be done with Premiere CS6 as well but honestly you need a faster machine or transcode to an intermediate format like Cineform.
keylight
Veteran
Tarr, in another thread you asked:
The answer I previously gave about the color is the same answer to your question here about playback. Here's the key part from what I wrote:
So.... VLC lets the gpu directly handle decoding and playback. But with Premiere, the video has to first be decoded (by Premiere) and then rendered (by Premiere in conjunction with your gpu) before it can be played back. Even when you're just playing back an unedited file, Premiere still reads and renders. VLC just sends the file to the GPU.
The answer I previously gave about the color is the same answer to your question here about playback. Here's the key part from what I wrote:
So.... VLC lets the gpu directly handle decoding and playback. But with Premiere, the video has to first be decoded (by Premiere) and then rendered (by Premiere in conjunction with your gpu) before it can be played back. Even when you're just playing back an unedited file, Premiere still reads and renders. VLC just sends the file to the GPU.
Sage
Well-known member
If there is one update that was the most vital in the history of Premiere, it was going from CS4 to CS5.
What they did was rewrite the whole playback engine. The new engine was titled "Mercury Playback Engine" (MPE), which worked wonders with multicore cpus. It even included a gpu acceleration of scaling and effects if you happened to have certain Cuda cards. And - it left 32 bit behind, because NLEs are perhaps the single largest benefactors of 64 bit addressing. This was considered a bold move at the time - but was critical in positioning the NLE as a far superior software to FCP7.
Since then, CS5.5 and CS6 have increased performance even further, though little can compare to the gulf between the performance of CS4 and CS5.